The Psychology of Yelling at Game Developers

On January 12th 2019, a father prayed for his child. Wanting to share the beauty of the shrine and the humbling moment with the world, he took a picture and practiced his English with his caption, letting his followers know that he was praying for the success of his child.

The post received many replies. While there were a few well-wishes sprinkled in, the majority of comments had a much different tone.

Despite this moment being over two years old, it has always stayed with me. I found it to be disrespectful and tone-deaf, but could it really be classified as something like trolling? What causes fans of a video game to spam developers with their demands when they try to share something online? What prompts them to yell at and berate the people responsible for their happy gaming moments?

This is a very delicate topic that I’ve wanted to cover for a long time with as much grace and nuance as possible. This article is the product of both rigorous academic research and consultations with game developers and community managers. Three areas will be covered: why people yell at video game developers personally, why you should care about this yelling, and what can be done to minimise this yelling and channel it into healthy boundaries and more constructive feedback.

Before I begin, I cannot emphasise enough that I support the power of fan feedback. Some of my favourite gaming experiences would not nearly be as memorable or enjoyable without the feedback of players. I hope it is evident throughout this article that I support constructive feedback pipelines that reach the right people in a manner that does not exhaust employees and keeps their passion alive in the gaming industry.

As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you do not wish to read everything. With everything said, let’s begin!

Contents

1. 1. Why People Yell at Game Developers
      1.1. “Just Give Me What I Want!”
      1.2. “Listen to Your Loyal Fans!”
      1.3. “LISTEN TO ME!…Please”
      1.4. “Please Yell at Our Developers!”
   2. Why You Should Care
   3. Potential Solutions
      3.1. The Love of a Good Survey
      3.2. Manage Situations, Not Emotions
      3.3. Community Unity
      3.4. Be Honest with Players
   4. Summary
   5. Credits
   6. References

Why People Yell at Game Developers

“Just Give Me What I Want!”

When I first started brainstorming for this article, an idea that I had was the role of parasocial relationships. To describe it in basic terms, a parasocial relationship is a relationship where Person A may know a lot about Person B and may try to interact with them, yet Person B may not even know that Person A exists (Ashe & McCutcheon, 2001).

The topic of parasocial relationships is frequently brought up when it comes to social media as fans can feel close to someone even if they have never received a response from them (Ward, 2016; de Backer et al., 2007). So if you feel close and familiar to someone despite never having a two-way interaction with them, it makes sense that you may act overly familiar with them and feel comfortable bombarding them with how to change their game.

While overly familiar parasocial relationships may be where people end the discussion, I’d actually like to consider the opposite idea – the complete lack of a relationship.

Psychologists have explored why we use social media and the different roles that it plays in our lives. Part of this exploration involves investigating and repurposing old theories that still apply to new media. One of these theories is known as Uses and Gratifications Theory (Katz et al., 1973), a theory exploring why we engage in the content that we do and what we get out of it.

The theory basically explains that as we are goal-directed beings, we seek outlets that help us fulfil these goals (Rubin & McHugh, 1987; Ward, 2016). This got me thinking about the types of accounts that I see on places like Twitter. You may have come across accounts that exist just to do things like retweet giveaways and tweet at game developers. It seems that according to Uses and Gratifications Theory, these people are just using social media as a platform to get what they want, and this could mean yelling at a game developer they are otherwise uninterested in to maximise their chances of getting a game how they want it to be.

I was interested in finding research on who these angry yelling types are likely to be. You may not be shocked to find that this angry yelling relates to traits such as being unempathetic, narcissistic, and being hostile and power-hungry (Emmons, 1984; Boyd & Helms, 2005; Raskin & Terry, 1988). However, is such a widespread problem really just a case of ‘bad’ people doing ‘bad’ things?

While the studies above looked at the idea of people behaving badly, this next section will present research on a topic that you may have first-hand experience with – customers behaving badly.

“Listen to Your Loyal Fans!”

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from spending too much time in gaming communities, it’s that people love being true and loyal fans of a video game. Something I see particularly often is fans leveraging their trueness and loyalty in social media messages to the company. It’s not enough to say “I don’t like this”, the message is “I’m a big fan and I/we don’t like this”.

Before I continue, I’d like to make it clear that the language I’m about to use is that of the research that I’m citing. I’m not making up terms to make fun of people, I am just presenting the information as it is written.

With that elephant in the room addressed, this behaviour is known in research as ‘consumer entitlement’. Consumer entitlement refers to believing yourself to be a special customer who deserves special treatment, and these feelings of entitlement are linked to how loyal they feel to a company (Boyd et al., 2005; Li et al., 2017). Consumer entitlement emerges for quite meta reasons: they feel their repeated custom helps keep the company alive, so they try to leverage this power to petition for changes, benefits or discounts (Li et al., 2017).

Unfortunately, consumer entitlement can be bad news for company employees. When creating a consumer entitlement questionnaire, Boyd et al. (2005) found that the question “I feel that a store’s personnel should cater to my every whim” related the most to customer entitlement, meaning that entitled customers can expect a company’s employees to treat them like royalty and cater to their every thought and desire. This idea is supported in research by Li et al. (2017), finding that those who are most likely to make a complaint against a company (even if it wasn’t that big of a deal) are those who feel loyal to the company, the same loyalty exhibited by those with consumer entitlement.

It is even possible for loyal customers to find themselves in a frustrating loop. Not only are entitled customers more likely to expect more from a company (Boyd et al., 2005; Butori, 2010; Li et al., 2017), but they’re also more likely to be disappointed by a company not meeting these needs (Oliver & Swan, 1989). When the needs of these loyal customers are not met, this can unfortunately lead to assertive and aggressive behaviour towards company employees (Raskin et al., 1988; Richins, 1983, Moeller et al., 2009; Reidy et al., 2008).

This cycle can ultimately be a catch-22 for those in the gaming industry. Loyal fans help creators to retain employment and enact their artistic visions with their support, yet they’re more likely to have very high expectations, to be more disappointed when these expectations are not met, and may be more likely to vent these frustrations to company employees. This cycle perfectly encapsulates the need for improvements to be made to the feedback process: these fans should have their voices heard, but in a manner that does not overly demoralise and bombard employees with negativity that can encourage them to leave the gaming industry (more on this soon).

“LISTEN TO ME!…Please”

I have included several reminders in this article that I do not intend to be mean-spirited towards anyone and that I want to approach this topic with the utmost care. One of the reasons for this is the quite humanising body of research I came across when researching this topic.

As humans, we like to feel that we belong somewhere, and we will seek out similar-minded people and social connections to fulfil these needs (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Leary et al., 2013; Pickett et al., 2004). However, we might not always be able to meet these needs: people might ignore you, see through you, hang out with friends without inviting you, or some of the other many different ways of inciting that chest-tightening feeling of not quite feeling welcome.

When we are frequently ignored and our social needs go unmet, this can trigger something known as chronic ostracism (Iannone et al., 2018). You might think that chronic ostracism encourages someone to shut themselves off from the world, but it can actually have the opposite effect, leading to them trying even harder to feel accepted and listened to (Williams, 2009).

One place where those with chronic ostracism try to find their voice is social media. Research indicates that people who are lonely and experience chronic ostracism are more likely to engage in these previously-mentioned parasocial relationships to feel like they belong somewhere (Baek et al., 2013; Iannone et al., 2018).

However, an interesting part of chronic ostracism isn’t just the feelings of loneliness, but the feelings of invisibility. If you are someone who is used to not being taken seriously and having your ideas ignored offline, you may find comfort and power in the thought that your fan request is going to be read directly by your favourite game developer.

While it can be convenient to demonise people who bombard developers with requests, it is possible that we are dealing with quite lonely people who are beyond frustrated at never being listened to offline, so they turn to the online world for a chance to be listened to – for once.

“Please Yell at Our Developers!”

So far in this article, I have used factors such as loneliness and entitlement to explain why customers may treat employees of the gaming world poorly. But what if companies themselves need to take some responsibility for how their employees are treated?

After tuning in to nearly every livestreamed gaming press event for the last decade, one term in particular is an expert in making my toes curl – “The [Brand Name] Family”. The implication being that if you buy the new and shiny thing, you’re joining the family. Or gang. Or whatever unifying term the company’s marketing team came up with. However, this term has a domino effect: what starts as a small “Welcome to our family!” can end in a big “Please yell at our developers!”. Let me explain.

The idea of brands using warm and fuzzy language to describe its userbase is known as relationship marketing (Casaló et al., 2008). By doing this, the relationship goes from a more conventional consumer-manufacturer relationship to a more parasocial and wholesome one. The main benefit of doing this is that it increases the chances of consumer loyalty, and having more loyal customers is of course good for the company (Watson et al., 2015; Casaló et al., 2008; Morgan & Rego, 2006). In a nutshell, companies will use language that will make you want to trust them and commit to them in the hopes of retaining your custom (Garnefeld & Tax, 2013).

But when you have so many trusting and committed family members, you’ll certainly be hearing from them – and not just at Christmas.

Research conducted by Arnold Worldwide (Mickens, 2012) examined how the changing face of consumer-manufacturer relationships has influenced consumer expectations. The survey found that over half of consumers now expect a brand representative to respond to any comments that they have. The language used is not complaint or issue or problem, just a comment. The accessible nature of companies on social media, the ability to quickly find the account of someone who works at a company, and repeatedly being told they’re a valuable brand family member is a chaotic combo in getting these loyal consumers to fight for their whimsies to be catalogued and processed by someone at the company.

But as loyal family members, is that not what we deserve?

I know I’ve been quite hard on companies in this section, but I do feel that some of the language used for marketing reasons can steamroll into making employees very tired. In the next section, you’ll learn a lot more about some of these tired and demoralised employees who have even feared for their lives.

Why You Should Care

One of the challenges I considered when planning this article was how to get people to care about this topic. It is very easy to just harken back to an infamous Tyler the Creator tweet and tell devs to just ignore comments, ignore emails, just look away from the screen. During my research, it turns out it’s not quite that simple.

I conducted two types of research for this segment: searching the internet for pre-collected testimonials from game developers, and reaching out to those in the gaming industry to gather my own testimonials. From this research, I think you should care about this topic for three main reasons.

The first reason is that this yelling can get pretty heated. Examples of this come from Hello Games, the studio behind the infamous No Man’s Sky. Their founder Sean Murray recalls how the yelling could no longer be ignored and required more serious attention:

They were in regular contact with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police. “We didn’t talk about it, but it was as bad as things can get…I remember getting a death threat about the fact that…there weren’t any butterflies in the launch game.”

Not only does this liaising with police services take time away from improving the game, but it understandably rattles the development team and lowers morale when all they wish to do is to give you an enjoyable gaming experience.

The second reason is that this yelling is actually counterproductive to your cause. To once again quote Sean Murray:

“You’re stood there, and there is admittedly an angry mob in front of you, but behind that there’s a crowd of others. I just want to communicate with them directly. I want to make things for them.”

This sentiment was also echoed in the conversations that I had with those in the industry. If you are loud and angry and abrasive, this reduces your chances of the feedback actually reaching those who matter. However, this isn’t necessarily out of any spite or malice, it is genuinely more challenging:

“The pipeline we had was to summarize trends in online feedback in a regularly scheduled report for each “active” game IP…people who were profane or uncivil had a very low chance of being quoted, while people who articulated their feedback well and succinctly had a high chance. It should go without saying, but well-worded, reasonable feedback is simply more persuasive, particularly in a business context. Of course, if the uncivil tweets represented a clear trend in sentiment, that sentiment was also reported.”

If you truly love a game and wish to see it improve, you are far more likely to be taken seriously if you are calm and reasonable. It is a lot easier to ‘sell’ feedback if it is written in a clear and diplomatic fashion. If you are overly emotional and unreasonable, you are selling yourself and your passion for the game short.

The third reason is that from my own gathering of testimonials, it seems that the gaming industry is bleeding passionate and kind people. Several of the people that I spoke to on this topic have since left the gaming industry, and it is not hard to see why. Here are some key points from these testimonials:

• Everyone that I spoke to had experience with game feedback and fan desires being delivered directly to their personal accounts. This would include: up to 60 Twitter private messages per day, fans disrupting their personal after-work Twitch streams, and being woken up by fans calling them at 2am with feedback. One person described it as “an astounding lack of empathy and understanding [of] the limits between personal and professional life”.
• Constant feedback bombardment on personal accounts was draining. Several people described how their work/life balance was pretty much nonexistent. The person who received 60+ Twitter messages per day told me they would work around the clock cataloguing this feedback no matter when they received it.
• From the conversations that I had, it seems that no one was given practical advice on how to deal with this bombardment. Instead, they were told basically to stop caring so much. There will be more on why this approach sucks later.

Lack of privacy, exhaustion, and lack of support seem to be real burdens faced by those in the gaming industry, and this can have both physical and mental health consequences. Constantly dealing with angry and demanding customers can leave an employee feeling stressed, burned out, exhausted, dehumanised, and can even lead to physical illness (Fisk & Neville, 2011; Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Richards & Gross, 1999). When employees receive the same unhelpful workplace support offered above, this leads to them feeling abandoned by their place of work (Fisk et al., 2011).

When you are stressed, tired, burned out, dehumanised, ill and unsupported, it’s no surprise that some people decide to walk away.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Potential Solutions

Now that I have shared research on why people may yell at those in the gaming industry and why you should care, I would like to end this article on a hopeful note and share some evidence-based solutions for how to reduce this problem. These solutions include:

The Love of a Good Survey

Not to sound like a fossil, but I remember the early days of social media when gaming companies themselves weren’t sure how to handle this massive new advertising platform. I remember being told to “Let us know if you want this game!” but being completely unsure of how to do this. Did they want me to get a hashtag trending which would be free advertising? Did they actually want me to spam their developers?

I personally think that collating player feedback and desires has come a long way since then, and I can’t help but feel that surveys have contributed to this. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that gamers look forward to taking surveys, but I’ve witnessed a certain willingness to help out developers and provide feedback because of the amount of goodwill they have generated. For example, Atlus released a survey surrounding PC releases of their games, and they subsequently began releasing more games on PC such as Persona 5 Strikers and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne HD. Companies may even openly share the results of these surveys with gamers, such as the Final Fantasy XV demo survey.

I genuinely feel like surveys are a situation where everyone wins. Fans get to feel empowered that someone is taking their feedback into consideration, and someone with a passion for data and player feedback gets paid to read and organise this feedback without personally being yelled at. With this in mind, there are a few things the gaming industry can do to increase the number of people completing their surveys:

• Make sure to emphasise the reciprocal nature of surveys. Let people know that if they take this survey, they are helping to improve some aspect of a game or service. This makes the survey seem more like a give-and-take relationship, so people are going to be more likely to give (Qualaroo, 2017).
• If possible, give people examples of a time when the company has acted on survey feedback. For example, Team Ninja could mention how weapon breakage was removed from Nioh following fan feedback. This helps communicate to fans that their feedback actually does matter and encourages them to provide it (Christenberry, 2019).
• Similarly, let people know that this is a great opportunity to let their voices be heard as the findings of this feedback will be passed on to the respective people at the company. This is ultimately going to be a lot more productive than yelling at the personal social media accounts of employees.

Manage Situations, Not Emotions

After speaking with those in the gaming industry, it was becoming apparent that there was a lack of practical advice for dealing with a bombardment of calls and messages to personal accounts. It seems that any advice they were given was focused on their emotions surrounding the bombardment, not the bombardment itself.

When it comes to dealing with situations, we may approach them two different ways: with emotion-focused coping or with problem-focused coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). While the former involves managing the emotional response to a situation, the latter involves thinking of practical solutions to reduce or eliminate a problem.

After reading these conversations, it was apparent that managers were recommending emotion-focused coping. They were told to basically just deal with their emotions and weren’t offered any practical solutions. It then dawned on me how ineffective this approach may be in the video game industry. It is an industry filled with so much passion that people deal with abuse and potential homelessness just for a chance to realise their dreams. You are basically just telling a passionate person “Stop being passionate”.

I tried my hand at some problem-focused coping – the idea of setting your Discord status to your office working hours to better communicate with fans when they can expect a response. When I pitched this potential solution to several people, they all agreed that something like this would have been better than the advice they were given.

When dealing with situations like bombardments and invasions of privacy, it is important to consider whether you are just sweeping emotions under the rug or if you are actually trying to offer a practical solution to the problem at hand. While the former might get your employee off your back in the short-term, they will feel unsupported like those discussed above. If you spend a little more time coming up with a practical solution that helps them, you not only have a long-term solution to a problem, but you help your employee to feel supported which fulfils them emotionally, improves their performance, and reduces the likelihood of them quitting (Armeli et al., 1998; Eisenberger et al., 2002).

Community Unity

Earlier in the article, I mentioned how the people who spam developers with requests may do so due to being ostracised and ignored offline. When someone experiences chronic ostracism, they are motivated to get rid of these feelings and try not to feel so ignored and invisible.

Developers can actually help with these feelings of loneliness. One thing that I’ve noticed over the past few years is that more gaming companies are curating their own community spaces such as an official Discord server. I notice that when I start up Hades on my PC, I have the option to go directly to the game’s official Discord server and start making friends. I think it would be a good idea where possible to make fans aware of the communities surrounding games and the potential for them to make friends.

The evidence behind this comes from an amusing study I found on Bruce Springsteen fans. The researcher explored community spaces centering around Bruce Springsteen, theorising that these people were Springsteen fanatics who had parasocial relationships with him. They found that these fans didn’t really care all that much about Bruce Springsteen, it was all about the friends they made along the way – he was just an excuse for them to meet like-minded people (Yates, 2015).

While a single video game can have a certain playtime, engaging with video game communities can allow you to make lifelong friends that can alleviate your loneliness. This is probably my most repeated citation throughout my articles, but it is worth repeating: online friends can offer outlets for mental health support that people would otherwise be too scared to talk about offline, and can blossom into offline meetups and romantic relationships (Cole & Griffiths, 2007).

If we help people to have a fulfilling and supportive social life, this can hopefully reduce their feelings of chronic ostracism and stop them from seeking out ways to finally be listened to.

Be Honest With Players

This final section can read like a miscellaneous list of bullet points, but the philosophy behind them is to simply be more open and honest with fans about certain things. These include:

• If your company has taken the time to incorporate things like feedback forms and forums, make these very visible and accessible to the public. One source told me that adding links to bug posting locations within a game itself helped to cut down on angry social media messages.
• I think companies need to be more transparent about the human cost of their employees being pestered online. Fans should be reminded that going to the personal accounts of employees and/or expecting responses from them outside of office hours will burn them out and harm their mental health. I know I’m being sneaky here, but it could be an idea to take the ‘family’ language that’s usually reserved for marketing purposes and use it for the greater good – please don’t hurt your fellow members of the [Brand Name] family.
• Fans deserve to know the interesting bit of insight that I learned while working on this – employees don’t necessarily ignore negative feedback because it’s mean, but because it can be harder to sell. Remind people that the best way to communicate feedback is through the three Cs – being clear, concise and calm. This helps everyone because it’s easier to communicate within the company and makes someone more willing to incorporate/investigate something if it is worded clearly and convincingly.

I love the world of gaming and those who help deliver happy gaming memories. Through small and empowering steps, I hope we can make the gaming world more positive and less exhausting for those who make us happy.

Summary

• Based on personal factors, people may bombard developers with requests due to the perceived abundance of or complete lack of a relationship. Social media acquaints us with the people who make our games, and this can lead to us feeling close with them even if we have never received a response from them (known as a parasocial relationship), causing overfamiliarity and lack of boundaries. Conversely, people can have social media accounts just to get what they want (e.g. retweet giveaways), so they may contact developers with their personal desires with a lack of consideration for them as a person. This is more likely to happen if the person is unempathetic and narcissistic.
• Consumers may enjoy being a loyal fan of a games series or company, but this can lead to something called consumer entitlement. Consumer entitlement refers to believing yourself to be a special customer who deserves special treatment for helping to keep the company in business. Entitled customers are more likely to have high company expectations and are more assertive and aggressive to company employees when these expectations are not met. While loyal fans can help keep you in business, they may also be the ones most likely to yell at your employees.
• Those who are frequently ignored offline may experience something known as chronic ostracism, encouraging them to seek alternative outlets to feel listened to and taken seriously. These people may bombard developers with requests because they are seeking an outlet to finally be listened to and have their opinions matter to someone.
• Companies may use warm and fuzzy language such as ‘The [Brand Name] Family’ to describe their consumer base in an attempt to boost consumer loyalty and sales. However, this can have a domino effect of expecting direct responses from your ‘family’ for even inconsequential comments, and this problem is exacerbated by the sometimes quick ability to find a company employee on social media.
• There are several reasons why you should care about employees being yelled at by fans. Companies take death threats seriously and this can not only rattle employees, but takes time away from the company as police contact needs to be made. Angry feedback is a lot harder to use and quote than calm and diplomatic feedback, so anger actually makes feedback less usable and processable. Finally, employees being yelled at on personal platforms leads to a non-existent work-life balance and a substantial invasion of privacy (such as 60 requests delivered to a personal Twitter account daily and being called by fans at 2am). Evidence indicates that this can lead to stress, burnout, and poor mental and physical health. Multiple people that I spoke to no longer work in the gaming industry, and these were contributing factors to leaving.
• Steps can be taken to minimise employee bombardment. Encourage people to instead take official surveys with invitations that use language to empower fans. Managers need to use problem-focused coping to deal with their employees’ situation and provide practical solutions for managing stressful customer interactions. Where possible, developers should signpost to their official community spaces that can encourage people to make friends and help alleviate feelings of chronic ostracism. Companies can incorporate greater transparency and honesty in dealing with bombardment, such as clear signposting to feedback spaces, making fans aware of the human cost of social media bombardment, and letting fans know that the feedback that is easiest to share within the company is feedback that is clear, concise and calm.

Credits

I would like to give a massive thank you to everyone who made this article possible. Thank you to Antonio Santo, Midomon, James Bartholomeou, TaintedTali, and the additional gaming industry sources who wished to remain anonymous in this article. A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image, Lord knows creative design is not my strong point!

This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, redKheld, Dimelo ‘Derp’ Waterson, Hagbard Celine, Aprou, Austin Enright, NotGac, Shaemus, Joey Rodriguez, Marcus Lo Re-Sant, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Dr. Jhin, Mulgar, Tobias Svensson, Matt Demers, and RK_Rammy. Thank you!

 

References

Hey there, thanks for checking out the reference list. I cited a lot of sources in this article, so much so that they’re making the article look like a bigger read than it truly is. If you’re interested in any of these sources, please check out this document.