More than 30 gaming companies have congregated in what they dubbed the Fair Play Alliance, so as to combat toxic behaviours of players in online multiplayer games, with their first summit on 21 March 2018 at the Games Developer Conference.
has more than 30 members, including big wigs such as Blizzard, Epic, Intel, Xbox, Riot Games Twitch, Mixer and quite a few more. Obviously, the industry is aware of the problem, so all that's left is to fix it. Simple, innit?
The FPA held their first summit on GDC a few days earlier, where they discussed toxicity in general, root causes of it and examples of some companies who have already encountered similar problems.
Among the presenters were Blizzard, whose recent activities on really made the world a safer place, and Epic, who are surely no strangers to the issue, what with Fortnite becoming a global obsession these days.
FPA
Perhaps the most useful of sessions was one on root causes of player behaviour, which had boffins from Activision, Epic and Twitch discuss it in great depth. Unfortunately, even though they covered many genuine root causes, they forgot to mention lousy upbringing. What? Someone had to say it.
With so many online multiplayer games plagued by toxicity of online players, formation of the FPA is hardly a surprise. Still, it will be interesting seeing whether the Alliance plans on actually doing something. After all, FTP staying in pure academic capacity means it's just another drum circle that changes nothing.
In conclusion, while the intention behind the Fair Play Alliance seems commendable, we sincerely doubt that the gaming world will be the first one to fix the issue of toxic behaviour. Still, a gamer can dream, can he not?
