Understanding the Social Values of Your Players

[Music] firstly thank you everybody for coming it means a lot to us that you care about social values as much as we do so we're here from Riot Games and we're here to talk to you about understanding the social values of your players being told to remind you to just make sure you check your email for the mobile survey for this session it should come to you towards the end of the session and that feedback means a lot to us and it helps GDC kind of learn what's good cool so to get started by way of introduction my name is Tasha I'm a researcher at Riot Games I've been there for about two-and-a-half years now and before starring at Riot Games I did my PhD in behavior and cognitive psychology hi everybody my name is Jeffrey Burrell and I'm head of corporate social responsibility at riot or CSR for short I've been at riot for about three and a half years now and I've got a little bit of a mixed background I've got one foot

as an MBA so I love capitalism and then I've got one foot as a masters of public policy and administration so I love fighting social and justices and doing things to support social causes and so we also wanted to take just a moment to thank Christina Swan and Berg for her tremendous help and support on this project as well this is the agenda we just want to cover quickly with you guys today is first we want to share a little bit about the context and background understanding of why we wanted to do this research in the first place then we'll dive into the methodology and some of the key findings that we had and then wrapping with how we actually applied this research to creating we're real world social outcomes with the players and community and then finally sharing some key insights and lessons we learned along the way hopefully that you can take with you going forward as well at riot we consider ourselves a mission of values based and purpose driven organization and this is our mission is

we aspire to be the most player focused game company in the world and like many game companies being player focused to us extends well beyond the game this includes everything from sports two-player support and how we answer tickets to creating comics and music videos for players all around the world and yes with CSR we think that there's a few natural and authentic things that we can do to add long-term value in the lives of our players our communities and the societies that we serve but if you'll allow me I wanted to take just a moment and address everyone here in the audience today and step up on the balcony and say that I think we in the video game industry are in a really unique position in the world today in that we create products and experiences that gamers voluntarily spend dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of hours of their own personal

time to engage at the peak of their ability to solve complex problems in real time think celeste they engage in collaborate with complete strangers to achieve common goals together with people they've never met and they dive headfirst into exploring new worlds in uncharted lands they min/max optimal build paths and they do this all to take on that next challenge right on the horizon on hardmode these are the same skills that educators and researchers have dubbed 21st century leadership skills and they're highly attributed to being able to solve some of the world's most complex problems now and in the future that we don't know exists yet so I'm willing to argue that we have a tremendous opportunity as an industry in front of us and that we can help change the narrative of what it means to be a core gamer for the

millions of gamers who are out there we need to change the narrative so that it's not something to be shunned from from broader society but rather embraced it's because with these skills and the passions that gamers have they will one day be able to inherit the world and leave a positive mark upon it because they are practicing these leadership skills every single day and we can change the narrative because what it means to be a core gamer is to have NASA D and resilience in the face of tremendous odds I mean how many of you have done a raid and you've failed after several hours and you're like alright let's try again tomorrow it means that having a narrative of being a core gamer you can apply creativity and adaptation to solve problems in ways you never even thought possible or even designed around and yet gamers find unique ways of solving these issues and the narrative of what it means to be a core gamer is to have an unrelenting yield for

self-improvement just one more level just one more match let me speed run this and I can get a better score if I master this technique I will surely get to gold but that's not enough so I want platinum because that you get cool shiny you know border icon or something that helps you show off your skills and so I think that we as an industry can help and we can lead by example and show that what it means the narrative of being a core gamer is not just caring about a high score but also means about caring about your fellow player it means saying GG after our hard fought and bruising defeat and it means that you care about the communities that you're a part of and you serve and there's natural things that you can do to help and give back and sue to all the core gamers in the audience here today I say throw your shoulders back hold your head high and wear that as a mark of pride because I think it's something worth honoring and respecting and with that really quick now back onto the dance floor this is my team's mission is

we aim to apply Riots unique resources and strengths to create a positive and lasting impact and we do that through three primary initiatives the first is what we call personal karma and this is designed to amplify the good that everyone who works at riot already does and so we have empower programs and do connections and donation matching to amplify the good that writers are already doing regardless of what it is that they personally care about we just want to make it better then we have a local karma and we'll dive more into this here in a little bit but local karma is all about partnering with local players and communities to create meaningful and deep connections and provide long-term value in the neighborhoods that were in and lastly we have global karma and the idea behind this one is we want to invest in organizations and outcomes that have bold ideas that we think will create a lasting impact on some intractable

problems as you can imagine I'd love to talk about any one of these in detail and I'm happy to afterwards but right now we have to focus on local karma because that's really where the genesis of this research came to be we have over twenty three twenty four offices around the world where we aim to apply local value to players in their own backyard and how they engage and interact with the world and so as our mission with this of fostering those deeper connections we needed to really understand the core question of what were the values the social initiatives that our players cared about and why and really quick the first question you want to ask is why why did we want to know this at all according to simon Sinek and the first answer is because gamers are already tremendously caring and compassionate they reach out to game companies in each other all the time to help get activated and engaged everything from charity streams they put up complete strangers in their homes during times of crises because you're a

gamer too and they even pick up another player after a bad game and say dust yourself off let's queue up again and we can make it so the demand is there players are already asking and want to get engaged to creating this social impact and additionally as I said before as I fundamentally believe to the core of my being that gamers can and will change the world and so what we wanted to do is we want to start with all things that we do at riot and that's to start with the player but really importantly and I can't emphasize this enough is we wanted to start where the players are not where we wanted them to be or what we wanted to project upon them but to really understand what's going on in the day-to-day lives that they're going through every day and what are their hopes and dreams for the future and so because of that we really wanted to deeply understand what were the social values that our players cared about all over the world and then of course the next question is how how do you go about doing this because as you can imagine

talking about social values is really tricky across cultures and countries because what matters to a lot of players here in the United States is vastly different than those in say Brazil versus China versus Germany versus Korea versus turkey versus all over the world and so we also had a hypothesis where that everybody cares about something but not everybody cares about the same things equally so we needed to really understand not only the breadth of social values that our players cared about but also how deeply they may care about each one and so ultimately what we wanted to do is we wanted to apply the same rigor and due diligence to CSR research as we do to any other game or product decision at riot we wanted to be really data informed not necessarily data-driven but informed so that we could make more robust and impactful decisions to add values to the lives of players everywhere and so what we needed

was a framework we needed something that we could talk about these values across cultures and luckily the UN had just what we were looking for so we didn't have to invent anything these are the UN's sustainable development goals or SDGs and for those of you who are unfamiliar these are goals set forth by the UN that address everything from ending poverty to fighting social and justices to protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all they've been adopted by countless government nonprofits and a lot of for-profit organizations all to collaborate together so that we can move humanity to the next chapter of progress and so luckily we saw this and it was able to converse around various issues that we thought players would care about and there were a framework that we could use to parse through some data and so we took the list and we slightly modified it a little bit because if you're not familiar with any of these you may not necessarily know what we're talking

about so we just cleaned it up a little bit but then we were armed with how we wanted to engage players the social values they cared about cool research story time so we'd never measured players social values before a Trier and for this reason we wanted to take multiple creative approaches to explore this space so our research was divided into two parts we had a focus group which allowed us to really get out there and talk to players and really dive deep into what players care about and then we also had a survey which allowed us to reach around 3000 players across seven different regions so first I really want to show you an activity that we created for the focus group so discussing social values is not always easy especially in front of strangers in this focus group environment so we wanted to make players feel comfortable and we devised a method that combined League of Legends with the expression of

social value so for those of you who aren't familiar with League of Legends each game a player picks a champion and that champion can have up to 5 abilities and we ask players to design their own champion but with a twist their champion should have up to 5 world saving abilities that map back on to their social values and we made it clear that these shouldn't map onto gameplay in any way that's not what we were expecting of them and so I really want to show you some examples now because it turned out awesome so this is Sir Bennington and he was created by a player in Dublin the handwriting may be a little hard to read so I'll point out a couple of them for you so sir Burlington's ii climatized allows him to stop global warming and his ultimate ability here comes the money provides players with well-paid and happy jobs and as you can see these can be pretty clearly mapped back onto the SDGs of climate action and job and economic growth and as you can see from

the right here his abilities map onto multiple SD g's and we were able to talk to this player about what these were and why he really cared about them and this is poncho and Pancho's abilities really just map on to one SDG of good health and mental well-being one of our favorite abilities is his comp arm which is big hand here and this hits angry people until they feel calm make sense and never ability or the fields is warmth and this provides lonely people with the warmth of their good memories and this little guy is eternal and eternal is much more practical he fixes things from broken machines to computers to rivers and even removes harmful bacteria from food and so just to bring these together these

kind of illustrate why the focus groups was so important to us in this topic because we really got to get out there talk to players and after they'd presented the champion to us in the group we really talked in detail about some of these issues and from a craft perspective it really allowed us to to let them open up and without just straight up asking them like hey what's your social value so this was really cool and we'll talk about some of the learnings from this at the end and so we were really inspired by how open they are with some of these issues and we really saw that some of them meant a lot to players and so for this reason we wanted to kind of reach further so we created a survey that as I said reached about 3,000 players in seven regions and the key thing here is that we still wanted to be creative so even though they're not in a focus group environment and it's probably less awkward to answer a survey online we still wanted to be creative with the kind of information that we're asking of them so for this we

created the three whishes survey and in this survey we asked them to tell us their top three wishes for league of legends for themselves for their country and for the world but to keep it focused wishes for their country and the world were based on they're the SDGs that Geoff just show you so what were the results well we found that globally there were some goals that players valued more so than others which you may expect for the demographic and those were quality education to college education and job training good health of mental well-being and employment opportunities and in a follow-up study we really wanted to understand what they meant when they selected these categories and so we really dive deep into subcategories and importantly here we found that what they meant was post-secondary education including college and university mental health including depression and anxiety and this one was particularly prominent

and inclusive economic growth so that was really helpful for us to see globally what what can we do for our players as a whole but as we know that's just one part of the picture and each country has its own social values based on historical and cultural experiences and so if we break down some of the results that we saw on our country basis as you can see here in the US one of the top goals was quality education and job training with 39 percent of players picking this as a top 3 value and this was followed by good health and mental well-being and no poverty and those are you who are from the US might be familiar with these are some goals that you really care about however when we look at Brazil and this is where it's really important for us to understand these regional differences we see a greater prominence in quality education and job training so our Brazilian players 73% of respondents pit quality quality education and job training as a

top 3 value and and the other two was slightly different from the US as well those being sustainable employment opportunities and innovative infrastructure and again when we look at Turkey we see a completely different picture with no poverty being their number one value and so just to bring that together as I said it's easy for us to assume that globally there are some there are three goals that players really care about and that's what we should do to serve them but really that's not the case looking into the regional data is so important to us as well and as just Jeff mentioned earlier one of the the missions of our team is to connect with players who are local and and foster meaningful relationships and we so that this is the way to do that really understanding them where there are so Jeff is going to talk to you now about some of the ways that we use this research locally and globally to really create some some value in there thank you so now that we were armed with this

data what do you do how would we go about actually then saying okay here's how we can engage and one of the first things that we did was actually go to those regional offices I had talked about earlier and say hey here's what we have found in ways that you could potentially engage local players with local causes that they care about because we figure that they those offices would have much more knowledge and autonomy into making those decisions on what they thought was best for their players and one of the results that we saw from this was our Oceania office partnered with headspace it's a national Australian Youth Foundation focused on mental health awareness and prevention and interventions and so what they did was they partnered with headspace during a week of their OPL esports broadcast and during the week of this broadcast they had people on to help share awareness on issues regarding mental

health to help educate on where to find help what resources were available and even potential warning signs that you might find within yourself or your friends and they even had pros go on and publicly state what a healthy headspace meant to them and how they kept a cool head during times of high competitive stress this was actually really enlightening and touching to see and additionally rioters in our Dublin office have started to engage with coderdojo this is an Irish national youth nonprofit that focuses on getting kids tech education skills and so the rioters in this office have done everything from hosting coding jams in to the local office and you can see some of the kiddos interacting right there and learning how to just use basic coding skills and getting more comfortable with technology they've started to provide mentorship into some disadvantaged youth into pursuing careers and - tech and the video games industry and

the whole office even pitched in for a 24 hour helpeth on where they did everything from a whole backlog of projects that the nonprofit wanted to engage on but hadn't had the time so they translated a bunch of learning materials into new languages to reach thousands of new kids the world over they redesigned the logo and they even helped them overhaul their website to reach more streamlined kids around the world and we've also begun to use this research on a global level as well what we have talked about before was how we can start to engage on a local issue but one global example of how we used this was last year we held a global fundraiser for the players around the world and it was one of those where it's like hey if you buy this item in-game it'll go to help support a charity pool but what we really wanted to do with this campaign was to align in player's mind that their decisions mattered in real world social outcomes and so we had

players vote on one of three organizations that they could go to support the winning nonprofit got 50% of the overall charity pool and the other two got 25% each so it's still a rising tide for all boats but here was the kicker was the players vote was actually amplified by their in-game honor level or how sportsmen like they were so if they were just a really strong Samaritan and a great teammate and someone who is just a really positive influence on the community their vote counted more than someone who maybe say a toxic jerk bag the technical term and so what we really wanted to do was the whole premise of this campaign was to give players that sense of ownership and agency and we had to use this research as a starting point so that we could go and select these organizations that we thought had a global appeal to them and yet one wouldn't be completely run away from

another they had to really internalize in the players mind this is what I want to go into support and as a community this is what we can achieve together and so we are actually kind of nervous where and we were running this campaign was this even a good idea how would players respond and what were the results and I'm still just gobsmacked by what the community was able to do they had raised over 2.4 million dollars for these charities they were extremely happy and some follow-up research into the organizations that they were able to select and vote on and over 80 percent of them wanted future similar events like this going forward and what was just really touching to me was after the fact I'm talking with the organizations and the nonprofit's and they saw a spike in traffic and donations directly to them outside of the in-game campaign it turns out that players were rallying their friends their family their schoolmates and their local communities

to go and support these organizations on their own because it mattered so much to them and so this only fuels my conviction in the decency and compassion of gamers all over the world who are willing to help hundreds of thousands of lives of people they'll never meet and with that we wanted to share a couple of key learnings that we learned along the way that we'd want to share with all of you and the first is that it's really important to us to apply the same level of research and due diligence into our CSR activities as we do any other game or product decision there's a lot of research out there that shows being authentic with your CSR activities is really important and so what we found was by using this data informed process we can create strengthened connections between our players and our communities to create long-term value and Trust together additionally we found that using our IP to facilitate a conversation is

immensely helpful these are not easy issues to talk about around the dinner table let alone with complete strangers but the fact that we were all together in all gamers and had that in common said hey you know what's what matters to you what are your goals and aspirations in the game that allowed us to connect on a human to human level and really open up some deep and insightful conversation and additionally allowing player agency into these social outcomes this was something that exceeded my personal wildest expectations on what we could achieve together as a community and as a whole and we found that players really really resonated with this and we're asking and wanting a lot more of these going forward and so with that we wanted to open up for any questions that we have right now and of course Tasha and I will be right outside if anyone wants to catch us afterwards to talk thank you all so much for coming to spend time with us today [Applause]

hi what percentage of your user base got engaged with this so of the engagement rate in participating regions was around north of 20% 1/5 yeah ok thanks sir hi thanks for this talk um can you see a way that the social values priorities that you identified amongst the player base could complete the circle and influence Riot Games game design yeah that's a that's a really robust question I think that what it is is how we approach all other sort of things as we like to be player informed so as you can imagine we don't necessarily only have a research on you know the social values of what our players use but also what kind of comics they like what sort of movies do they like and I think all of that factors in to how we think we can

best add value in the lives of players all over the world in future products and any sort of you know things that we create in the future I think it's definitely a component but not necessarily solely driven by that did you think there's a correlation between games that exhibit the social values they prioritize and purchase intent sorry can you explain I think people are more likely to buy a game that exhibits the social values that they prioritize I have a hypothesis around that I think it's a little bit early for us but if you look at some of the research out there particularly among Millennials is they are far more likely to engage with products and companies and decisions that support strong sustainable social outcomes than those that may not necessarily do great thank you very much yeah well you mentioned the use of the IP was valuable but how do you know that did you try some IP neutral experiments that had less success or did you just kind of assume that it was better I'm just kind of curious that's a good question and we actually ran some kind

of practice labs for this and internally and it was very awkward to open up with just like hey so we're here to talk about social values let's go and I think one of the things is especially we players when they come into our lab they are expecting to play a new champion or see a new like a new game system and obviously they come in to riot it looks really cool I mean we wanted to kind of break the ice in that way and so although we didn't practice with players I do believe based on our internal kind of tests of it that it is it was the most comfortable way to open her thank you okay thank you hi regarding some of the sustainable development initiatives you talked about I am it I'm a bit a more cynical than you are about groups of gamers and how they interact with things and I feel like there are a lot of people get some gamers included not all that act in opposition whether

intentionally or unintentionally to those sustainable initiatives do you feel that it's important to reach out to those gamers to try to get them on board with these things and encourage them both inside and out of the game to explore why those things are important and helpful to a lot of people yeah that's a really good question how I see it is that this is an issue just with humans in general right like I I am an eternal optimist unfortunately but I think that it's really important what we're doing is talking about adaptive change about mobilizing entire communities of people to address big challenges in front of them and I think that you need to listen to all of the voices within the system whether they are your strongest advocates or your biggest deterrence and so I think that what it normally doesn't work what I've seen in terms of politics or business or

any kind of activity like this is a heavy hand is not necessarily what's needed but more of that idea of understanding of communicating and opening and listening up and trying to show what the benefit of being thoughtful and caring brings both Malia's and today these are individual humans who make their own decisions and I think that as part of my a little bit of a rallying cry up forward is you know we can help show by example of how to engage in our you know communities and everything like that to show that there is a stronger and more powerful way out there okay and just to add to that sorry I just want to say that I think it's a great question because I love that kind I love to reach out to players and let them know what we care about as a company and the the charitable event that Jeff showed you ran in client at peak time and and that was our way of being like hey this is what we care about these are our values as a company and we really hope that that kind of shines through to players and that's what we stand for so would love for next steps to be more outreach for that minister okay thank you thank

you is the relatively low sample size of 3,000 reflective of the sort of mandate to be data informed rather than data driven and then is that made easier because the core values are in line with the results and you're more confirming your values at that point yes so in terms of sample size we had about 400 players per region and that tends to be representative of the players in those regions that's what we tend to do for all surveys we find that if we do any more than that we kind of get a diminishing return on investment for for that so and yeah so we do find that that therefore represents the players in that region and then to kind of go on to the practical side when we do go out and we like you saw a head space in Australia when they go and do kind of interact with plays in those regions we do get a big kind of warming towards it so yeah right for the moment it seems to be working

thank you I I was curious about the weighting system for for the voting on the fundraiser I was curious about that I was wondering did you guys think about how how it accounts for maybe people with language issues like maybe they're on the spectrum and maybe people might just misinterpret you know their communication in general right so how do you guys account for that did you consider that in waiting voters tell you yes so this we worked in strong collaboration with our player behavioral team and they're a group of a bunch of really you know talented behavioral researchers and scientists and so we didn't want to graft on something just for a social value purpose but really make it a natural extension of it if that kind of makes sense so we used the existing honor system that they've already designed in terms of for those of you unfamiliar after the game you can honor someone for

being you know just Gigi really player friendly to being a strong leader and having good communication skills or having tenacity and resilience in the face of tremendous odds and so we used that framework of saying you know as you go along it does account a little bit for language differences or all that it's just how you are in game not necessarily you know you're trying to game the honor system so you get a higher vote if that kind of makes sense it's just a naturalistic extension of that so it's based on gameplay behavior early language that's right okay interesting thank you sure thank you hi as a fellow researcher would riot be interested in sharing their modified SDG as well as potentially comparing notes on different game titles and IPS we would love to share the modified list I think yeah yeah I mean it's essentially we took the SDGs and just dumb down the language a little bit and kind of made it more digestible but we're always looking to expand out and to collaborate

with others so we can we can definitely connect after absolutely yeah great well Tasha and I will be right outside but thank you guys so much I mean so much friends