League Of Legends Confronts Gamer Griefing With Neuroscience

If you've spent virtually any amount of time in an online multiplayer game, you've no doubt experienced the effects of gamer hostility in one form or another. Griefing takes on many forms, but each of them has ultimately one goal, for the griefer to have some fun at your expense, usually by making the game unenjoyable to play. One community hit hard by this dynamic has been League of Legends, whose reputation for having a "mean" player base has in turn damaged the game's reputation, a problem that Riot Games now seeks to not only address, but also change…with science! Says lead producer Travis George, speaking to Gamasutra:

"There's a line, and that line generally is people being mean for the sake of being mean — telling you what to do, telling you how bad you are. And I think we can actually fix a lot of that."

Their approach is to bring together the Player Behavior and Justice Team, shortened to The PB & J Team. The "talented" group of people, which includes a cognitive neuroscientist and a behavioral psychologist, use a combination of web experience and academia to enhance the player experience by seeking to reduce or eliminate negative encounters, Continues George,

"We've actually developed specific trends, and our own set of metrics that we look at for measuring what percentage of times we think that players will encounter a negative experience in a game, and how severe that negative experience is. And then we have to build things or be responsive or message the community in a particular way to address those things."

He says it's not just about The Tribunal, the user report process in which the company removes offending players from the game. That part, he says, is only one half of the equation. By using science to track and trend bad player behavior to anticipate and fix what causes it, they hope to reduce the number of offenses as a whole. He adds,

"We think it's a great addition to the team, and that team is actually cross-discipline, so it's got the PhD guys, game designers, engineers, production support all working together from a variety of perspectives. You'd be surprised how much the game design intermingles with the PhD research."

What do you think of Riot Games' approach?