To make a game toxic, we first must put the player in the right headspace: Anger, frustration and hate are the emotions we’re aiming for. We could do that by just having dumb mechanics which are inherently frustrating to use, or perhaps glitches and bugs. This is a start, but directs our player’s emotion at the game itself, and might cause them to uninstall. We don’t want that. Instead, let’s make it a team game.
In team games, the player can perform amazingly on their own and achieve some high moments, yet still lose because the rest of their team wasn’t good enough. This is frustrating, as the player’s effort isn’t rewarded. The player now can write “man, this team sucks”, but this toxicity is general enough to not affect any one player on the team particularly. If we also use a small team size of just 5 or 6 people, the player now also has a clear target to be toxic to. Instead of just “this team sucks”, it’s now “Purple sucks”, which Purple of course will take as an attack on them and probably retaliate, either immediately, or the second the player makes a mistake themselves.
Yet there’s one more obstacle we need to overcome: The social aspect. If the player has a social relation to their team members, they might not become as angry as they have a lot more context about who that person is and how good they are at the game. If the player is playing with a person who they know isn’t good at the game, they might not take the match too seriously in the first place, and the frustration will never kick in. We therefore need to prevent this social aspect as much as possible and implement a Solo Queue where everyone plays with random people as much as possible.
To ensure that we maximize the salt we get out of this, we also need to ensure that both teams can start blaming and flaming each other, even if there’s no clear winner yet. To do that, let’s use skill-based matchmaking. Every game needs to be as close as possible, not because it makes it more fun, but to ensure everyone is in a competitive mindset and get frustrated by their teammates playing not perfectly.
We can make it more toxic still: Implement a MacGuffin which is critical to winning, which only a single person on the team may carry – like a bomb in counter strike, or a flag in capture the flag. This puts additional pressure on the singled-out person, may make them more likely to fail and definitely improves the odds of abuse in case they do fail.
We’ll also make sure that our players simmer in the frustration as much as possible by having them stay in the match for 20-60 minutes and punishing them if they dare to exit early. No dynamic joining and leaving is allowed.
Using these simple ingredients – mainly really the team game, small team size and solo queue aspects – we, too, can make our super-popular toxic and insanely profitable multiplayer game. Well, not quite: We’ll need to market it first. Sign up for my upcoming online seminars “It’s not gambling – how to convince consumers and legislators that lootboxes are fine, actually” and “How to get rich and famous through marketing and employee abuse” now.
Leo Wattenberg 