Effective Title: How to foster good communities.
GDC Year: 2024
Why having a good community around your game is important?
Having a safe community for everyone allows more people in and outside it to interact with each other and be willing to talk and give ideas.
You must communicate with the players about the different ways that the game tries to create a safe environment as well as what they can do if they start feeling safe because of other players or environments.
When you slowly change the perception and the culture of the game and the people working on the game it allows players to start feeling safer.
It is important to not consider in-game safety as a checklist but as a conversation between the developers and the players. Even if it seems like the players are just perceiving a nonexistent unsafe area it may be useful to still determine if there was an overlooked area or if a new system might help reduce/mitigate that feeling of unsafety.
Try to involve players more in the process to stop the culture of the game to a more aggressive nature. Allow for easy features to stop harassment in the game. Like Muting or reporting players.
Interacting with the community:
Some days it might not be as enjoyable to interact with the community.
Try to set up a system that allows players to submit information in a log system which allows you to deal with them if appropriate but can take some days at a lower rate than others depending on how the team is doing.
Attempt to implement digital safety skills inside the game which the player can learn about and use.
Be prepared as normally there will be more players playing the game compared to devs/community managers on the team meaning that there is a good chance there will be a lot of interactions you won't be able to get to for some time. As long as you are communicating with the players and understand what is happening this will allow them to understand what to expect and how the process is going.
Q/A:
Q: How to make companies/games more inclusive?
A: Set up servers or areas that can be safe areas for certain people. Like a Japanese server for people from Japan to talk in and be willing to interact. But also try to understand your studio's limitations as you may not have the manpower or resources to make sure those areas stay safe. Maybe try to plan a bit about what communities you would like to target or what are already big communities inside your game and try to start with them.
Q: How do you communicate with players from other countries or different cultures?
A: A solution is setting up a bot system that will catch as many of these moments as possible and then have someone with more experience in that language or general culture read through the context and decide what might be the best solution. Tre Rose Gonzales works in Unity and also does research on moderation and safety in games.
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