INDUSTRY PROFESSIONAL
Dr Kimberly Voll is the leader of the Fair Play Alliance. She spoke about the different reasons that people get abusive online.
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(Image Credit: Freepik)
"Today we know a lot more about the root causes in part because we've matured the connections between human psychology and how behaviour manifests online and in games. Generally speaking there are several factors at work:
Poor social connection and individual identity
Expectation management
Habits and intent
Lack of social consequences
The game itself/competitive experiences
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Our goals for the FPA are not to regulate, but to empower games companies to better understand the root causes of behaviour in their game, and the cultural, societal, and even genre forces at work. Each game is different, as are the communities that surround and drive them. Additionally, as a society we are maturing in ways unprecedented as we live our lives both online and off. Distinctions like "IRL" increasingly make little sense -- it is all real life. So quickly have we "gone online", however, that we have not had sufficient time to catch up with social protocols, or overcome tens of thousands of years of evolution for tribal living."