Into the Digital Future Fostering Healthy Online Communities with Kimberly Voll

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the podcast here.

 

Laura Higgins: Kimberly Voll is the co-founder of the Fair Play Alliance. It was wonderful to have Kim on and hear about her experience as a very experienced developer. Not just building some very well-known games, working for some of the best-known companies in the world, but just to share some of her experience of what that’s been like both as a woman working in the industry but also as a mentor. Her interest is particularly around combating toxicity, and the work she’s doing now is really groundbreaking.

Jordan Shapiro: I was really excited about the gender stuff that came up in this conversation. When we started to do this podcast in the middle of the pandemic, I had no idea we were going to get to so many questions about equality and social justice. I was really glad that we were able to bring some of that into this conversation. Let’s get to it.

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Kimberly Voll: It’s awesome to be here. I’m really excited to talk to you both today. My name is Kimberly Voll. I am a kind of a combination game developer/ researcher who focuses a lot on artificial intelligence and how we think and why we do the things that we do, including a lot on cognitive science and the brain and how those aspects relate to video games and digital society more generally.

Laura: So can you tell us just a little bit about your journey with game development?

Kimberly: At the risk of overly nerding out, I don’t think I could start without mentioning my earliest development and my love of games, which really came from an old machine from Texas Instruments, the TI-99/4A, which was my first true love in this world. I was quite young then. It was just the most incredible thing that I had ever seen. Here was this space where you could create worlds that weren’t possible anywhere else. And I think it just blew my little mind. I couldn’t get enough of it.

As early as five, I had found this menu that would pop up and you could press one for a game or two to load BASIC. I kept poking my parents, ‘what is this game, BASIC? I want to play BASIC!’ And when I would load it, I would just get this blinking cursor. ‘What do I do? Is this an adventure? What is this?’ And neither of my parents have technical backgrounds at all – they have zero interest in computer programming. But they did give me enough to tell me that it’s programming and they took me to the library and took out a book on BASIC and pointed me to the right spot. And so I would spend all day poking at something only to get it to print my name with some little stars next to it, and then run and grab the whole family to show them what I had accomplished.

That left me with this just incredible sense of the possibility of spaces of technology – just these magical worlds that you could transport yourself into, and even better, create. When I started having a slightly more mature but still pretty terrible self-taught version of programming, I started to make text adventures and gradually got more and more into just making games as a hobby.

So, games have always been a huge piece of who I am, how I identify, how I think about the world. And not until I was much older did I ever stop to reflect on that role. It was just sort of a thing that I did, and it turns out not all my peers were interested in those things and I just couldn’t get it. It wasn’t until I got to actually to my PhD when I was exploring topics and I was thinking [about games formally]. At this point, I’d done an undergraduate degree and in cognitive science I’d done an honors thesis. So I’d gone pretty deep on the research side, and was lucky enough to be able to move directly into a PhD.

I remember thinking then, can you do research in games? What does that mean? That would be spiffy, because I sure like games! I never forget bringing it up to one of my supervisors and them telling me at that point that it was inappropriate for a young lady to pursue games as a career or research topic.

One of the things that I have focused on in my career, is why people do the things that they do, and particularly in the context of games. So I worked at Riot for about four years, I joined in 2015 or so to work on player behavior. Player behavior for me was this beautiful intersection of all the things that I love about games. How can you first and foremost understand the patterns and behaviors that you’re seeing within the context of these digital spaces? And then second, how can you influence them for the better? How can you actually drive healthier communities? Greater social cohesion? Greater player wellbeing?

Riot had done a lot in this space. I think at that time they were one of the definite leaders, having even just a dedicated focus on the challenges of hate and harassment in games and just the general negativity that we often see emerging in digital spaces. I joined to work on League of Legends at that time, and just really [to] figure out what was going on and what was left to try.

Jordan Shapiro: Can you tell me a bit about the kinds of things you found?

Kimberly: In just a few decades, really, we’ve gone from being a non-digital to a digital society where you see that digital spaces and video games are now part of the social fabric of the world. When you look at estimates – I think it’s one hundred and sixty billion dollars was the rough estimate of the [value of the] gaming industry. I mean, these are huge, huge things. These are not toys. These are rich, thriving social ecosystems that require respect and care and intentional approaches to how we address them.

A lot of the non-verbal cues, like body language, are absent or greatly diminished in a digital format. Even over a camera, you’re losing so many depth cues and where a person’s eyes are focused, and that read of the room that you have when you’re in the same place. You can’t just look around you in a digital setting and get a sense of what’s going on or how others are reacting to what you’re seeing. So if something transpires in the game that makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have that bolstering of seeing others are also uncomfortable and then getting that signal that, hey, maybe this is inappropriate.

One of the other challenges in digital spaces, is because of that simplicity of communication and the lack of richness, you don’t have those other cues of how what you’re saying is truly impacting people. We see this with social media, more generally. Some people talk about the post-truth world. A lot of what’s happening there is that everyone gets equal billing in the digital context and we haven’t yet matured the tools to be able to create or recreate or figure out what a reasonable facsimile is in a digital context, in the same way that we have done in non-digital settings.

Laura: So could you tell everybody about the Fair Play Alliance and what our aims are?

Kimberly: The Fair Play Alliance is a cross-industry initiative across the gaming industry and broader gaming ecosystem where we are all united around a shared goal to foster inclusivity, prosocial behavior and reduce hate and harassment as a core part of how we make games and gaming environments.

Really looking at the entire game development pipeline from the initial conception, all the way through to a game as a service or a game that exists out in a live ecosystem, and is being maintained and supported and growing by the industry around it, and of course, the amazing players within. All the way to its sunset when we wrap up that game and we’re no longer going to offer it. When I was at Riot, I was focusing on these things on a pretty daily basis—reaching out into the industry to talk to colleagues and understand what was going on in their games, what were they doing about these things, and just trying to find others who were tackling these problems day-to-day.

That’s a lot of what we think about within the Fair Play Alliance. What are the responsibilities, what are the opportunities? But through a lens of game development, how can we make games differently in a way that unlocks these opportunities and fosters greater player well-being and community wellbeing across the entire industry?

Jordan: I understand you have a new project with the Disruptive Behavior Framework. Can you tell everyone a bit about that?

Kimberly: The Disruption and Harms in Gaming Framework is an unprecedented cross-industry initiative to catalog and understand the various elements that are causing disruption and more serious forms of actual harm across video games.

So we’re trying to understand: what’s going on in games? What are the forms that it can take? What are the channels through which this can emerge? And then what are the impacts, the things that we need to be conscious of?

We really lack the tools and a deep enough understanding to know what to do next. It’s very, very rare, if not next to impossible, to encounter a developer for whom the notion of reducing hate and harassment isn’t a no-brainer. You say, “Oh, shouldn’t we make games a better, safer, more efficient space?” And everyone’s like, “Yes, absolutely.” But the next question is, well, how do we do that? Great question.

Really, there’s already a lot of folks doing work in this space. And what if we were to be able to pull it all together into one spot? So that was a lot of the genesis of the framework. Another element too, was, we lack a shared language. So often we talk about toxicity in games. And that’s a fine, casual term. But it’s incredibly ambiguous. It’s not discerning enough.

Jordan: So it sounds to me that this is an incredibly important thing to do, not just in terms of the responsibility of developers or platforms thinking about that behavior, but also, [because] this is no longer the box in the store. This is the landscape of childhood at this point. If we want to start to think about, ‘how do we best care for children, how do we best raise children who have ethical values, who are kind and compassionate?’ we really need to identify what life looks like in these spaces. We really need to know a lot more about the phenomenology of play and toxicity.

Laura: Being part of the Fair Play Alliance steering committee and working with Kim on some of this project, it has been fascinating. We’ve had these discussions amongst peers who were all working with this really shared goal and vision, just trying to define some of these terms. One term would lead to a 20-minute conversation because they’re just so huge. We all see things slightly differently.

Kimberly: Hundreds of hours of conversations of folks across the industry volunteering their time, experts from civil society and academia as well, lending their weight and expertise. We had the wonderful opportunity on this journey to partner with the Anti-Defamation League on this, who have been just an incredible source of information and connections and support as well. So it’s been a nearly two year effort to get this out the door, but we’re very excited and we hope it is the best representation on behalf of games and, of course, on players to really help usher in a more modern and healthy space for gaming.

Laura: So what advice would you give to the people listening on how they might even think about getting into game development? Particularly, we want more women in tech across all of it, so how do we encourage people to take up those STEM subjects and get involved?

Kimberly: I think there’s two sides to think about it. So one, on behalf of the younger folks who are thinking about getting into this career and what that path looks like, I think the first thing is to not be afraid to try to make things. There’s so many different tools out there today that are accessible, that are freely downloadable, that anyone can pick up and start poking at and playing with. And so don’t be afraid to explore this space. [For educators and parents] one of the most crucial things that we can do is get kids exposed to it early.

But on the other side, we often talk about the pipeline problem in game development. We are not good enough right now when it comes to diversity within game development. And it’s definitely something that I think everyone is very aware of and equally are trying to figure out the best approach to. There are things that you can do way downstream. I run a studio as well, and so when I’m looking to hire, I try to diversify my process and at least reduce biases and hold ourselves accountable.

But there are very upstream things that I think need to change as well, which is how we think about and represent and present these things in school settings; how as parents thinking through how we represent the opportunities to our children, how we talk about these things. For so long we have been in this rut where everything has become just hyper gendered and there are these silos, these roles in which people are supposed to subscribe. There are studies that show as early as two years old, people are making gender-based selections on the basis of what they’ve been exposed to.

Being conscientious about how we present roles in the gaming industry as viable careers, regardless of how you identify, and ensuring we’re doing that from a very young age, because it doesn’t take that long to go from two-years-old to applying for your first job. That window is so critical. And that’s where we really start to fundamentally alter the pipeline. And then the opportunities explode for us to have much healthier, more representative, more inclusive workplaces, which, of course, then feeds into the games that we’re able to produce as well.

Laura: Crystal ball moment. What are the innovations that you would like to see or think we’re going to see in the next couple of years?

Kimberly: What a great question. What a time too, for innovation. Things are going so quickly and as much as I feel for and share the hurt of recent events, they have at least shaken some things loose, I think, on a global scale that are fueling innovations in spaces that have much needed them.

When I look ahead, I think a big part of it is going to be a combination of breaking down the stigma, the historic stigma of games, and opening up space for parents to get more involved and enable vulnerable conversations for parents to less be intimidated and more understand and be present to guide children through their developmental journey, much of which is today digital and understanding that. Finding a better hybridization of digital and non-digital, is going to be a very important part of what we see over the coming years.

So I think some of that innovation is going to come in the form of us really continuing to unlock this deeper collaboration and working with the platforms and larger gaming companies as well to really provide for the greater industry on behalf of players to give those foundational tools that we need to really create safer and more welcoming spaces and really unlock the potential that games have. Because games are incredible. They transcend cultural differences and physical distances. They bring people together, even strangers, around shared goals and I think have this incredible magic. And they’ve inserted themselves in society in such a way that I think if we are intentional and we are thoughtful and we are collaborative and across all elements of society, we are working together, I truly believe that games can actually change the world.

Jordan: What do you think we need to add to the conversation that you don’t think anyone’s having?

Kimberly: I think it’s really a deeper, more mature look at games as social ecosystems. I think too often it is an oversimplified dichotomy of, games are either clearly ruining society and should be somehow completely removed, or they’re the best thing ever and you can’t say anything disparaging about games.

Like anything in this world, it’s somewhere in the middle. They are neither destroying society nor are they perfect in every way. But they are a powerful, important part of today’s life. And I think being able to recognize that and bring the same maturity and care of thought that we do to all of our shared social spaces, and all of the places where our children, and even us, are spending time and really understand what is going on there.

What are those gaps? How do we close those gaps? What are the ways in which all of the things that make us human are not being fully realized in these digital spaces and put that same focus and care and attention and effort into those things? That’s really where we need to be. And we need to stop shirking the conversation and just falling prey to these two extremes and really talk—like, let’s talk about what healthy gaming looks like.

Games are very much a part of society. And if we don’t take this care now, we’re setting ourselves up for a lot more difficulty and a deeper [version] of the problematic patterns we’re seeing today. And I think, worst of all, we’re leaving children behind who are growing up in this digital world.