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Lifestream, Tweets

For this block, Community Cultures, the relevant paragraph is:

League of Legends used to be besieged by claims of harassment until a few small changes caused complaints to drop sharply. The game’s creator empowered players to vote on reported cases of harassment and decide whether a player should be suspended. Players who are banned for bad behavior are also now told why they were banned. Not only have incidents of bullying dramatically decreased, but players report that they previously had no idea how their online actions affected others. Now, instead of coming back and saying the same horrible things again and again, their behavior improves. The lesson is that tech companies can use these community policing models to attack discrimination: Build creative ways to have users find it and root it out.

I’m conscious of the language choice here: empowered players to vote. Possibly players did feel empowered (affective reward?), but I’m conscious that they are also unpaid digital labourers (volunteers) upon which the commercial interests of League of Legends is reliant, and has systemised. There’s a tension for me in ‘community policing’ of (and for) private, profit-generating entities which warrants further exploration. It seems to be a ‘civic duty’, yet it is not only for the public.

“Players who are banned for bad behaviour are also now told why they were banned” – this kind of transparency seems logical. Yet, it is seemingly not adopted by many online ‘communities’.