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Xbox head Phil Spencer has been outlining Xbox's plans to make gaming a safer, more welcoming place overnight as part of Microsoft's recent push into actively combatting growing toxic behaviour online and in gaming.
Posting an extensive post on the Microsoft blog, Spencer spoke of what he believes are two universal truths in gaming, saying that 'Gaming is for everyone. No one group “owns” gaming.' He continues by stating 'If you imagine gamers as predominantly men and specifically teen boys, think again. We are a 2.6 billion-person strong community of parents playing with our kids, adventurers exploring worlds together, teachers making math wondrous, grandmothers learning about their grandchildren through play, and soldiers connecting with their folks back home. Most gamers today are adults; nearly half are women.'
He then goes onto talk about the second truth, how both gamers and the games industry have a responsiblity to create safe spaces for people to play; 'Gaming must be a safe environment. Creating community is shared work, and protecting community is essential work, so, we all carry part of the payload of community safety.'
To that end, Mr Spencer outlined three core pledges that Xbox want to commit to in order to help making gaming a safer place for everyone. The first involves being 'vigilant, proactive, and swift' in combatting toxic behaviour, talking about a recent refresh of the Xbox Community Standards, and and the Xbox Community Ambassdors programme.
The second pledge involves empowering gamers with the right tools to customise their gaming experience to their personal comfort level, including offering new content moderation features for Community Club mangers and new content moderation features to be rolled out to everyone by the end of 2019. Furthermore, there'll be updates to the process of making child and family accounts, making it easier for parents to be able to monitor and manage their children's playtime,
The third pledge is for Xbox to continue to work on safety across the industry, with its partners in publishing and developing, by sharing access to tools and safety innovations being developed in areas of 'moderation, user research, data science, and others'.
'We invite everyone who plays games, and industry partners, to join us in following these principles to help unify the world and do our part: make gaming accessible for everyone and protect gamers, one and all.'
