Riot and Ubisoft recently announced that these two game development companies would work together to reduce toxicity in gaming.
Game development companies have always known that toxicity ultimately hurts the player experience. There have been numerous attempts by companies to reduce the level of toxicity within their gaming communities. Some of these initiatives have been more successful than others.
Riot and Ubisoft Use AI to Reduce Gaming Toxicity
However, it is rare to see two separate companies form an alliance to reduce overall gaming toxicity. As the worldwide gaming phenomenon continues to gather steam, reducing barriers to entry becomes more important. One of the biggest turn-offs for people to get into gaming is the high level of toxicity in multiplayer games.
That’s why Riot and Ubisoft are teaming up on a tech partnership to develop a database gathering in-game data to better train AI-based preemptive moderation tools that detect and mitigate disruptive behavior in-game. Any data gathered that will be able to identify a person will be removed before sharing.
Zero Harm in Comms Project
The “Zero Harm in Comms” research project is the first step in a cross-industry project that aims to benefit all people who play video games. Riot and Ubisoft are aligned in their mission to create gaming structures that foster more rewarding social experiences and avoid harmful interactions.
As members of the Fair Play Alliance, both companies believe that improving the social dynamics of online games will only come through communication, collaboration, and joint efforts across the gaming industry. With Ubisoft’s wide catalog of popular games and Riot’s highly competitive titles, the resulting database of this partnership should cover a wide range of players and use cases to better train AI systems to detect and mitigate harmful behavior.
As games become more and more popular around the world, the scale of this challenge only expands. That is why Riot is investing in AI systems to automatically detect harmful behavior and foster more positive communities across all our games.
Gamelevate Looks Forward to More Partnerships
Making online communities safer and more inclusive is an ongoing mission. We, at Gamelevate, certainly hope to see more game publishers join these two companies in these types of efforts. The individual company efforts are certainly very commendable. However, if more game developments join together to remove toxicity, then faster progress can be made.
Related: Gamelevate Articles About Reducing Toxicity, Smurfing, Hacking, and Cheating in Gaming
