You can learn a lot about a person by the values they express, and possibly something about an entire gaming platform by the blog posts the person running it writes. Thatās why I was so eager at E3 last week to ask the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, why he recently wrote a 1200-word essay mostly about ābuilding a safe and inclusive gaming environment for everyone.ā His answer was illuminating, and hinted at ambitious plans taking shape for Xbox Live that could prove influential for online gaming as a whole.
Before getting into what Spencer said and the new initiatives he outlined, itās worth familiarizing yourself with his May 20 post. It was titled āVideo games: A unifying force for the worldā and spends zero words hyping Xbox games. Thereās some stuff at the top about gamingās positive impact. He notes that gamingās ever-increasing cultural impact ācomes at a time when digital life includes a growing toxic stew of hate speech, bigotry and misogyny.ā The crux of the post is about online safety.
āWe will identify potentials for abuse and misuse on our platform and will fix problems quickly,ā he wrote, promoting revised Xbox Community Standards and noting that āhate and harassment have no place in gaming.ā He added that Xbox would be adding new content moderation features, first to community managers of official Xbox Live groups called Clubs, but eventually to all Xbox users by the end of the year.
https://kotaku.com/phil-spencer-on-xbox-s-unusual-strategy-working-with-s-1835652509
None of this is as attention-grabbing as the announcement of a new console, but it indicates a major Xbox priority. What I learned from Spencer as we discussed the post was that it was meant to articulate the Xbox teamās values while putting potential critics and skeptics on notice as new moderation tools and standards roll out.
āIāve been public before,ā Spencer told me. āXbox Live is not a free speech platform. It is not a place where anybody can come and say anything. And as weāre working to ensure itās a safe and inclusive environment for everybody, I donāt want to be opaque about it. I want to be out there front and center so that you understand our motivation.ā
Such words may rankle some people. But they will also surely give hope to others that maybe online gaming can still become a less toxic environment, one more regularly filled with the kind of positive interactions that make playing games online with good friends or cool strangers so rewarding.
(The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Stephen Totilo, Kotaku: You published a blog post about āgames as a unifying force,ā and you talked about the responsibility of gaming being a safe environment. You talked about toxicity as well and efforts to battle that. Why did you write that?
Phil Spencer, Xbox: It really represents, I think, a point of view that the team has. And obviously as the head of the business and the head of the team, I think itās important for me to be public about the things that are important to us. And I believe it at a fundamental level.
Itās funny, here at E3 thereās some guy Iāve been playing games with for almost three years online. He lives in Arkansas, Iāve never met him face to face, I play two or three nights a week with him, and we tend to play with an African-American guy who lives in New Jersey and the three of us. And I think about what social construct on our planet today brings a guy who runs a funeral home in Arkansas, a video game guy in Seattle, and a construction worker in New Jersey together in one fireteam to go run Destiny strikes together. When I feel that connective capabilityāIāve been in this industry for a long timeāI think about both being at Microsoft and using the platform that we have as one of the largest global companies. What does it mean for Microsoft to be in gaming? What should we stand for? And then being deliberate about that.
The only reason we published it now is, just as weāre making progress in Gaming For Everyone, as weāre going to do more things in our services, as weāre beefing up parental controls, thereās going to be a fringe segment that doesnāt like the direction we go. Iāve been public before: Xbox Live is not a free speech platform. It is not a place where anybody can come and say anything. And as weāre working to ensure itās a safe and inclusive environment for everybody, I donāt want to be opaque about it. I want to be out there front and center so that you understand our motivation.
Totilo: You mentioned a couple of things in that post. You said: āThis summer, we are empowering our official Club community managers with proactive content moderation features that will help create safe spaces for fans to discuss their favorite games. We plan to roll out new content moderation experiences to everyone on Xbox Live by the end of 2019.ā What does that mean? What might I be able to do to moderate content on Xbox Live?
Spencer: Today we have parental controls, but we looked at our parental controls system and said, āWhy canāt everybody use them?ā Why are parental controls and this idea of, as a parent I have a child account and I can kind of mandate screen time and spending limits and what kind of content I seeāwhy canāt anybody on their own account go and set that? We have a roadmap of us continuing to build that out, and some of this is us looking at some of the constructs we had under the child accounts. We want to blow that out a bit and really let anybody put those kinds of constructs on their account.
The intersection of [Looking For Group] and Clubs is really interesting, because now on Xbox Live I can filter my LFG through my Club affiliations, which is a nice way to be able to say, āHey, I donāt like swearing online so Iām going to be in a no-swearing club. And Iām going to use that as my matchmaking service.ā So it lets me curate the people I end up in an online session with. It only works if youāve got a Club moderator who can moderate who is in a club and making sure people are actually adhering to the rules.
And so all of this is about taking, one, a lot of the controls that are already in place and are really focused on a child account and expanding them out, and then continuing to build on this. The blog post was kind of to not miss the āwhyā in why we are doing this.
https://kotaku.com/microsoft-announces-new-controller-for-disabled-gamers-1826095787
Totilo: I wondered if the blog post was also you recognizing that this is a problem in gaming. We experience it in my different ways, in my profession, and in yours, thereās a distressing amount of toxicity. You talk about misogyny and hate that you hear in online speech and everything, and I didnāt know if this was signaling some ideas and developments you had. In terms of accessibility, you guys had a very bold step that you took with the Adaptive Controller last year, which was wonderful, and I wondered if this signaled some breakthroughs or some real prioritization of finding a way to make the online gaming space a less hateful, less misogynistic space, a less racist space.
Spencer: Two things Iād say there, and Iām really loving this conversation. One is: We own Minecraft. And itās not specifically about Minecraft, but, as a team, thinking through the responsibility that we have with a game that spans such a broad age range and how many kids have their first game experience on a parentās phone in the backseat of the car. When that goes to online, our opportunity to kind of set aāārulesā is probably too strong, but letās just say a ācommon code of conductāāand try to set some expectations.
We take that very seriously. And not just about Minecraft, but all of Xbox Live. I would say Minecraft, just at the scale itās at, we feel that it is part of the responsibility in a big way. I think when we look forward, when we talk about toxicity online, letās not only relate it to gaming, clearly. Itās message posts after articles online. Itās Twitter. Itās a lot of different places.
Totilo: YouTube comments. Twitch chat.
Spencer: I think the anonymity of the internet and the ability to comment to anybody is a really difficult place to unlock. One of the things we find in gaming thatās actually really helpful to us is that because your Xbox Live account has friends and identity and state, there seems to beāand itās goodāthere seems to be a lot more care that a player takes in their identity and its reputation. Banning somebody on Twitter, it takes me five seconds to create another account.
So when we think about our ability in the long run to actually create a system that actually has some amount of capability to actually impact behavior, we think the fact that our account has friends and history and relationships gives us a good relationship with a customer to actually impart some real rules and responsibilities. But I think itās just as much about gaming as it is about a community online.
Totilo: Yeah, well, I was impressed that you wrote a thing about it.
Spencer: It was five years ago when I became head of Xbox, and Satya Nadella, the CEO, he said, especially when I moved to report to him: I donāt want you to think about how gaming can help Microsoft. I want you to think about how Microsoft can help us make inroads in gaming, and I want you to use the platform of Microsoft in gaming to stand for things that you guys care about.ā
That was an empowering statement from our CEO, and we leaned into it. And heās been great in supporting the endeavors. And you know this: Thereās backlash any time. I can change my Xbox logo, my Twitter account to a rainbow logo this month, and thereās backlash against that.
In the final part of my conversation with Spencer, we discuss the state of game development for Xbox and what went wrong earlier this console cycle.
