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Protection from Unwanted Communication

Not everything that everybody says is going to be appreciated by everybody else. Besides the obvious cases of "I can't stand him!" and "Everything she says annoys me..." there are more insidious uses of communication to intimidate and harass. While the game should certainly provide some kind of "Code of Verbal Conduct" that gives guidelines for what is appropriate and inappropriate communication, it also needs to provide enforcement of the code and, more importantly, provide the individual players the means to protect themselves.

Code of Verbal Conduct - with Enforcement

The most obvious, and simplest, solution is to have a posted "Code of Verbal Conduct" or "Community Guidelines." These guidelines should spell out what is explicitly disallowed, such as flaming, sex-related talk, and so on.

For example (from the game Paintball NET):

Since Paintball NET is played by people of all ages, backgrounds, religions, and nationalities, it is expected that the players will refrain from speech that is deliberately inflammatory, excessively vulgar, and/or personally derogatory. In other words: No flaming and keep the trash talk to a minimum.

The problem, of course, is that a posted guideline is just so many words unless there is some form of enforcement to back it up. This enforcement needs to be automated as much as possible, but there is no substitute for a good moderator. The "teeth" of the moderator will need to include the power to silence, kick, and (at least temporarily) ban an offending player. And since the violations may not be occurring in a public forum, the moderator will need some kind of monitoring mode which shows all communication received and sent by a player.

"Ignore" Support for Chat and Notes

In addition to moderators, the game should also provide the means for the players to fend for themselves. Allowing the player to ignore (and un-ignore) other players at will accomplishes this nicely. If the game provides a note system, then the ignore feature should also cover notes sent by the ignored player.

Ignoring another player should be as simple as possible. Either a prominent button or a right-click menu option.

On the other side of the fence, the ignored player should be made aware of the player ignoring her. In my experience, this needs to happen only on direct messages.

Language Filter

Another feature the game might provide, depending on the nature of the game and its players, is a language filter. This would be an optional feature that the players themselves would turn off or on. Like the ignore, this is a player-empowerment feature. Since no list of "forbidden words" will ever be complete, it is probably necessary to include a means of adding words to the filtered list. Being able to point-and-click offending words and have them immediately filtered makes use of this feature as easy as possible.

Anti-Spam Controls

"Spamming" or "flooding" the communication channel by a single player is another serious problem that must be dealt with. Besides the annoyance factor to the affected players, it can chew up bandwidth needed by the game. Having a moderator will help keep this down, and ignore options help as well, but the game must have built-in anti-spam controls.

A simple method of spam-control involves tracking how much communication bandwidth is used by the player over a 15 second period. If the player exceeds a set limit, then the game forces him to be silent for a short time, such as 5 minutes.

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