Don’t Be Toxic
Online multiplayer video games have brought people from all over the world together, yet since its inception and drastic, exponential growth in popularity, in-game voice and text chats have been plagued by toxicity. The toxicity includes racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and other slurs that cannot be tolerated in modern times. However, to address such toxicity in larger games has always been a difficult task due to the number of times it happens and the actual reports made. It requires either a dedicated team of persons to deal with the complaints or some sort of automated system. The Call of Duty franchise is one which has unfortunately historically been one of the more toxic franchises. Given the nature of the game, Activision and its developers have taken a strong stance against any form of toxicity in the game and are committed to removing toxic behavior, hate speech or embarrassment from their games.
Over the past twelve months, Activision’s enforcement and technology teams have undertaken to rid Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty: Mobile and Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War of toxicity by banning over 350,000 players with toxic names based on reports and their database and deployed new in-game filters across eleven different languages to filter offensive text chat, user-names, tags and profiles. The developers note that there is much more to be done including increasing player reporting capabilities and addressing toxicity in voice chats.
In order to provide further support for the player base, the company endeavors to provide more resources to support detection and enforcement, additional monitoring and backend technology, updating the database and enforcement policies and increased communication with the community.
Do you have toxic moments in video games? Do you report them? Do you think the measures taken are sufficient and effective? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter and Facebook.