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Online juries help curb bad gamer behaviour
TECHNOLOGY
“As sunlight moves across the rock engravings, it may illuminate successive narrative scenes” of day, the shallow engravings are barely visible, but in the early morning and evening, when the light skims across the tops of the Alps, shadows suddenly make the peck marks pop out. Baker thinks that as the light moves it may illuminate successive narrative scenes, which only come to life at specific points in the solar cycle. Fröhlich’s immersive recreation, Baker says, will be the “bridge into the past” he needs to test his theories. n 18 | NewScientist | 13 April 2013
Moderate your language Online gamers often hurl awful abuse at each other – a Tribunal may prevent it riot games
< Frederick Baker at the St Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria. In the next few years, the entire valley and its art will be captured in 3D, using satellites, scanners and cameras mounted on gliders and drones, as well as high-resolution 3D scanners at ground level. The data will be fed into the Weimar VR system. Fröhlich envisages an immersive screen allowing users to fly into the valley and zoom in to see the pitoti’s fine structure. New, portable high-resolution 3D scanners being developed by Axel Pinz at the Graz University of Technology in Austria will capture the pitoti down to a resolution of one-tenth of a millimetre. They will also capture the reflective properties of the rock so that its appearance at different times of day and year can be recreated. In the virtual Val Camonica, says Fröhlich, “at any time, we will be able to grab the sun and move it around to see different shadings on the pitoti”. This last point is key for Baker, who claims the site represents the earliest form of 3D proto-cinema. Pitoti artists used chisels to make tiny peck marks on the rock, thousands of which were lined up for the final effect. In the full light
–Eat that, motherfudger!– Hal Hodson
THERE is a place where 75 people die every second, hacked to bits with giant flaming swords or blasted into the air with powerful magic. Welcome to League of Legends (LoL), an online world in which 3 million gamers are playing online at any given time. Games are competitive and tempers often run high, so abusive messages are commonplace. But a new system has shown that not only can such bad behaviour be dealt with by the crowd – it is also easy to modify. “We can create behavioural profiles for every player in the game,” says Jeff Lin, lead designer of social systems at Riot Games, which manages LoL. The profiles measure how many times users curse or insult their teammates and opponents during a game. It is not just about filleting out the handful of regularly abusive players among LoL’s 30 million subscribers: most bad behaviour consists of outbursts from players
who are normally well behaved. “The question is how do we stop the spread of bad behaviour?” Lin says. A system called Tribunal, demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Game Lab last month, could be the answer. “Tribunal aggregates all the negative behaviour cases, including chat logs, and bubbles them to the top,” Lin explains. These cases are presented back to the community in the game’s forums, where other players vote on whether the behaviour was acceptable or not. Particularly egregious cases, judged by votes, can lead to the offending player being banned. “If players say ‘fag’ or the N-word, those cases are the most highly punished,” says Lin. The system has also led to new standards – swearing is now allowed in LoL, but not if it is directed at another player. The Riot team has also tested other ways of nudging player behaviour. They found that
simple messages, displayed during load screens, can have a big effect on player behaviour in the subsequent game. For example, advising players that their teammates would perform worse if they harassed them after a mistake resulted in an 11 per cent reduction in offensive language in the subsequent game, compared with when no tips were shown. Lin says that systems like Tribunal could be useful if applied to other online systems. Web communities like Reddit already rely on the users themselves to shape the community, and to down-vote offensive posts from view. These mechanisms allow societal norms to emerge in online communities where none were before, just as juries have for hundreds of years, says Cliff Lampe at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “This really helps to shape sites,” he says. “It used to be that sites would rise and fall quickly, like MySpace, but these social structures lead to more sustainable sites.” n
“As sunlight moves across the rock engravings, it may illuminate successive narrative scenes” of day, the shallow engravings are barely visible, but in the early morning and evening, when the light skims across the tops of the Alps, shadows suddenly make the peck marks pop out. Baker thinks that as the light moves it may illuminate successive narrative scenes, which only come to life at specific points in the solar cycle. Fröhlich’s immersive recreation, Baker says, will be the “bridge into the past” he needs to test his theories. n 18 | NewScientist | 13 April 2013
Moderate your language Online gamers often hurl awful abuse at each other – a Tribunal may prevent it riot games
< Frederick Baker at the St Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria. In the next few years, the entire valley and its art will be captured in 3D, using satellites, scanners and cameras mounted on gliders and drones, as well as high-resolution 3D scanners at ground level. The data will be fed into the Weimar VR system. Fröhlich envisages an immersive screen allowing users to fly into the valley and zoom in to see the pitoti’s fine structure. New, portable high-resolution 3D scanners being developed by Axel Pinz at the Graz University of Technology in Austria will capture the pitoti down to a resolution of one-tenth of a millimetre. They will also capture the reflective properties of the rock so that its appearance at different times of day and year can be recreated. In the virtual Val Camonica, says Fröhlich, “at any time, we will be able to grab the sun and move it around to see different shadings on the pitoti”. This last point is key for Baker, who claims the site represents the earliest form of 3D proto-cinema. Pitoti artists used chisels to make tiny peck marks on the rock, thousands of which were lined up for the final effect. In the full light
–Eat that, motherfudger!– Hal Hodson
THERE is a place where 75 people die every second, hacked to bits with giant flaming swords or blasted into the air with powerful magic. Welcome to League of Legends (LoL), an online world in which 3 million gamers are playing online at any given time. Games are competitive and tempers often run high, so abusive messages are commonplace. But a new system has shown that not only can such bad behaviour be dealt with by the crowd – it is also easy to modify. “We can create behavioural profiles for every player in the game,” says Jeff Lin, lead designer of social systems at Riot Games, which manages LoL. The profiles measure how many times users curse or insult their teammates and opponents during a game. It is not just about filleting out the handful of regularly abusive players among LoL’s 30 million subscribers: most bad behaviour consists of outbursts from players
who are normally well behaved. “The question is how do we stop the spread of bad behaviour?” Lin says. A system called Tribunal, demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Game Lab last month, could be the answer. “Tribunal aggregates all the negative behaviour cases, including chat logs, and bubbles them to the top,” Lin explains. These cases are presented back to the community in the game’s forums, where other players vote on whether the behaviour was acceptable or not. Particularly egregious cases, judged by votes, can lead to the offending player being banned. “If players say ‘fag’ or the N-word, those cases are the most highly punished,” says Lin. The system has also led to new standards – swearing is now allowed in LoL, but not if it is directed at another player. The Riot team has also tested other ways of nudging player behaviour. They found that
simple messages, displayed during load screens, can have a big effect on player behaviour in the subsequent game. For example, advising players that their teammates would perform worse if they harassed them after a mistake resulted in an 11 per cent reduction in offensive language in the subsequent game, compared with when no tips were shown. Lin says that systems like Tribunal could be useful if applied to other online systems. Web communities like Reddit already rely on the users themselves to shape the community, and to down-vote offensive posts from view. These mechanisms allow societal norms to emerge in online communities where none were before, just as juries have for hundreds of years, says Cliff Lampe at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “This really helps to shape sites,” he says. “It used to be that sites would rise and fall quickly, like MySpace, but these social structures lead to more sustainable sites.” n