As we’ve already heard this week, Phil Spencer — the man in charge of all things Xbox — recently took part in an extensive interview with the New York Times. Along with revealing that the Xbox Series consoles are the best selling in the brand’s 20-year history Spencer discussed a number of other ideas and one in particular caught our eye: cross-platform moderation.
There’s little doubt that sometimes gaming can have a bit of an image problem when it comes to user interaction. It’s a trope, but the concept of kids screaming everything-phobic abuse at each other during and between Call of Duty matches (which Microsoft now owns, thanks to a $70bn buyout of Activision Blizzard) has a ring of truth. Just look at the comments in many post-race lobbies in GT Sport…
That’s something that can be off-putting to new players, internet-savvy parents letting their kids play online, and particularly women — who face some of the worst abuse. It’s also something that gaming publishers and networks want to stamp out.
According to Spencer, Microsoft has invested in technologies aimed at making online interactions safer. Some of this tech includes an AI that monitors the sentiment of a conversation, looking at when a specific chat reaches a “destructive point”. It can flag a message and warn the users that they need to cool off — and of course there’s manual user reporting functions built in too.
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