Moderation in web3 gaming

Positive reinforcement for the ages

Gaming is famous for its toxic communities and bad actors. Put a bunch of pseudonymous people who are amped up on killing into an arena and lots of things can go wrong. And it’s not just trash talk: everything from cheating to leveraging a game’s mechanic itself for bullying tactics. A younger yours truly spent a lot of time in America’s Army flashbanging teammates and blocking them in cramped vents to get them to rage out. Sorry, it was too much fun. 

Game developers use a lot of techniques to moderate text chat, voice chat, manipulated code, and rely on community policing to identify wrongdoers who may have found an exploit that isn’t easily trackable. But there’s a lot of nuance in online chats and gaming. Can you contextualize the difference between friendly banter and sarcasm vs harassment? No system is foolproof, and there tends to be a lot of manual human review and moderation to assess the damage of in-game actions. 

Some moderation systems have tiered approaches that go from just x-ing out naughty words through official warnings through the ultimate: account bans. In traditional gaming a banned account is a real bummer, especially if you’ve poured in a lot of time and money. If it’s a permanent ban, your purchases and achievements are lost forever. For the truly despicable, farewell! But this is even suckier if you’ve been banned inadvertently or unfairly (e.g. it’s not impossible for bullies to gang up on trolling people for the sheer purpose of getting them banned. Like I did). 

The blockchain adds some complications but also opportunities for moderation, and not solely around bad actors. 

Let’s start with the baddies:

What happens when a web3 player has been flagged consistently and fairly warned and it’s perma-ban time? Ownership through the blockchain presents an issue. Even in a scenario where the player’s wallet is blocked, the portability and ownership of the game’s items (assuming they have a real non-custodial wallet, as they should) means that the player could send all the assets and achievements to a new wallet and set up a new player account. Obviously a bad actor creating a new account isn’t unique to web3, but the ability to pick up right where they left off is a new concept. 

Web3 titles have different degrees of things on-chain, and a game with a bunch of cosmetics is one thing, but it’s another ballgame if we’re talking about status, achievements, rankings, etc. emblazoned on-chain. That means that there’s little more than the headache of transferring items and setting up a new account between a banned account and that bad actor picking up with all the power and abilities that they had pre-ban and coming in to terrorize the community anew, with all the powerups and might of before. 

What do developers do? In short, perhaps nothing, and hope that the moderation cycle repeats itself and they’re able to ban the player again, quickly and repeatedly enough that they give up on coming into the game at all. 

That’s what traditional gaming contends with. The alternative gets into some tricky waters, but also opens the path for ways that the blockchain can help with moderation. The developer could, theoretically, blacklist the items owned by the bad actor. That’s an interesting concept, since it means that the player can’t start over ever again, even if the assets change wallets. But what if the banned user merely sells off the items, washing their hands of the game completely? That could inaccurately taint the accounts of people who unknowingly bought items from a blacklisted user. 

There could be something in the middle: If the assets stay wholly together—for example, if more than 50% of the banned account’s items remain in the same wallet for a given time post-ban—it’s seen as the same player and that new account is automatically blocked. Yes, a player could divvy up the items into different wallets and still come back into the game, but that would make for quite a hassle and also a weakened account and most banned players will either move on or not be so horribly toxic as to go through all that just to be bad again. 

Now, enough of the naughty list. What about the good actors? As much as moderation systems are there to discourage unsavory behavior, how do we reward good behavior? Positive reinforcement is an uncommon concept in gaming (at least as it relates to anything outside of the reward mechanisms that are baked into the core game loop). What if a player is a very helpful part of the community, good at diffusing bad situations, standing up for others, etc.? One idea would be to codify that good behavior with an on-chain badge, like a soul-bound token (making it non-transferable to other wallets). Of course, games can do something like this already, but the on-chain nature of it means that a game can effectively add to someone’s “permanent record”—i.e. their universal wallet—a badge of honor. In addition to the ways in which all on-chain data can be used for far more sophisticated and interesting player-benefitting targeting, a Nice Player sticker could be used by games to find and entice helpful community participants into their ecosystem. Or game developers could work with third party brands to present unique, token-gated offers and discounts to good people. 

This isn’t foolproof, certainly. Someone could be a great team player in one game and a complete monster in another, so there’d have to be a kind of relative scaling that can be adjust or balanced over time. Moderation platform GGWP has something like this, a sort of FICO score for players that reflects changes over time. Throwing that on-chain for players to be rewarded would be a beautiful incentivization or reward for good behavior. 

This kind of system could be applied to the universal accounts of the baddies, too, but that’s quite philosophically fraught. Should a wallet mark someone as broadly untouchable just because of some bad behavior judged by a bot or, at most, a community manager? Once on-chain, things are relatively permanent. Is there no retribution? As we know, positive reinforcement is much stronger psychologically than negative reinforcement, and as-is each new ecosystem is an opportunity to start fresh (or for moderation systems to do their thing again).  

Which leads me to think that rather than a scarlet letter, identifying and rewarding players for the good they bring is a far more ecologically beneficial mechanism, and these kinds of on-chain badges of goodness may pave the way for an entirely new player reward schema that benefits players, developers, and third parties.