Thoughts on Forum Moderation

Forums are strange communities.  A few things tend to be constant about them, one of which is that moderators are supposed to handle anything immediately and perfectly.  Which is enough to dumbfound anybody.  Here's one from yesterday.

 Removed the forum name because the intent here isn't to call anybody out.  It's an opening post that could be closed immediately--wouldn't be difficult to justify action within the rules, but coming down too hard with the tools tends to cause longer term problems.  We're talking about a game; it's supposed to be fun.  Once in a while anyone could feel frustrated in a long term strategy game when they're having a hard time competing.  This is someone who has probably played at least a year.

So what to do?  Fortunately someone had found this shark in a business suit a few hours earlier.  I have no idea who created the image (and kudos to that artist).  It just seemed like the right thread to use it.

Forum humor is a tricky thing.  Nobody likes to be the butt of a joke in a public setting, especially not when the person cracking the joke is in a position of power.  Moderator ops really aren't much power, but up close it can seem to people like a much bigger deal than it is.  So the humor has to be gentle.  Tried to add something more thoughtful afterward.

The community is not necessarily gentle.  That's the advantage of not having extra buttons; you can pretty much be candid as long as it doesn't get too vulgar.  The community was not kind to the player who started this thread.  Some of the feedback was constructive, others just disagreed.  Kept an eye on it to make sure it didn't descend into abuse.  Another moderator closed discussion a few hours later.

The fine line here is letting discussion take place so that people don't react against things getting shut down too early.  There are threads that do need closure at the first post.  This one seemed to go better by giving people the chance to respond.

Game for Gamers

In a high profile piece for New Statesman last month, Simon Parkin writes "If you love games, you should refuse to be called a gamer."  Dennis Scimena follows up Parkin's thoughts in Salon with "Why I can't call myself a gamer anymore."  It's natural to soapbox against discrimination that affects oneself; it takes principles to adhere to the same standard when discrimination goes against someone else.   Both Parkin and Scimena deserve kudos for taking a stand against prejudice. Yet it's possible to admire people while disagreeing with them.

What Simon Parkin wants to do is erase the notion of a "gaming community."

The term is a miserable legacy of the medium’s niche past, where video games were viewed as the sole preserve of white, western indoors-y teenagers. The cliché has proven indelible. ‘Gamers’ (a term that further segregates ‘players’, while adding unwelcome ghost notes that call to mind the gambling industry) are routinely represented in media as socially inept boys with poor hygiene and a proclivity for impotent rage...

Parkin's examples are cogent, as Scimena summarizes.

Parkin feels that the idea of the “gaming community,” and its endemic misogyny, transphobia and rape culture, all need to die, and by extension, anyone who has adopted an identity as a “gamer” needs to give it up.

It would be pointless to deny that their objections lack basis.  Just yesterday the following arrived in my in-game inbox.  This doesn't happen every day, or even particularly often.  It was written a few hours after midnight on January 1 in North America, and although I have no idea which time zone this was sent from it isn't difficult to imagine him groaning with a hangover a few hours afterward--and also reeling with well deserved embarrassment.

I don't know the fellow who sent it.  We aren't even acquaintances.  Didn't answer, of course.  And yeah, passed this to the appropriate staff at the gaming company.  They're professionals with good judgment.  The question here is not whether this bothers me personally (it doesn't much) but whether it's a one-off.  If this dude goes around writing to random women like that it's a problem because of course that message is completely inappropriate.

So here's the question: do we cede the term gamer to the sort of guy who does this?  In particular do we cede that ground to not just to the dude who does it once when deep in his cups on the Holiday of Drinking Binges but to the guy who makes it a habit?  Is this a more authentic expression of gaming enthusiasm than anyone else's?  Or is it a steaming mound of horse manure?

I vote horse manure.  And I'm not handing that person ownership of the word gamer.  I'm a gamer.  Frankly, most guys in the gaming community aren't that doofus.  Not even once in a blue moon.  Yes, we get transgressive behavior.  Transgressive behavior happens everywhere on the Internet.  Sometimes it's trolling, sometimes it's poor impulse control, sometimes it's just the belief that the Intenet is a space without social consequences.  Occasionally it's real bigotry; that exists too.  But I'm not about to retreat from being a gamer over that.  And the good news is that about 98% of men, Simon Parkin and Dennis Scimena included, don't take to behavior like that either.

Meet The Weresquirrel

Back in the day doing tabletop gaming I ran the silliest games.  The players would be taking a tour of a wizard's castle and find themselves in mortal combat with a living room sofa.  You know the kind of sofa that's so comfy it's hard to leave?  This one would cast cast a sleep spell on you then close and release digestive juices: a Venus Flysofa.  It was a tough fight; the dang thing had 17 hit dice.

So when the same group was traveling through a forest and it was time for a random monster encounter, they met up with weresquirrels.

"What?"  They weren't sure they'd heard it right.

"You've heard of werewolves, weretigers.  These are weresquirrels."

It was impossible to talk for a while because they were clutching their sides laughing.  Sometimes I would randomly insert a different animal into a known monster type and work out the details from there.  One session they would have been fighting hell hounds and instead battled hell bunnies.  Another day one of the guys farted one too many times and the whole party ended up fighting a pack of barking spiders (special attack: poison gas).

I really didn't know where this was headed while I was saying it--what exactly do you do with weresquirrels?

"What do squirrels bite?"

Laughter halted, jaws dropped.

"You better hope these things don't get a critical hit."

It was completely unplanned but it worked.  And the players--who were all male--got into the role play including the critical hits.  Somehow they loved it.  Turned out to be one of that campaign's best sessions.


So during a Skype chat in Battle Pirates (speeding ahead several years) we were reminiscing about old gaming experiences and this story came up.  Completely different group of people, again all male, and they loved the joke too.  It turned into a game name and stuck.  When the Community Manager at Kixeye asked me to become a forum moderator we tossed around ideas for mod names.

"You don't think Weresquirrel is too unprofessional?"

"Looks fine; it's funny."

That's how it went.  There are things outside the scope of Kixeye's forums that are worth comment and discussion.  So after a day of various back end preparations (mostly hunting down free licensed squirrel pictures) here's a new year's blog.