firehose

Riot Games is committed to making League of Legends as pleasant for new and struggling players as it possibly can, and it's not exactly an altruistic goal: The more people sign up and play, the more people there are to buy content and expand the success of what is arguably the most popular game in the world. The efforts have been ongoing, and have yielded some interesting strategies.

Science journalist Jeremy Hsu wrote a great look at some of the company's efforts in making the competitive scene a bit more welcoming, which is a daunting task. League of Legends, and other games in that genre, are known for their aggressive players and often borderline abusive chat logs. A single player who is unsure of their strategy can sink a team, and you'll hear about it if that player happens to be you.

The article focuses on the work of Jeffrey "Lyte" Lin, a designer with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience.

"Today, he heads Riot’s player behavior team of more than 30 researchers working in game design, statistics and data science as they devise social psychology experiments on competitive League of Legends gamers," Hsu wrote.

One of the experiments limited toxic players' ability to chat, and the results seemed to last longer than that specific punishment.

"It’s a temporary punishment that has led to a noticeable improvement in player behavior afterward — on average, individuals who went through a period of restricted chat saw 20 percent fewer abuse reports filed by other players," the article stated.

"The restricted chat approach also proved 4 percent more effective at improving player behavior than the usual punishment method of temporarily banning toxic players. Even the smallest improvements in player behavior can make a huge difference in an online game that attracts 67 million players every month."

So it seems as if having your chat limited in this way made you a less abusive player even after the limitation was removed, it's a slap on the wrist that could lead to longer lasting, positive change in players.

The entire article is a fascinating look at what can happen when scientists, and game designers, have such a huge field of players and potential areas for manipulation of player behavior and emotion, and using that power to make the game more welcoming is a good thing for both Riot and the player base.

A happier, more welcoming community interested in teamwork makes players more engaged, which leads to greater revenue. Everyone wins.

Call it the lullaby of capitalism: first we had Matthew McConaughey purring sweet dreams of respectable American sedans into our ears, and now Jeff Bridges has recorded a whole album of sleepy murmurs for Squarespace's new Super Bowl campaign. To demonstrate how the company's tools can help anyone build a slick website with a built-in storefront, the Big Lebowski star has recorded Jeff Bridges Sleeping Tapes — "a unique album of relaxing sounds, guided meditations, and stories designed to lull you to sleep."

"His voice is like oak and leather and cigar smoke and the wilderness."

The album is available as a pay-what-you-want download from DreamingWithJeff.com (built using Squarespace, naturally), or as a limited-run of vinyls and cassettes to be auctioned off separately. Best of all, any money raised from album downloads and auctions is donated to No Kid Hungry — a campaign aimed at ending child hunger in America (Bridges has been a spokesperson for them since 2010). "We wanted to create a campaign to illustrate that any idea, no matter how wild or weird, can be presented beautifully and meaningfully through Squarespace," said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace's founder and CEO. "Instead of being built around an ad, our campaign is built around a real project on our platform."

In the 30-second teaser above Bridges plays a pipe, expresses his love for "intriguing sounds," and generally maunders about like the human embodiment of chilled vibes that he is. There's also a two-minute tutorial (below) and the company says the full 30-second commercial will play during the first half of the Super Bowl game on February 1st. "His voice is like oak and leather and cigar smoke and the wilderness," says David Kolbusz of Wieden+Kennedy, the ad company responsible for the campaign. "I personally have fallen asleep to the recording on more than one occasion."

Back in 2012, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian posted a massive wall of furious, dismissive, or actively threatening YouTube comments that people had left on her proposal for a video series about female characters in games. At the time, this harassment wasn't exactly unprecedented, but it seemed bizarre and singular — how could a fairly mild video about narrative tropes draw such pure hatred? Three years later, it's become practically routine, and Sarkeesian has posted a week's worth of equally angry and depressingly similar Twitter messages.

Obviously, this is a biased statement. A more objective reporter would concede that the entire campaign against Anita Sarkeesian could be an elaborate charade, a brilliant gambit involving hundreds of paid-off vloggers, thousands of fake Twitter accounts, and collaboration at the very top levels of the FBI and various state police forces. She could even be faking the wave of people who descend on our writers every time they mention Anita Sarkeesian! But maybe, hidden behind the exhortations to "kill yourself," the explicit rape threats, and the occasional smug assertion that the whole thing is a false flag campaign, there are actual human beings.

As it turns out, some of the most direct threats come from throwaway accounts, or ones that have been suspended. But some of them are extant, long-running feeds from people who... well, it's hard to say that they have regular lives, or passions, because their timelines are mostly just racist or homophobic jokes and insults. But if you trawl deep enough, little pieces of normality peek out. And it makes everything all the more frustrating.

(Warning: unsurprisingly graphic language ahead.)

Here's a pretty mild one:

DiceTrojan has a very important mission: preserving the noble institution of internet death threats. But he also enjoyed a winter vacation, just like the rest of us.

Adensma shows up here a lot, whether he's praising games with "girl characters half naked" or expressing extremely graphic sexual assault fantasies.

But he's experienced his own share of oppression at the hands of girl gamers.

Now we're back to the intentionally non-actionable death wishes, courtesy of Johnatan Irons:

"I personally dont [sic] have any thing against her (im just a troll)," he explains. We imagine his girlfriend understands, unless she's also just a figment of his trolling.

It's hard to find anything but hatred in these timelines, some of which span years and thousands of tweets.

But sometimes you find out they had the same reaction to Gravity as you did. For once, they unabashedly, unmaliciously liked something.

Maybe we've walked by some of these people on the street? Maybe we sat a few tables over at a restaurant, while they were typing something like this?

How much of it is just an act? How much does it actually matter? How much empathy should we feel when we read something that genuinely seems like a cry for help, when the entire premise of modern-day trolling is that the internet is just a giant game of make-believe, and you're a fool to do more than point and laugh?

None of this is encouraging, especially when you know that just mentioning it puts you in the crosshairs, too. It doesn't prove that there's some hidden decency to reach or some way to impose offline consequences (I haven't looked up anything about these people's real identities, and I don't plan to.) It doesn't prove anything about what kind of person does this, because someone's web presence doesn't necessarily indicate much about their everyday lives. All it proves is that this isn't some barrage of throwaway insults in a vacuum. Given enough time, whether it's created out of deep resentment or teenage thoughtlessness or deliberate, sociopathic calculation, even the most one-dimensional troll mask can start to come alive.

Nintendo had a pretty good Christmas. The Kyoto video games giant posted an operating profit of ¥31.4 billion for its third fiscal quarter, selling 1.91 million Wii U consoles and 4.99 million 3DS portables. Net profit was ¥45.2 billion, and revenue was ¥271,521 billion.

The solid holiday sales won't be enough for Nintendo to meet its forecast of ¥40 billion yen in operating profit for the financial year, however — the company has slashed that target in half, now expecting to make ¥20 billion. Since its account for the nine months so far stands at ¥31.6 billion, Nintendo is predicting to lose more than ¥10 billion over the next three months.

Although the Wii U has been picking up limited steam with a series of great games, Nintendo actually sold slightly fewer systems than it did a year ago. 3DS sales are down over 35 percent, as well, despite the launch of the new models in Japan and Australasia; the upgraded New 3DS XL will be released in the US and Europe next month. Still, it seems likely that Nintendo can close out the year in the black, suggesting its business has stabilized after a rocky couple of years.