FURI is a game about action arrangement.
People forget that the hard thing is not only hard, it's also expensive. Ubisoft did the hard thing a while back by auto-banning toxic players in Rainbow Six Seige. Today they did an abrupt about-face, claiming that the auto-ban feature was intrusive to the non-toxic part of the communities gameplay experience.
I cant... I just.... wow.
Any parent knows that the second you tell a kid they can't get ice cream they will throw a fit. You have to let the kid get through that because if you turn around and give the kid that ice cream, your word ain't your word anymore, it's a negotiation and that tantrum becomes the Trump card.
Ubisoft is one up-ing this by giving the kid the ice cream and explaining that it gave the ice cream to the bad kid because the good kid was traumatised by how the bad kid was behaving. For fuck sake.
There is an unspoken rule among gangsters, thieves, and other assorted criminals. The rule is, once you walk into Disneyland, you are off the clock. there are no shenanigans to be had there. It's the worlds largest and longest cease-fire area.
A crip and a blood spot each other walking around Futureland with their kids the most that pass is a cold stare, on dire occasions maybe some strong words. That happened because Disneyland took a hard stance on the issue. "If you misbehave, you will leave, and you are not welcome back." So in a sense, Disney is the biggest gangster because it played by gangster rules, as in, "My word is my word."
It took a long time to set, but it did set because Disney stuck to its guns, Disney understood there is more long-term yield in positive customers than negative, and because Disney offers a product so piff that any and every person that walks in there understands the hell they will catch if they are the one that got their kids kicked out of Disneyland.
Video games think toxicity is part of the culture, it's not. Video Games are a microcosm of society, almost all societies begin with toxicity because people accept what they can't change until they realise it has to in order to survive. Toxicity never survives to the survival stage of any society because when push comes to shove toxicity is not important to the machine. It's pineapple on pizza.
I don't think video games will understand this until winter comes. Government regulation, oversight, and fines, is winter. If you were wondering. It's on its way, and honestly, at this point I get it.
Much like social media, the video game industry is getting bullied by its audience and just not showing that it is capable to stand up to itself, and there are children being put at real risk. There has been a lot of time to fix this problem, and reactive measures or blaming the victim isn't a long-term fix. Something's gotta give.
Shouts to information, I know the job search is hard. I'm going through it myself. Keep your head up, your eyes open, and don't give up. The industry needs you more than you know. Also Jerbz.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Gullion
