Don't ignore the trolls

The following article is part of a series of daily year-end content on GamesIndustry.biz analyzing the most notable news and trends we've observed over the last 12 months

"I have to be very careful on this subject, because I have had death threats over this. I don't mind, well I do mind, but I'm quite used to getting death threats over a video game. But when people start bringing my family into it, that's not good."

That was Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson speaking with GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year about the fallout when Football Manager 17 was not fully localized for Chinese audiences. Here is a developer behind a much loved and very successful franchise who says a) he is accustomed to having people threaten his life as a result of the games he makes, and b) things have been getting worse. It's the perfect distillation of where gaming is in 2016, an industry numb to indefensible things it should be absolutely horrified by, and one that only begins to get concerned when events go beyond horrifying and into the unthinkable.

This sort of thing isn't even that shocking anymore. We're so desensitized to it that Jacobson and his death threats were barely a blip on gaming's collective consciousness in 2016. There was the case of Alison Rapp, a product marketing specialist at Nintendo's Treehouse localization team who was fired by Nintendo after months of targeted harassment by a group believing her responsible for the removal of a "face-petting mini-game" and the option to customize a character's breast size in US releases for a pair of games.

"Hello Games went radio silent for a while to work on No Man's Sky updates, while those who enabled the game's hype in the first place threw the developer under the bus"

And then there was No Man's Sky. Just in case you haven't been following the drama surrounding this (and good for you if you haven't been), indie studio Hello Games' released an ambitious procedurally generated universe space exploration survival game that had some AAA-style hype behind it that was jump-started by some trailers with prime placements at Sony conferences and The Game Awards. It was so rabidly anticipated by some that Hello Games founder Sean Murray received "loads of death threats" after the game was delayed less than two months. Even Kotaku's Jason Schreier, who first reported the news of the delay, received a death threat over it. It's pretty understandable that on the day of the game's release, Hello Games CEO Sean Murray confessed that the hype surrounding the game was terrifying.

No Man's Sky came out to mixed reviews, and some players were disappointed that features they believed would be in the game were not. Then the internet does what the internet does, and a pound of flesh was demanded. Hello Games went radio silent for a while to work on updates to the game, while those who enabled the game's hype in the first place threw the developer under the bus. Sony's Shuhei Yoshida distanced himself from the project and criticized Hello's PR job, while The Game Awards' Geoff Keighley belittled indie developers everywhere by commenting on his YouTube show that "It's just unfinished and repetitive because let's face it, games are crafted by skilled story-tellers and big teams," and then promised "more transparency" in future Game Awards reveal trailers.

These were by no means the only ugly things to happen in the games industry this year, but I point them out because they are part of a pattern of behavior I've seen accelerating since 2012 with the reaction to Mass Effect 3's ending, Double Fine's Kickstarter, and seemingly everything Fez developer Phil Fish said after Indie Game: The Movie came out. Part of this can simply be chalked up to the dynamics of life on the internet. Having the world at one's fingertips allows like-minded people on the margins of society to find each other. Sometimes this means queer youth in repressive societies get the support they need to keep going, or thousands of strangers can chip in to provide someone with the money for a life-saving operation. Other times, this means regressive misanthropes can find communities that echo their toxic beliefs back to them and feed into a cycle of hatred.

At the same time, the internet has made game creators increasingly visible in the industry. In a saturated market, a charismatic face behind a game can be the difference between standing out from the crowd and drowning in the tide. Giving gamers direct lines of communication to creators fosters connections and emotions that are far, far more difficult for a faceless corporation to generate. That increased investment might fuel some sales, but it also heightens any feelings of betrayal should the developers not deliver on everything the players expect. And conveniently enough, when you make people into figureheads of those projects, it gives players inviting targets for their anger.

"We need to stop ignoring the trolls, and start standing up to them. If you aren't the target of their ire, help out those who are"

If we are to continue embracing this personal connection between creators and fans (and I think we should), something needs to change, or we're just going to see the same patterns of behavior continue, worsening as time goes on.

There's an old piece of advice when dealing with trolls: Ignore them and they'll go away. If there's one thing 2016 should have taught us, it's just how inaccurate that statement is. Mainstream politics and press ignored undisguised white nationalists and avowed racists for decades, only to have a UK referendum on leaving the European Union and a spectacularly ugly US presidential campaign bring them all right back out of the woodwork. No longer do appeals to them need to be veiled in the plausible deniability of dog whistles; now you can just straight up say the most racist stuff imaginable--that Mexican immigrants are mostly criminals, or that non-whites haven't contributed significantly to the history of civilization--and it's just a normalized political position like any other.

Ignoring the trolls is like ignoring the sound of wildlife chewing away in your attic. It's going to be a pain to get up there and clean them out and keep them from getting back in, and being lazy about it might not come back to haunt you right away. But if you just let them live and breed and defecate and die up there, each one chipping away at the structure little by little every single day, eventually the roof is going to collapse, and cover your master bedroom in all that waste.

In 2017, we need to stop ignoring the trolls, and start standing up to them. If you aren't the target of their ire, help out those who are. When trolls target your business partners, explain what happened in a way that doesn't hang them out to dry. When trolls target your employees, provide those employees with the public and private support they need to get through it.

If the trolls boycott you in return, consider any lost revenues as going towards a less toxic player community, or an investment to help you recruit top talent in the future. We can try kicking them out, or reforming them, or virtually anything else. But we need to stop pretending they'll go away if we just cover our ears, because I don't think the roof can take much more.