author_name|Jessica Conditt

Meta is adding a handful of features to the Messenger app that will be familiar to anyone who’s used Slack, most notably with a new @everyone function. Starting today, typing @everyone in a chat in Messenger will alert the entire group to your message — so make sure it’s a good one.

Messenger is also adding a /silent function, which ensures your message will arrive in the chat without alerting anyone, like a ghost in the night. Just type /silent before your message and you’re in sneak mode. Both @everyone and /silent commands are live on Android and iOS today.

Meta has more Messenger plans in the works. Over the coming weeks, Android and iOS Messenger users in the US will be able to use a /pay shortcut to send and receive money in-chat. On top of that, iOS users will get /gif, which drops searchable gifs directly into the chat. Messenger on Apple devices will also get /shrug and /tableflip commands, which populate the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ emoticons, respectively.

Roberta and Ken Williams are back. After 25 years out of the video game industry, the legendary founders of Sierra On-Line are working on a new project with an old twist – they’re rebuilding the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure as a 3D experience with a VR component.

Maybe that’s an old project with a new twist, but regardless, Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is a complete reimagining of the original title and it’s due to come out this fall for PC and Quest 2 VR headsets. Not only will this new interpretation add graphics to the text adventure, but it’ll be in first-person 3D, with details filled in by the minds that brought us King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria.

In traditional Williams fashion, Ken is in charge of the code as chief engineer, while Roberta is creative director, building the narrative and working across all aspects of the project. There are 16 people on their team at Cygnus Entertainment and they’ve all worked together remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve had our stressful moments,” Roberta said. “There have been moments that Ken and I have said, what are we doing? Why did we do this? And other moments are just really exhilarating and exciting. I’ve learned a lot, Ken has learned a lot. We have a really good team and I’m just so excited to have met them – not in person – but they’re very experienced in 3D graphics and programming.”

Cygnus Entertainment

That last bit is especially important, considering 3D development is a new arena for Roberta and Ken, who are best known for ’80s and ’90s narrative adventures and full-motion video titles. It’s been a quarter of a century since they last stepped into the world of game development, and they’re jumping straight into VR and Unity, a 3D development platform.

By her own admission, Roberta hasn’t even played games for the past 25 years. She and Ken have kept tabs on the industry, but mostly, they’ve been checked out.

“It was like, if we thought about it too much, we could be drawn back in,” Roberta said.

Instead of staring at computer screens and dreaming of digital worlds, Roberta and Ken spent 15 years traveling the planet on a 60-foot boat. They would land wherever they wanted and spend a few months, half a year, in one spot before hopping back on the trawler and sailing to a new location. Ken wrote four books about their travels during this time, plus another one about Sierra On-Line; Roberta wrote a historical novel about the Great Famine in Ireland.

“Which didn’t sell as well as his book,” Roberta said, laughing. “But anyway, after that we were looking for something to do and I noticed that Ken was doing a lot of YouTube tutorials on some sort of 3D engine, some sort of 3D programming language.”

She didn’t think much of it at first. Ken outlined a game idea he was toying with, where players would learn programming as they went, building simple experiences within his digital ecosystem. Kind of like Roblox, but with more emphasis on learning real-world programming skills.

“He was telling me this and he had some ideas on how to do it and make it fun,” Roberta said. “And I said, well, will it be fun?”

Ken assured her it would be, but she wasn’t convinced. That night when she was in bed, mulling over her husband’s dull-sounding idea, Colossal Cave Adventure popped into her head.

“I remember laying there and thinking, why did it do that?” she said. “You know, it’s like, is this a sign?” In the morning, Roberta brought her late-night revelation to Ken.

“I hadn’t really wanted to get back in the industry, but I just suddenly felt this urge, almost kind of like when I sat down and did Mystery House,” Roberta said. “And I don’t know why, and I mentioned it to him and I saw his eyes kind of light up.”

Cygnus Entertainment

Mystery House was Sierra On-Line’s debut game and when it landed in 1980, it was the first-ever graphic adventure. Roberta mapped out Mystery House in a quiet frenzy after playing the original Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game, in the late 1970s – as an avid reader, she was inspired by its interactivity and narrative heft, and her imagination got to work. She acquired a giant piece of paper from a local stationery store and started drawing rooms, connecting them and finding creative ways to get from one area to another. This ended up being the flowchart for Mystery House, and Ken, an avid programmer, brought it to digital life.

“Colossal Cave is the game that started Sierra On-Line,” Roberta said. “It started my career.”

Colossal Cave Adventure creators Don Woods and Will Crowther never copyrighted their work, which means anyone can do what they want with the IP, including the Williamses. Still, they got on the phone with Woods himself to ask permission, and the original developer had one request: Never try to copyright it. Keep the Colossal Cave franchise open, unowned and free for anyone to play with.

Roberta and Ken agreed, and they got to work. In June 2021, they revealed there was a new, secret game in development at their studio, Cygnus Entertainment. Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is due to come out this fall, primed to capture the imaginations of a new generation of players.

When it comes to online games, we all know the “report” button doesn’t do anything. Regardless of genre, publisher or budget, games launch every day with ineffective systems for reporting abusive players, and some of the largest titles in the world exist in a constant state of apology for harboring toxic environments. Franchises including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Overwatch, Ark and Valorant have such hostile communities that this reputation is part of their brands — suggesting these titles to new players includes a warning about the vitriol they’ll experience in chat.

It feels like the report button often sends complaints directly into a trash can, which is then set on fire quarterly by the one-person moderation department. According to legendary Quake and Doom esports pro Dennis Fong (better known as Thresh), that’s not far from the truth at many AAA studios.

“I’m not gonna name names, but some of the biggest games in the world were like, you know, honestly it does go nowhere,” Fong said. “It goes to an inbox that no one looks at. You feel that as a gamer, right? You feel despondent because you’re like, I’ve reported the same guy 15 times and nothing’s happened.”

Game developers and publishers have had decades to figure out how to combat player toxicity on their own, but they still haven’t. So, Fong did.

This week he announced GGWP, an AI-powered system that collects and organizes player-behavior data in any game, allowing developers to address every incoming report with a mix of automated responses and real-person reviews. Once it’s introduced to a game — “Literally it’s like a line of code,” Fong said — the GGWP API aggregates player data to generate a community health score and break down the types of toxicity common to that title. After all, every game is a gross snowflake when it comes to in-chat abuse. 

GGWP

The system can also assign reputation scores to individual players, based on an AI-led analysis of reported matches and a complex understanding of each game’s culture. Developers can then assign responses to certain reputation scores and even specific behaviors, warning players about a dip in their ratings or just breaking out the ban hammer. The system is fully customizable, allowing a title like Call of Duty: Warzone to have different rules than, say, Roblox.

“We very quickly realized that, first of all, a lot of these reports are the same,” Fong said. “And because of that, you can actually use big data and artificial intelligence in ways to help triage this stuff. The vast majority of this stuff is actually almost perfectly primed for AI to go tackle this problem. And it’s just people just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

GGWP is the brainchild of Fong, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao, and data and AI expert Dr. George Ng. It’s so far secured $12 million in seed funding, backed by Sony Innovation Fund, Riot Games, YouTube founder Steve Chen, the streamer Pokimane, and Twitch creators Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin, among other investors.

GGWP

Fong and his cohorts started building GGWP more than a year ago, and given their ties to the industry, they were able to sit down with AAA studio executives and ask why moderation was such a persistent issue. The problem, they discovered, was twofold: First, these studios didn’t see toxicity as a problem they created, so they weren’t taking responsibility for it (we can call this the Zuckerberg Special). And second, there was simply too much abuse to manage.

In just one year, one major game received more than 200 million player-submitted reports, Fong said. Several other studio heads he spoke with shared figures in the nine digits as well, with players generating hundreds of millions of reports annually per title. And the problem was even larger than that.

“If you’re getting 200 million for one game of players reporting each other, the scale of the problem is so monumentally large,” Fong said. “Because as we just talked about, people have given up because it doesn’t go anywhere. They just stop reporting people.”

Executives told Fong they simply couldn’t hire enough people to keep up. What’s more, they generally weren’t interested in forming a team just to craft an automated solution — if they had AI people on staff, they wanted them building the game, not a moderation system.

In the end, most AAA studios ended up dealing with about 0.1 percent of the reports they received each year, and their moderation teams tended to be laughably small, Fong discovered.

GGWP

“Some of the biggest publishers in the world, their anti-toxicity player behavior teams are less than 10 people in total,” Fong said. “Our team is 35. It’s 35 and it’s all product and engineering and data scientists. So we as a team are larger than almost every global publisher’s team, which is kind of sad. We are very much devoted and committed to trying to help solve this problem.”

Fong wants GGWP to introduce a new way of thinking about moderation in games, with a focus on implementing teachable moments, rather than straight punishment. The system is able to recognize helpful behavior like sharing weapons and reviving teammates under adverse conditions, and can apply bonuses to that player’s reputation score in response. It would also allow developers to implement real-time in-game notifications, like an alert that says, “you’ve lost 3 reputation points” when a player uses an unacceptable word. This would hopefully dissuade them from saying the word again, decreasing the number of overall reports for that game, Fong said. A studio would have to do a little extra work to implement such a notification system, but GGWP can handle it, according to Fong.

“We’ve completely modernized the approach to moderation,” he said. “They just have to be willing to give it a try.”