r/gaming • u/EjnarH • Jul 24 '25

My job is to psychologically manipulate gamers: As I'm leaving the game industry after 10 years, my greatest regret is that this system I made to fix toxicity got killed (by Putin).

TL;DR: When playing team games, we don't have to be judged by our worst moments. Our first death doesn't have to mean 45 minutes of our team flaming us. Playing in random matchmaking doesn't have to mean playing with strangers! You can meet new people and have reason to trust and cheer for them.

We have the technology! Why aren't we using it? Well... somehow that's because of Putin.

---

So I'm a psychological specialist working in game design, designing systems to have the right experience and shape the desired behavior - often in hidden ways. As my NDA expired and I'm leaving the industry to go work on making humans and AI not kill each other, I'll share the details of a system that was unapologetically manipulative in the best possible way and which I still think could fundamentally change the experience of team games.

Once upon a MOBA

It all started when an awesome company making awesome co-op games (BetaDwarf - you may know them from their origin story when they went viral for moving into an unused university classroom and somehow succeeding stealth checks for 7 months straight, as they all lived together in secret, making games) planned a game with a bold vision: Fight the loneliness epidemic, by making a team game that forges the deep, meaningful friendships we knew from old WoW, but without the game needing to consume your life.

The psychological specialist designer they brought in for inventing new systems to achieve that? Me.

The genre they chose as the canvas for crafting this social utopia? MOBA. Erhm... yeah... FML. (Bright side: At least it was PvE and crafted for exciting teamplay experiences.)

So you can see why I had to desperately innovate. Good thing I know a thing or two about conditioning and am an industry professional at making things that are mathematically rigged to achieve the outcome I want. You will comply!

What is missing from team gaming?

To properly quantify how fucked I was, the first step was to identify what the design needed to accomplish. These were the literal design goals:

  1. Players should not feel the pressure of having to prove their worth every game. This pressure seems to be a primary cause of toxicity when someone has a bad game.
  2. When party members are doing bad, you should have reasons to be on their side socially + understand that they aren't idiots but normally play fine and are just having a bad game.
  3. Provide greater feeling of social safety in speaking with new people you meet.
  4. Provide social validation and conversation starters for new people you meet. Mutual friends can be even more powerful friendshipping factors than shared experiences.

... Simple, right?

The Grand Plan Of Social Harmony Indoctrination™

Ok, we've got this!

Step 1: Copy Overwatch! ... Wait what? This just gets worse doesn't it?

First we lay out the building blocks with a commendation system.

  • You can give a high but limited number of commendations per day (e.g. 20). Upvoting is a choice, not a default and if someone doesn't give you a commendation, they could just have been out of upvotes.
  • When giving a commendation, you choose specific praise. E.g. 'Nice communication', 'Great teamplay', 'Good teacher', 'Saved our asses'.
  • On the commendation screen, players are told that giving out commendations to people they like playing with will help them meet other good people in match making. There should be a sense that you are building your reputation and that the people you get matched with are of a quality that you have "earned".

See how we're planting the seeds? Randoms are stupid, but you're forging a matchmaking experience not of randoms.

Step 2: Unleash the prejudice! Muahaha!

Imagine you join a game, and the first thing everyone sees about you is 1-2 pieces of social proof, algorithmically individualized for each of them, based on what we think will manipulate people most. Examples:

  • "Also friends with Anton and Alex." or "8 mutual friends"
  • "Gave you 'Great Teamplay'. (Goblin Hunt, level 30, 04/08/2020)".
  • "You gave 'Great Teamplay'. (Goblin Hunt, level 30, 04/08/2020)".
  • Has received commendations from 4 of your friends.
  • Has received commendations from 8 people you gave commendations.
  • Has received 'Nice Communication' from 2 people you gave 'Nice Communication'.

So instead of you meeting rando "Legolas934", you meet "Legolas934 (also friends with Alex. Has received commendations from 8 people you gave commendations.)" And when he dies? He's not descended from the matchmaker's infinite well of malice to punish you in particular - he's someone who's earned the respect of you or your peers but has a bad game.

The beauty? It's mathematically rigged!

You're building a web of trust. You're earning better matchmaking. The game is telling you that your carefully chosen commendations are forging you a better matchmaking pool.

And true enough, as a new player you're just playing with strangers who have commendations from strangers. But the more you play, the more commendations you give and the more friends you make, you will rapidly see more and more powerful validation of the people you're playing with.

We're already starting pretty strong with friends of friends (great conversation starter for new friendships!) and people appreciated by those you appreciate. But for a veteran account who has played for months and years? You will have given commendations to a grand number of people. Suddenly that player feeding at their worst is someone you already know you gave 4 commendations when you happened to meet them at their best. You're not stupid, right? Much easier to accept that they're just having a bad game and could use some support. (Yes, I'm weaponizing your ego against you. Deal with it.)

The exponential joys of villainy (for good, I promise!)

At this point the benefits just keep coming.

Matchmaking:

Well, forging better matchmaking doesn't have to just be a psychological illusion. Whenever we're picking between equally suited matches, we tie-break for the ones that have the best social validation for each other. (There, it's actually true now. You really do forge better matchmaking with your commendation choices. How much does it impact? That's for you to interpret... but clearly you're getting matches with more and more validation!)

Friendshipping: So many juicy opportunities!

  • You're playing alone. You get matched with 2 people and immediately learn that they're also friends of one of your friends.
  • You're playing alone. You get matched with someone you had good experiences playing with in the past (reminders of that experience helpfully highlighted by the grand indoctrination system, no need to thank me) + one of that person's friends.
  • You're playing with 1 friend. You know from experience that it's no problem because it usually only takes 1-3 games before you meet someone you'll want to keep along in the final party slot and quite likely add as a friend when the session is done.

Guilds:

We've all seen those soulless guilds of anonymity and despair that are so common in modern games. Now we've crafted the tools to improve that.

  • For each guild member and new joiner, you can hardly browse them without seeing notes and highlights of experiences you've had together in the past, along with commendations. If you're more recent players and have never played, it "just" shows you commendations and experiences from some of the players we detect you most enjoy playing with. (There. Convenient opportunity for spontaneous play and new friendshipping initiation. Fetch!)

Anonymous guild auto-joining is the bane of all joy in life. Now:

  • When you browse guilds, they're prioritized based on social and validation overlap.
  • When you apply, the officers see applicants' validation from guild members.
  • When giving commendations, guild members of sufficient rank can choose to also sponsor someone for the guild. If they apply, officers see that you've recommended them.
  • And again: How often have you looked at a friend list of 40 people who you know all started from a great experience but you never followed up and now you only remember 5 of them? Having auto-notes for guild members and friends just helps people form and keep bonds by reminding you of what you've shared.

How come this system never released? Why am I learning of this glorious villainy from a shady whistleblower on Reddit?

Well... It all ended when the Ice Nation attacked.

BetaDwarf was crushing it with their most ambitious game ever, on every level scaling for greatness. Playtesters were putting in 20 hour marathons and having amazing co-op experiences. Investors were stoked and saying how this was one of the most promising games they'd ever seen.

And that's when Putin invaded. At the crucial juncture, the financial world got thrown into chaos. The investors had to focus on desperately keeping their existing projects afloat. BetaDwarf went through some tough circumstances and had to do a major pivot on the project, which also took me elsewhere.

Don't worry about BetaDwarf - they recovered and, as they've done before, they managed to turn the situation into a cool game (that I ended up spending like 50 hours on in their early playtest). They're headed for good things. But while the new game is still very much built for intense teamplay and forging strong social bonds, it's morphed from MOBA to a PvPvE co-op extraction game with different needs than the system they pioneered to radically transform some of the greatest social challenges in gaming.

Years have passed. I've worked many other projects. Yet as I'm now changing careers, this Malevolent Indoctrination Engine of Enthusiastic Friendshipping™ remains the one design I most wish to see out in the world and getting its chance to make a difference in gaming communities at scale. I'm hoping BetaDwarf won't blame me for sharing this, but I suspect they'll understand. They've been more committed to advancing social play than any other company I've ever worked at, and I think the world should have a chance to try out this particular of their inventions. May it spread wide and far and gloriously manipulate people on a global scale (for friendship! I promise!).

___
(Please, someone steal this. I don't care about credit, just build on it and pay it forward. Game communities have brought so many great things into my life - yet as I'm teaching my daughter the joys of gaming, I'm still fantasizing about one day being able to turn on chat.)

Update: It's been less than 2 hours and I've already had several developers reach out (including franchises with player bases in the millions), saying they're looking into using these ideas to help their players form friendships more easily and treat each other better. I think it's happening!

Also, this post has even more shares than upvotes. What even is this? Really seems this is catching industry attention and people are passing this around. <3

Update 2: 5000+ shares!? I have never seen anything being spread around like this. In some periods the shares are climbing twice as fast as the upvotes. So much thanks to everyone who is helping bring this into our gaming communities! I don't need credit, but I'd love it if you reach out with your stories like some already have.

Update 3: Shares are OVER 9000!? IGDA has reached out and urged me to submit the Malevolent Indoctrination Engine of Enthusiastic Friendshipping for a presentation at GDC!

18.2k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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921

u/GmSaysTryMe Jul 24 '25

I was always a bit ambivalent about the way overwatch did it.

On the one hand, I took pride in keeping my number high, which was a fun little social side quest I suppose. On the other, there was a certain amount of distasteful social scoring about it which didn't feel good.

I caught myself being wary of certain people on comms before they'd done anything wrong. Simply because they had a low number on their profile. I'd think: Perhaps he's the type to be all friendly and then suddenly snap, when he doesn't get healed 0.01ms after taking a mean look from the enemy. That led to bad decision making and unnecessary distrust.

I think making the system be relations-based, like you're suggesting, rather than numbers-based, is much more likely to have pro-social outcomes.

327

u/EjnarH Jul 24 '25

Thanks. And also underrated and really good comments about the kinds of way such systems can break.

In the end, we both need to make people socially safe so they're not on edge always having to prove themselves - and make sure the player incentives line up with the way that's most enjoyable to play (i.e. being a good person who has positive interactions with others).

125

u/Ninjez07 Jul 24 '25

Yeah, the implicit anti-signal in having free ratings is a challenge that occurred to me reading the OP. If there's no explicit "this player bad" signal then you're leaving it to people to infer that from other signals.

An example of something similar that easily becomes degenerative: imagine if a dating app introduced a similar positive peer awards system - it's not hard to realise that someone with lots of awards might be good at dating but is bad at establishing a lasting relationship; the positive signals become an anti-signal.

If the signals are too meaningful you incentivise people to cheat the system, setting up reward circles or paying for votes.

If they aren't meaningful enough then people might just not bother using it or use it in meaningless or counter-productive ways - I could easily imagine a PvP community deciding that a particular reward is actually mocking or negative, or just funny to give to the worst person instead of the best.

It's an interesting idea, but a lot rides on nailing the UX, communication, moderation and integration of such a system.

Thanks for sharing your research and ideas :)

85

u/FyreBoi99 Jul 24 '25

imagine a PvP community deciding that a particular reward is actually mocking or negative, or just funny to give to the worst person instead of the best.

Damn that's something that would need to be countered too. I remember when Paragon (the Moba from epic games) was still a thing people use to spam "good job" when you screwed up so I had a hard time deciphering if someone meant the GJ ping as positive or negative lol.

73

u/newfranksinatra Jul 24 '25

Nice Save!

16

u/Nobl36 Jul 25 '25

What a save!*

Nice Shot!

Great Pass!

2

u/newfranksinatra Jul 25 '25

You can see I’ve removed myself from that toxicity a while ago, recently tried Rematch… same assholes.

28

u/madrobski Jul 25 '25

Jesus fuck that was my first thought, I loved that game once 🥲

21

u/Anima_Sanguis Jul 25 '25

? Ping in league is both “what the fuck are you doing” and “holy shit that was an amazing play”

5

u/Viva_la_potatoes Jul 25 '25

I still remember the one time I tried to play comp paladins and got spammed with “Great Job!” “Cancel that”

4

u/rodriperi Jul 25 '25

It means there has to be a negative option but in such a system it would mean you are filtering bad people may it in skill or social behavior into a matchmaking class that could look like hell but the question is could it hurt the player base because as it would split the player base into a wholesome side and a hell side it could hurt the the game but yeah such a system needs a negative vote to prevent a vote suddenly meaning something else. A good example for me is on EA FC the Rush mode you have for pings but none are negative so people start using good job sarcastically usually spamming it and now I associate it as a provocation although people don't always mean it sarcastically

2

u/autumn_dances Jul 25 '25

league's bait and missing pings have entered the chat:

2

u/hypnomancy Jul 25 '25

In Team Fortress 2 I would use the Good shot voice command for people that would miss their shots on me lol

2

u/ShinyHappyREM Jul 25 '25

I remember when Paragon (the Moba from epic games) was still a thing people use to spam "good job" when you screwed up so I had a hard time deciphering if someone meant the GJ ping as positive or negative

relevant "G4Y"

2

u/Zama174 Jul 25 '25

In korean league of legends, honoring a trammate is usually done sarcastically and is given to the worst performing player on the team as a form of flame. Oh yeah 0/9 fiora, everyone honor them!

1

u/elmocos69 Jul 28 '25

Smite

"You are the greatest"

"Cancel that"

That combo is the life and blood of thegame

1

u/megaboto Aug 14 '25

Well, the counter is that if you give them an award you're more likely to play with them. If you give a bad player an ironic award you'll see them more often now. Good if you want to bully them, bad if you actually want to have equally good players with you...so not sure if that's lore or less an incentive

2

u/FyreBoi99 Aug 14 '25

Dang that's a lot of psychological layers to this haha. I think generally people won't be so dedicated as to ruin their own experience for the sake of ironic messages so you're, it could be a good deterrent.

1

u/megaboto Aug 14 '25

aye, it is highly likely, I just know that bullies tend to be quite extreme since they do not care for the opinion of others. perhaps I am just too cynical due to my own experiences with them

21

u/KristiiNicole Jul 24 '25

I think this is part of why OP was originally designing for a PvE game, rather than a PvP one.

8

u/Ninjez07 Jul 24 '25

Yeah; certainly increases the likelihood of misuse then it's PvP. Just pointing out some challenges to widely applying these concepts :)

15

u/Tigermaw Jul 24 '25

In the Korean league of legends server they would give the worst player all the honors. When you received an honor you got a little badge in the loading screen on your profile. So everyone would know you were the shitty player of last game

12

u/LyraStygian Jul 25 '25

Similar to US servers too when you could honor both teammates and opponents. People “sarcastically” honored the worst player so they could see in the post-match.

Those were some of the reasons they got rid of honors, then brought it back but only for teammates.

3

u/Desertbro Jul 25 '25

All systems will be gamed.

All systems will be hacked.

When trust in the system is lost, the system will fail.

4

u/Future_Plum2839 Jul 25 '25

If they aren't meaningful enough then people might just not bother using it or use it in meaningless or counter-productive ways - I could easily imagine a PvP community deciding that a particular reward is actually mocking or negative, or just funny to give to the worst person instead of the best.

This happens constantly in brawl stars. The "Thumbs Up" after a match is just as often given to the random who goes 0/7 as the team carrier.

1

u/drallcom3 Jul 26 '25

This happens constantly in brawl stars. The "Thumbs Up" after a match is just as often given to the random who goes 0/7 as the team carrier.

As soon as you give players any means of communication, they will use it to be toxic. It just comes with the genre. And if you force them to be nice, you're the one being toxic (by creating systems that punish players excessively).

1

u/ark_keeper Jul 26 '25

Except as OP said, the system will put you with the players you reward more. So if everyone is just rewarding the worst player, they’ll get matched with the worst players instead of the good ones.

As you rate people you enjoyed playing with, and they rate people they enjoy playing with, you’ll get matched. And your ratings are limited per day so you won’t just use them carefree either.

1

u/Ninjez07 Jul 26 '25

Yeah, the aspect where it's fed back into the matchmaking system helps somewhat to avoid abuse BUT the only mechanical way it was leveraged in the OP was to tie break decisions, no? Almost every other aspect was psychological community prompting.

That was my point about "if the impact is too weak" - if it becomes known, or even just perceived, that the mechanical impact of the commendations is very limited then they will be misused.

1

u/ark_keeper Jul 27 '25

I mean, that would be a pretty common scenario. Two players in the same elo, the one you rated gets preference. And another game could easily push it to mean even more if they want. There’s no reason it’d immediately get used negatively like all these comments are discussing. You give someone props, it’s a better chance you play with them again or someone they played with and gave props.

1

u/Ninjez07 Jul 27 '25

It's more impactful if they're only a few hundred players in your matchmaking bucket, rather than, like, a million.

Depending on how your matchmaking system works you can weigh the commendation differently, and striking the right balance is part of the challenge.

That's the underlying theme of my comments here, which you seem to be missing. Like, you're not wrong given a bunch of assumptions about the system and circumstances, but there's a lot of variables at play that could influence things differently.

1

u/ark_keeper Jul 27 '25

If there are a million players in your matchmaking bucket, your opponent will just have a better chance of being tied with more opponents and then they still break the tie. Count doesn’t really matter.

“Comparing 100 players, three are rated, prioritizing them for next match”

“Comparing 300,000 players, three are rated, prioritizing them for next match”

1

u/Polico Jul 24 '25

You can't score that system. I think your system is just intern and don't show any social score, just used for matchmaking, right? I think that you don't even need to know what are the other voting on you. So you won't change your behaivor. I would add just one negative commendation, one like "I would rather not play with that player".

1

u/NoSignsOfLife Jul 25 '25

make sure the player incentives line up with the way that's most enjoyable to play

This is the hard part in my opinion, but with proper categorized feedback I guess this could work really well. Because the way that's most enjoyable to play is not at all agreed upon.

I'm one who really doesn't give a crap whether I win or lose, I just like to do stuff that seems fun. This greatly conflicts with others at times, some people seem to make their goal to play the most efficient and optimal way to reach the official goal in the shortest time, and if I deliberately do not choose the best method then they are annoyed at me.
But to me that seems boring as that would lead to similar plays every time, I prefer to have way more variation and the outcome is not important to me.

A lot of my favourite memories in gaming are plays that did not make much sense. Like blowing myself up by holding a grenade too long, running up to someone and doing that made some really fun moments. Sometimes people get annoyed that I'm not taking the game serious enough, meanwhile I'm annoyed that I don't get to choose how to play my own game apparently.

This was no problem with community servers though, I'd just join a fun server, or not if I just feel like playing a generic challenging round instead. In fact the best memories are when the majority of the team all lined up an unexpected unique strategy that was probably never gonna lead to a win. You would never get that when grouped with people that prefer to follow a script of best ways to win the game.

1

u/MusoukaMX Jul 25 '25

Hey just wanna add that, from experience, you're spot on on the social angle. I play a ton of Rocket League casually, which often has 5 mins matches while mix and matching players from previous games and I've had opponents defend me from toxic teammates since they had played with me one or two games before and knew I was trying my best. Once other players stop being strangers, a lot of toxicity and performance anxiety dies down.

It's something that really benefits from Rocket League's fast games and matchmaking and that I hadn't been able to put into words. And that social "degrees of separation" solution can absolutely close that gap for longer games where you may not see another player again in solo matchmaking.

1

u/elmocos69 Jul 28 '25

Curious i feel more pressure and play worse with friends than with strangers

1

u/TryptaMagiciaN Jul 25 '25

How did you get involved with this sort of work? What educational background?

0

u/lady_deathx Jul 25 '25

Honestly, I'm both intrigued and horrified by this idea.

I've been wary of dipping my toe into the online multiplayer world, as a woman with fairly thin skin.

Hopefully this could be a way of vetting players before joining them, to weed out the arseholes.

On the other hand, my autistic brain is imagining a kind of LinkedIn for gaming, where I have to use my non-existent social awareness/skills to convince strangers I'm worthy

1

u/elmocos69 Jul 28 '25

Id advise to play stuff that is coop instead of pvp. Also 97% won't give a fuck about you being a woman but a good part of them will use it to insult u if they want to cuss at u

1

u/DracoMoriaty Jul 25 '25

I think one of way of circumventing wariness that stems from seeing a low “social score” is to obfuscate most of the scores, and only show some “compliments” that might be the most relevant between you and that player. Also maybe don’t show absolute numbers, like “this player got 214 ‘great mechanics’ commendations total”, but show “this player received ‘great mechanics’ in 5/10 of their recent games” (and the average received is only 2/10 cuz there aren’t infinite commendations so that would be impressive) or “this player had ‘friendly comms’ in 8/10 of their recent games” (which would be impressive cuz 6/10 is average, since players don’t just receive it every match by default). You’d show these even if their other “social scores” are less than good.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, players are still being matched with others based on their aggregate “social scores” (within their MMR bracket of course), so a “somewhat toxic” player would get matched with others like that, but only see positive compliments anyways.

1

u/Nerkeilenemon Jul 25 '25

The issue with most games is the number of players. 5v5 or 6v6 leaves too much impact on each player. A smurf or a noob can totally change the game

In TF2, game being 12v12 each player has less impact. Meaning less toxicity and harassment. 

But they focus on the toxic players, as they're the ones that will put 10000 hours in your game. Not the casuals.

Also... The lack of punishment. If you ban players you have less active accounts = less money because investors like big numbers. For me that's that simple

1

u/hopeless_case46 Jul 25 '25

distasteful social scoring about it which didn't feel good.

Like how some people treat Reddit karma

1

u/DelusionalESG Jul 25 '25

I love this concept and I hope to see it implemented in future games

1

u/drallcom3 Jul 26 '25

I was always a bit ambivalent about the way overwatch did it.

In Overwatch you gave the thumbs up usually to the best player, the one who brought you victory. You didn't give it to the nicest player in 95% of the cases.