Online Cultures

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the evolution of online culture. Nick, go for it. Evolution of online culture. What's on your mind? Yeah, so this

Speaker B: 00:00:30

actually is a question that was posed to us by a friend of the podcast and indeed former guest Chris Lear asked us, what do online games tell us about the evolution of social norms? And I thought it's a really interesting question and relates to lots of other things really. So this question of what makes online cultures different? First of all, maybe different games. Are there different online cultures with different games? But also more generally, things like Facebook and LinkedIn, kind of more or less the same people, but very different culture on those sites. And I think this ties into quite a fundamental question about culture. One of the sort of big debates and mysteries really about culture, which is, is culture driven by fundamentals? Is it driven by extraneous factors? Does culture evolve precisely to solve the problems and to deal with the issues of a certain environment? Or is culture more of a historical accident? And so that, for example, the sort of fundamentals first approach might say, well, the reason that farming culture and hunting culture have evolved differently are that farming can only happen in certain places in the world where there's relatively fertile soil. And as a farmer, you're settled and you're interacting with the same people and you live in larger communities. And so naturally, you end up with a culture that's geared around those specific issues. Whereas someone who's a bit more sort of culture first might say, well, no, the point is that hunting cultures are more, you know, find themselves more able to hunt. So the kinds of cultures which are, you know, which have hunting compatible norms are the ones which will end up going out hunting. And the ones that have farming compatible norms will end up farming. And so that's a big kind of live debate, really. I would say that, you know, as an economist, my background pushes me towards the former. I would tend to think that, you know, that the environment comes first and we've solved problems in the environment. But anthropologists tend to go the other way around. The point about online environments is it gives us a chance really to test this, you know, how do people behave online? And which of those theories does it help us distinguish between?

Speaker A: 00:03:12

And that's across, you know,: 1000

Speaker B: 00:05:14

I feel that what you've done is restate the question. Okay, rather than answering it.

Speaker C: 00:05:21

Anyway, Peter, pick it up. Yeah, I think that you hit on something interesting there, Fraser, where you have two different environments, and assuming that they're samples of people from the same population, one in one place, they all appear nice and behave well and get on and treat each other well. And in another place, where they don't, they don't so much. And it's it's much more sort of fraught and competitive. And I think that, yeah, I think you're right, I think it is the environment. And I lean very strongly towards the former, I think culture is a totally emergent property of humans and where they find themselves and where they find what you develop to be a hunter or a farmer, depending on what is the most available source of food. And your culture will evolve as a result of that. So the Yeah, so but I think online communities, as Nick says, give a really good opportunity to examine this. And it's quite a big business quite important. So there's lots of money riding on it. And lots of people deriving a lot of sort of entertainment and spending a lot of time doing it. I came across a really interesting comparison between two online big online communities, one which is League of Legends, and which is one which is StarCraft. Superficially quite similar kinds of games in the sense that it's sort of a role playing game where you are combating non player character enemies. And there's opportunities for collaboration, there's opportunities for competition. And you're basically sort of fighting monsters, casting spells and swinging swords. But they have two very different cultures. One, League of Legends has come under a lot of criticism for being quite unfriendly. And, and there's lots of sort of potentially lots of bullying and things that go online and comments are between players are often mean and sarcastic, rather than sort of friendly and helpful. Whereas StarCraft, there's very little competition, there's very little, very little of that. And it's much more sort of amenable and nice and friendly. And, and the so the articles I've read on this seem to boil it down to just the way that the environment in which players find themselves is set up is the key things. And I've got a number of factors which are sort of boiled down, which we could go into. But yeah, it's sort of to do with how the games designed like how was the reward mechanism? What's the sort of criticality of being in a team versus being a sort of single player? What's the how the game is launched in terms of like, how it's published to people is important? Is it hype driven? Or is it more word of mouth? The nature of the community develops around that. Whether there's moderation, and how the moderation works. And indeed, the so to League of Legends credit, they've been doing a lot of work in trying to make things better. And they've actually got quite advanced sort of social systems going on. So they now have a judicial system in there where, where they have, they have, have players are I don't know how they're elected, or if they if they volunteer, but they they basically run tribunals decide whether or not people well, it's like it's like the British judicial system, you get judged by your peers. You Yeah, so they run tribunals and decide what sanctions need to occur for various sort of misdemeanors online. So yeah, very interesting. And, and because it's all digital online, you everything's written down recorded. So you can do a lot of experimentation on it potentially, and a lot of sort of unpicking of what happened. And, yeah, it is quite fascinating. So it's fascinating, but it mirrors, I think it mirrors, mirrors IRL. It mirrors like on driving versus classroom. Because I think the key thing there, I think Fraser is the classroom is you all have a shared common aim. And it's not competitive. What was IRL? What's IRL? In real life.

Speaker A: 00:09:32

Oh, fuck. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:09:36

Classroom is not competitive, and you have a shared aim, which is whereas driving, you all have completely different aims. And it's competitive.

Speaker A: 00:09:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's other things with driving, actually, which is you can't communicate.

Speaker B: 00:09:48

But yes, and I think that's a key thing that Peter could have mentioned was, it was just but other other things you can not only can you communicate, but it's actively, you know, you can't, you can't even communicate non verbally, because you can't see the person in front of you and stuff like these things. And I think those are the sort of factors we want to drill into. But I think it is worth drawing a distinction at this stage between several things that we might be talking about, you know, how there's an oft quoted saying, no one actually knows who said this first. But the thing about rugby and football, and it's expressed in various ways, but it boils down to, you know, rugby tends to be played by well, rugby union tends to be played by sort of, you know, toffs and is much more popular public schools. And yet they behave like unless you're in Wales. Right. But okay, sure. Let's give the quote, give the well, it's something like, you know, football is a gentleman's game played by hooligans. And rugby is a hooligans game played by gentlemen. And I think the idea is that the culture surrounding football is a lot more rough and tumble. But the game itself is sort of, you know, quite civilised, whereas whereas rugby involves a lot of fighting on the pitch, and but is much more civilised in terms of the way that the fans behave and and you know, so the that is a distinction, I think we need to make here. And in fact, I think there's three levels that we need to talk about in when we're talking about online, which is firstly, the online forget the behaviour in game. So this is, you know, what is considered acceptable to do in games. So for example, a lot of games allow you to kill your squad mates, for example, it's perfectly legal to do that, you know, like you're you can kill the other people on your team. The game does not prevent or, you know, get a lot of games don't prevent you from doing that. But, you know, is that considered unacceptable behaviour? And there's a good analogy there with with the way that people consider it a fair way of playing board games, for example, you know, the other things that are just considered mean and nasty, which you shouldn't do. And so there's that behaviour in the game, right? Then there's the culture of, you know, sort of the meta game, or if you like the kind of the things that aren't strictly about what you're doing, but sort of the way you're doing it. So how you communicate with people, you know, what, how nice or nasty or encouraging or derogatory, you know, the languages that people use when they're talking to each other in the game. And then I think there's the wider community, the sort of forums and subreddits and stuff that will be associated with that game. Is the community nice, you know, if you like, in real life when we're outside the environment of the game? So there's quite a few things that they need and go hand in hand. And I mean, you know, if you just take something like a game about killing people can still, you could have a nice culture about a game that involves killing people. And similarly, you could have a horrible culture about a game that was about growing crops or something. Or can you, you know, but I think it's worth thinking about those different levels on which we're

Speaker A: 00:12:58

talking about. I think we're covering this really nicely. I think between what you've said there, Nick, and what you were saying, Peter, about those specific two examples of the things that can feed into the culture, we've nailed it. Have we? I mean, what else we got to say? I've got a bit of data.

Speaker B: 00:13:15

Go on. Well, it's not, I'm not. We're only halfway through. Well, I think I do want to hear more about Peter's theories, but I just have compiled a table of things that I picked up as sort of potential explanations for why people might be, why a community might be toxic or non-toxic. Specific to online or just general? Yes, specifically games. Because you can find endless lists of the most toxic games, you know, those toxic communities. Doesn't really distinguish in the way that I would like between that kind of behaviour in game. So griefing, as it's known online, you know, when you're doing griefing is when you're doing things that the game allows you to do, but which people don't like. So it's spelled G-R-I-E-F. As in grief. As in the sort of emotion you might, yeah. Yeah. So griefing, that includes stuff like, harassing other players or destroying stuff that other players have built, killing your teammates, playing it slowly, constantly pausing, going away from keyboard, which kind of disrupts other people's, you know, so you're just standing there and that can affect other people. Have you heard of training? No. Training? Yeah, it's where you go and get a load of monsters to follow you. So you wander around picking up monsters who follow you and you then take the big train of monsters into a friendly area and leave the monsters to kill everyone else. That sounds brilliant. Smurfing. Do you know what that is? No. Smurfing is where you come up with is where you cheat. This is a sort of metagame cheat, really. But it's where you give yourself a good ranking by setting up lots of fake accounts, which you then lose to your real account. And then that raises your rating. But on the flip side of that actually is apparently something that really, really good players just to annoy new players or make life hard for them will deliberately lose against them. And that then means that they end up with a massive increase in their rating. And so the next match, they're going to be facing someone who's really, really good. So there's these are all sort of methods of griefing and trolling. Who has time for this? But anyway, keep going. So anyway, I got the four, you know, I picked four things that crop up on all these lists as the most toxic and I found a bunch of things. Well, three, I found pick three that crop up on lists that I found like what's the least toxic, what are the nicest communities. And then there's an interesting one that is sort of in both, which I will cover at the end. But so the four really horrible ones, Peter's already mentioned League of Legends, also Cancer Strike, Global Offensive, I think it's called. Dota 2 and Call of Duty. Those are my four most toxic. And the three that crop up as least toxic, friendly, actively friendly communities are Factorio, Elite Dangerous and Stardew Valley. Right. Now, key features of these, of those four, of those four highly toxic ones, three are free to play. Right. None of the three. All of the ones that are considered nice are sort of 10, 20 pounds. Where does Fortnite sit? Fortnite? Well, I usually I've seen it on some lists of toxic communities. So so there's cost, right. Cost equals free to play. You know, I'm just saying it's associated here in this very small data set with toxicity in game interaction. Right. If there is necessary in-game interaction, you know, in League of Legends, you can't play online unless you're interacting with other players. Likewise, for those other ones. Whereas with the nice games, it's optional. So Elite Dangerous, you can choose to switch other players off if you want. Length of matches in those toxic ones are all short. In all of the in all of the nice ones, they're long. So they involve time investment. And if you're playing multiplayer. That's

Speaker C: 00:17:19

all. And this is just between the two between two different games. So that actually the length of game, if it's a long game and you're more vested in it, you're more likely to be nasty because if things go wrong, you've wasted your precious hour of play. Yeah, I well, I think and this actually probably I think it might be I think it might be to do with the map, like an individual kind of match. Yeah. As it were, rather than if it's like a like if you're if you're developing a character and there's no sort of there's no like break points in your in your game. It's just a open ended and and iterative rather than sort of little rather than chunk rather than discrete

Speaker B: 00:18:00

. Nice games. Factorio: 7000

Speaker C: 00:19:46

if I could posit I could probably posit some ideas. Just another bit of data that I spotted. So the League of Legends have got this sort of like a human behavioural insights kind of team that they've set up to try to address the problems with their community. So to their credit, they seem to be doing something to address it. And they've hired, well it's a slightly old article so it might things might have changed now, but they'd hired a behavioural psychologist to head this team. And an interesting figure that they that they pointed out was that only is that you'd think the prevailing understanding at that time, before they started doing their analysis was that oh, well, we just have a bunch of bad people. And if we ban those bad people, everything will be fine again. And so there's a sort of, there's some rotten eggs that we need to get rid of. But actually, as it turns out that they account for like 1% of the player base who are considered bad at the time. And they collectively produce about five, only 5% of the overall bad behaviour.

Speaker B: 00:20:57

So they're shouldering a lot more of the burden of toxicity, but they're still not responsible for

Speaker C: 00:21:03

Masonry. But the most bad, so 95% of bad behaviour comes from just good, on average good, well meaning players having a bad day and kicking off and getting frustrated because they've had a bad day at work or whatever, and bringing that in game. So, so maybe it's a really positive thing, because

Speaker A: 00:21:25

they do that instead of kicking the cat or something. I don't know. Well, maybe. Yeah. But it's, but it

Speaker C: 00:21:29

sort of spoils it for other people, I think. It does. Who may then go on and go offline and kick the cat. IRL. Yeah, they pass it forward. Yeah. So that's interesting. I think that that feels like it's kind of like normal life, because if you sort of normal life, there are a few nasty people that you don't want anything to do with. But most of the pain, or most of the sort of suffering you suffer from other people is just other people having a bad day. And you put a notice in yourself when you snap at somebody or rude to somebody. And why was it, why did I just do that? Oh, because I'm tired. Oh, because somebody else was mean to me earlier and I'm in a bad mood. So it's like, you know, it's, it feels like it's just like real life. But in terms of like, why you have the trends that Nick has spotted, I'm not, I'm not sure I'm qualified really to sort of explain, but maybe we could suggest some ideas. So one thing that I spotted that League Legends versus StarCraft, League Legends is a team game. So you have a team, and there are, there's big leagues of teams and teams are, I think lots of teams are often quite static. So you have a group of friends who arrange to play at the same time, they form a team, they play other teams. But then they're in order to fill gaps in teams, obviously, people just drop in. So that's where a lot of the problem comes, you get people on your team, who are not as good as you, or are doing behaving in a way that's not appropriate for your team. And they are then subjects of lots of lots of abuse versus a game where it's just, you know, you are your own team, you don't form teams. So yeah, I think that the key difference that they pointed out there was like what they, if it's just, if it's just, you just got to look after yourself, and you're kind of on an equal footing as anybody else. Versus if you're in a team, you need to comply with like the social norms of the team, as well as the social norms of the whole game. And it's much more competitive. And you're under pressure not to let your team down, you're under pressure to sort of punish those in your team who aren't doing the right thing in order to progress. Whereas if you're on your own, really, you know, it doesn't matter if you sort of cock up, because it's just you, and you've got no one to let down, as it were. So I think that's what yeah, yeah, I think

Speaker B: 00:23:52

ernal September was, I think,: 1993

Speaker C: 00:27:32

There are online for, I think, so I think Server Vault and Stack Overflow are a good example of this. So you as a, your profile has sort of two measures. One is how many contributions you've made, which is kind of your, which translates to your sort of overall seniority. And then you have a separate measure, which is like how many people have liked and sort of reposted or sort of approved of what you've put in, which is more like kind of kudos. So there's two, and this is true, I don't know if it's legal edge, but certain online games have this effect, they're this thing. So you have your overall, like, player level, which kind of dictates how hard the game is for you, and it's sort of an indication of how far you've got in the game, how many enemies you've killed, or whatever. And then you have a separate user, a vote by other players who, if they liked playing with you, will say, yep, nice game, nice guy, and give you a kudos point, which is completely separate from your seniority. And I understand that that is a useful driver for providing, you know, for

Speaker B: 00:28:41

moderating behavior. Great. So just one thing, one more data point before you push us forward inevitably. One interesting sort of observation, really, which is, I had a search, the one that I didn't mention when I was talking about this game, so it's Rocket League, because it appears on both the most toxic and least toxic, Rocket League, you're kind of in cars, and it's like football, but in cars, you've got this giant ball, you're trying to get into the opponent's... Very high

Speaker C: 00:29:10

pace. It's unforgiving for beginners, it takes a long time to get good at it. But it is, yeah,

Speaker B: 00:29:16

nt peak in the latter half of: 2020

Speaker A: 00:30:22

moved us on to the question that I want to ask, which is, I want to ask you, looking back, or maybe even currently, probably in real life, it doesn't have to be, what's the worst, most toxic community or environment that you've ever had the displeasure, or maybe pleasure, maybe pleasure of being within? And the opposite, what's the nicest, most collaborative community or environment in which you've operated? I've got both. Whenever you, do you want me to start? Yeah, why not? I've got an idea, but yeah. Okay. So for me, I can think back of various toxic communities. One, probably my school, which was a sort of, you know, a minor public school back in, it was quite haughty, kind of brutal, slightly brutal sort of place. Bit bullying, I feel. Also, when I was a dive master, the people, the culture of that particular dive school was, I felt, a little bit macho. Yeah, a little bit toxic from that point of view. But actually, was it like that, the, is it Cobra Kai, the one from? Yeah, it was, it was not dissimilar. It wasn't exactly, yeah, it wasn't that, quite that bad, but it wasn't far off. But actually, I think, I think there's various reasons, but one of the reasons was, I think the leader of the, of this dive school was a pretty awful person, to be honest. Was the SAP, if someone got a difficulty underwater, you just left them there? Leave them, leave them, yeah. Good. Yeah, and then, and probably the worst environment which I've ever, ever operated is, I have to be very careful what I say, but I recently started working in the area of PR, okay, and communications, and my God, they're just, I'll just whisper it so no one hears, they are the most awful people. And, and I, as an example, funnily enough, last, it's not strictly connected, but if you're familiar, and I know you are, with Black Mirror and that episode, Nosedive, yeah? Which one's that? It's the one where, it's all kind of social media world, and you rank people, oh yeah, and, and everyone's just super, super, super nice to everyone else, but it's massively fake, and, and they're actually probably pretty vapid, awful people. Well, I'll leave it there. So, so yeah, and those are my examples. But just to be clear, that's not your current employer? No, it's not, it's definitely, they are the best, exactly, it's not that at all. Nicest environment, most collaborative, probably, as you know, until a couple of years ago, I ran this community of filmmakers, and we would get together every sort of six months or a year, whatever, and that was just a lovely community of people, and I think what made it so great was that we, we've shared interests, shared values, but also very collaborative, working together in something we all enjoyed, and just wonderful, wonderful, I loved it. Yeah, those are mine,

Speaker C: 00:33:19

either you pipe up, if you like. Well, I'll start. Well, so the, the, I think the, the minor public school that I went to, I thought was one of the most nurturing environments I've ever experienced. I really loved it. There were times, yeah, there were times when there were other kids who were, you know, trying to be a bit bullying-y, but they were, they weren't very good at it, and it was generally very nice, and teachers were great, and loved it. Same with university, I thought it was really good, really well set up, and very accessible kind of professors and seniors within the department, and felt great. But the most, it was my time in doing reserve forces, I thought the army set up is really, really good at dealing with junior people, and nurturing them, and is extremely good at interdicting any kind of bullying behaviour. That was certainly my experience. I know it's not the same for everybody, but it was, that I thought was great. In terms of toxic environments, maybe it's not, so I, towards the latter part of my career, I really struggled with the civil service, not because people were mean or difficult, that was a very nurturing environment as well, but just because the organisation itself was quite sick. And I became quite disillusioned with the whole thing, particularly because my interest was not necessarily, was in improving the way things are done, in order to make the organisation better at doing what it's supposed to be doing. And it was just, it's just from an organisational emergent property, is that it's got no interest in doing that, because it doesn't, you don't rock the boat, you don't change things unless they need changing. Basically, you don't do anything until something massively cocks up, rather than trying to fix it before it's going to cock up.

Speaker B: 00:35:09

Yeah. Nick. A couple of things. Yeah, I think I'm going to pick ones that are interesting inversions of what you might expect, which is the world of face-to-face poker, and the being in a professional choir. So I was...

Speaker A: 00:35:29

Right, so the poker players are actually super nice, and the choir's a bunch of gits.

Speaker B: 00:35:32

he poker boom back in the mid: 2000

Speaker A: 00:38:13

I think it goes back to that shared value, shared interest kind of thing, right? But yeah, interesting. Okay, great. That's quite a long one we've done there. So we'll stop there. As always, thanks for listening. If you've any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast at alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast. Yeah, what should people do, Nick, if people like the podcast?

Speaker B: 00:38:37

Hit the like button, but no noobs done any scrubs in our podcast gang.

Speaker A: 00:38:41

Yeah, that's right. Thanks, as always, for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer, we've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.