Session: Creating Safe & Thriving Communities: Powerful Content Moderation Strategies......

[Music] so uh the next uh session we have is titled creating safe and driving communities powerful content moderation strategies in multiplayer games so please welcome to the stage uh hegy tokerz uh from IA AI thank you so much please Round of Applause thank you good morning everyone or good day uh hope you had a great last day or not the last day but a fun day yesterday and that there was a little bit not too much

toxicity on the party well I'm here to talk about how to make great communities and I want to start with um why it's why it's uh hard and why it's important how many of you here have your own um Community yeah oh we talked okay that's great okay so why is it hard let's see well why fighting toxicity is hard is because in those games in this in those communities there are so much content and also when it comes to uh if you have shat for example uh there can be so many languages and not only talking about German Norwegian Finnish English Spanish but also the algo speech like the kids are talking in different ways

and when it comes to the context that's hard it's really hard to understand if it's it's not about what it said but it's what about what it's meant to be uh what does it what does it mean and also we see that in many games there are very toxic players and they are keep coming back even if they are banned so that's why it's hard but why is it important to manage it even if it's hard and that that's because we see that uh this is uh a questionnaire from this year and as many as half of the players in a a multiplayer game they express do DOS about their safety in the game and that's a lot we also see that it impacts the mental health in their physical life as well and we see that it doesn't only um say that uh well of course it's bad when

it happens to you if people are toxic to you but also we see that uh it harms the people that see this is happening and after playing games they feel angry they are upset they get less social and also many of them are uh showing signs to uh post trumatic stress syndrome which is really bad and after playing in these games which supposed to be something they do on their free time to have fun one in 10 say they have suicid Suicidal Thoughts which is bad and also when it comes to the kids which is something we don't talk much about is that one in seven also are contacted by a sex sexual predator like

playing the games every year which is a big problem and that's also the reason why the governments now have talked about we have to do something and we see that there are so much regulations uh going on now in the in the space there is a new regulation in the EU like the Digital Services act there's a new regulation in the UK in the US that states that the communities you have to do something to protect your players and as especially the kids so if we go back to the kids or to to your players in the games it could be kids it can be teens it could be adults what they say is that over 75% say it's so important to feel safe while playing a game and it's so important not to being put under toxicity or harassment that's important for them

and also seven out of 10 players say they avoid specific games just because of the reputation of the game that it's toxic and also six out of uh 10 players they have quit a game permanently they never come back because they have put under uh bad stuff on the platform so do they put their money where their um mouth is and yes they do what I also said is that they have chose not to buy a a specific game because they heard it's toxic and also that they have discovered it's been very toxic and this is a US study and this is also the reason why it's so important not only because of the health of your community but also the health of your company or your game is that that we see

a healthy safe nice game it has 75% more Revenue than a toxic game so that's also important for you I think so when we're talking about the return on investment on trust and safety to have a healthy to have a healthy game we see that the safe players turns into Happy players and it gives you more Revenue into the game so how do you do this how do you make more revenue and make more happy players uh well you have this Community Management which been going on for years it's a very busy slide here but I uh I just wanted to show you this that this is nothing it's nothing new it started out with the internet when the internet was born I think uh the first sentence was uh hello world and the other one was

something toxic sorry and and the way uh we started out with the Community Management in the '90s was it was very reactive then we looked into the content that had happened and then we did something to solve it then later on um we started working on the proactive side trying to not trying to not having the players being toxic so then we started out with Community guidelines and also what's a big cost in this space is that there has been very resource intensive like the people they have spent so many hours trying to moderate the games and we see that with so many players so many games so many content so many you can it can be text it can be pictures it can be everything but it's so hard to cope up and that's why we

need to use Tech to solve this issue and also what we we see now uh moving forward and I will also come back to this is that okay you ban the bad players from your platform and they keep coming back but maybe we could also try to give them feedback that they should act different and maybe they do and then you can make a great game okay so you start out with your community guidelines and this sounds very boring I know but it's so important because then you also uh make the rules on how you want to have your community how your community should be and how your people or the players should uh act to each other in this game so that's the first thing you should start out with and then after doing

this well then you can start using the tech and the tools out there and I would re recommend that uh you you're not jumping into the tech at once but thinking about how you how you how you want to do with the tech or how you want to use the tech before you start using it what's your goal because there are so like when the AI uh was uh booming into the market in uh 2122 we saw that everyone they wanted to use those big language models which are great like chat GPT but for Content moderation it's not working and it's very expensive as well so it's good to look at some solutions that not the best on the market but which might be good enough that's what you're aiming aiming at and when it comes to the AI uh p moderation there are so many benefits of

course but also challenges and like uh the benefits is like you you can look look at all the content out there while the challenges are well in gives out uh so to say so it's so important that you also know your community you know your data and you feed uh this data into your models that will be trained by the AI and it's very important that you have um control over what you feed into those models and it's not enough to train only once you have to do it like maybe twice a month especially in the kids games because we see the way kids and teens are talking it's it's changing very fast and uh just wanted to show you this

what we did for uh a company which shows that it's not about what's written but it's about who is writing it which is the problem it's it's never uh it's never the content but it's the player that's often the problem and we saw that by being able to detect the toxic players like we did here we saw that uh less than half percent of the players in this game they were making uh 75% of all the toxicity in the game and also if you see those players here eight players out of 30,000 were doing 25% of all the toxicity in this platform so it's so important to find those people because it's people or it could be Bots and if it's Bots you should remove them instantly but but if these are people

you should absolutely do something about this okay so how do you start well it's easy peasy uh you start out with um defining your community guidelines that's one and also it should those guidelines should support your vision as well and what uh what I talked about previously all those new regulations coming in you should also try to think a little bit one step ahead what do you need to report to the governments and that's also something you should build into your into your uh um Community guidelines as well and as you see here it's not about technology it's about people and it's about processes and it's about data

and what's also important is that you have to measure measure measure to see is it working or not or your players getting happier well then you should continue if it's not working then you should change and speaking of those toxic players here the ones that are really really toxic maybe they don't know and also how do we how do we manage them because they keep coming back with another username well they are still here and what we see is that uh what happens in the game is also something it's about what people do in their real life so the toxic players they're also humans and maybe they don't know that they're actually toxic the way they do it's toxic maybe they don't know so what we see is that uh you should be

inclusive transparent and try to coach them into being nice players because if they start being nice then your uh 20 uh 25% of the toxicity on your platform or 75% of it it will it will drops down to zero and the and the health of your community will be so much better and we see that the people they will load the game even more so what's the key takeaway uh well you should have a strategy on how to detect the bad behavior because that's that's what you want to take away and also use the technology to support your uh moderators your people not the opposite that's uh then it can be really failing and also this coaching approach

try to coach your bad players into nice players because if you turn them into nice players they will also bring their friends into the game and then you will have a really powerful Community well that's everything I had so thank [Applause] you and if you have any questions I will be here uh happy to answer um and if you have any questions now perhaps yeah thank you very much if if anyone now has a a question it's time to ask we have uh question here yes thank you for the presentation um I wanted to ask how much do you think game design itself uh plays a part of this uh like um equation so if there's like a really you don't really know if there's like a mechanic or some like strategy that people really hate how

much that affects toxicity and do you think the best way is to sort of U take a like inter perspective U approach on that and sort of think why people hate this mechanic or this strategy or something like that instead of like uh going straight to like Banning or like punishing that yeah thank you for your great question I had I wish I had 100% answer on this but I think this is also about what type of game you want to build Do you want to build a toxic game or do you want to build a cozy game or but but also it's not about what you say or what you write it's about the intention about what you're saying what you're writing so I think well yeah it depends but it's so important to see the

context of the of the of the conversation of the community not not the specific words itself but uh very good question I will think about it a little bit more happy to discuss afterwards because this is important yeah thank you any other questions not not a single one well than that one uh cool so in that case I'm sure you'll be available if anyone has any questions just after uh and please uh please give a huge round of applause that fastic thank you so much [Music] he

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