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Many multiplayer games, especially VR games, utilize proximity voice chat allowing players to hear others who are within a certain radius. In other words, rather than hearing everyone in a VR lobby speaking at the same time, players will only hear voice chats from others who are close enough to hear. We wanted to make sure ToxMod was accurately capturing exactly who was saying what and, more importantly, who in a virtual space was actually impacted by the toxicity.
In today’s blog post, let’s chat about why we wanted ToxMod to be able to detect player proximity and how it impacts the accuracy and efficiency of voice chat moderation. Let’s get into it!
Challenges of Moderating Proximity-enabled Voice Chats
Modulate has been helping game studios improve the gaming experience for a while now through ToxMod’s Utterance Risk Scoring, which detects, analyzes and notifies moderator teams of toxic speech in voice chats.
However, if you’re moderating a game that uses proximity chat, how will you know if everyone in the virtual room heard someone say something awful over mic? Will you be able to know that other players were responding to an initial toxic comment, or just chatting with friends on the other side of the room? Sure, you could review the past two minutes of a room’s audio chat in order to figure out which players were involved in an incident, but it will likely take you a long time to decipher and filter out overlapping conversations.
This is the challenge we wanted to address by making ToxMod compatible with games’ proximity chats.
Moderation with More Context
Integrating ToxMod in proximity chat is, well…a game changer. Literally! It’s proximity chat-native, so once you integrate and start delivering data to ToxMod, your moderation team can start receiving exposure metrics and other proximity chat signals. For each player, ToxMod will show moderators a list of other players who heard them speak, drastically cutting down moderators’ time spent sifting through a jumble of irrelevant audio data.
Moderating conversations between 50 people is a nightmare. Moderating a conversation between five people? That’s a breeze in comparison!
In short, ToxMod’s proximity chat functionality takes voice chat moderation to the next level and gives human moderators the context to make moderation decisions in the complicated, nuanced situations found in gaming and VR spaces. The result is a safer, more enjoyable experience for players — and a more accurate and efficient moderation process for your team. Ultimately, we want to continue developing ToxMod to be as helpful as possible for our users and in-turn help to reduce toxicity in game spaces.
