I'm shining the spotlight on Chris Norris, the exec from Electronic Arts who's dialing up the positive play in gaming communities. Chris is the Senior Director of Player Connection at EA.

I had a great conversation, treading the path of evolution of social interactions in video games - from the cozy comfort of couch co-op play to making friends in the far reaches of the globe. We also explored how game makers developers can inspire better behavior in players and debunk the widespread belief that gamers are antisocial. 

Chris and I also delve into the exciting prospects of how using cues from physical spaces can create palpable experiences in the digital world. We're not just talking about games; we're talking about fostering positive social interactions in gaming spaces, and you're invited to join the conversation.

Jamin Warren: Hello! My name is Jamin Warren. We've got a great guest today. We've got Chris Norris, who is the Senior Director of Player Connection at Electronic Arts, otherwise known as EA.

One of the challenges that I often hear from brands is a concern about "brand safety." Gaming communities aren't often perceived as safe places. No matter that only 1% of players might be considered what you would call toxic or disruptive, I think that the brand safety concern is actually a fig leaf for other concerns about getting into games—but maybe that's a story for another time.

In any case, game companies take positive play incredibly seriously. And it makes sense. If games are social spaces, then you want the people in them to have great experiences. And that's what Chris does. We had a great conversation about the types of behaviors that EA encourages and how to create right expectations to create healthy communities.

Jamin Warren: Chris, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Chris Norris: My pleasure. Really excited to be here chatting with you.

Jamin Warren: Tell me a little bit about what it is that you do. When you're at a cocktail party and people ask you, "Chris Norris, I viewed you on LinkedIn," what does your day-to-day look like?

Chris Norris: It's a great question. I usually lead with, "I work in video games." Then people either get a glossy stare or they get really engaged, and that tells me whether or not I can continue the conversation.

My formal title is Senior Director of Player Connection in the Positive Play Team at Electronic Arts. But what that really means is I have the benefit and the great honor of thinking about how to better the player experience in and around our games on a regular basis.

So, that's a combination of research, working with our internal technical teams, and working with my cross-disciplinary team to really figure out: what are the ways that we can minimize the opportunities for disruptive behavior in our games, while at the same time figuring out how do we amplify all of the positive experiences and opportunities to maximize connectedness in and around our dynamic game experiences?

Jamin Warren: Can you tell me a little bit about "Positive Play" as a concept? What is the history of that phrase and that team at EA?

Chris Norris: Happy to. The team itself is formally just about two years old; I joined at the inception of the team. Interestingly, at Electronic Arts, we have a Positive Play Charter that we put out as a promise to our players. We said, "These are the things you should and should not expect when you play our games." That charter actually predated the team. There was an internal team that said, "Hey, we need to come up with a charter." And then, "Hey, now we need a team of people to actually bring this to life."

So when I arrived just about two years ago, we said, "Hey, we've got a new Positive Play team," and a bunch of folks said, "Cool. What does that mean?"

What we needed to do in the first instance was determine—because the opportunity space is so vast when we say we want to improve the player experience—what specifically that meant. What are the player problems that we're trying to minimize? And then how do we turn some of this on its ear?

I will say, the idea of disruptive behavior in video games is not a new one. There are a lot of very mature solutions out there around moderation. But our take on it is a little bit different in that our team is not called "Anti-Negative Play" for a reason. We're trying to think a little bit differently about how we approach these problems and really optimize for those fun and uniquely connected experiences.

Jamin Warren: What do those problems typically look like? How do you categorize what the positive traits are that you're looking to distill, and then what are the negative behaviors that you see amongst players that you're trying to train out of or de-emphasize?

Chris Norris: That's a great question. I think it's fair to say that games in their current incarnation are becoming increasingly social. You need to look no further than Roblox or Fortnite or any of the myriad experiences where we know that people are spending a lot of time not only playing, but also chatting, connecting, building, and creating together.

One of the things that we're seeing is: we know that games are inherently social, but do we know why? And can we more thoughtfully design for some of those interactions? My team and I are actually taking our cue from physical spaces. What are the lessons we've learned from designing for physical spaces that we've seemingly forgotten in terms of digital spaces? How do we allow for things like proximity and reciprocity on the path to connection?

On the other side of the coin, when we talk about disruptive behavior—and we very specifically don't use the phrase "toxicity," which is a common phrase—it is because I firmly believe that there's a very, very small percentage of players that are out to ruin other people's games on purpose. More often than not, it is: "I don't understand the rules," or "I had a frustrating day and I brought it to the game."

I cursed at someone, I called someone a name, I wanted to troll other players so I put up a really inappropriate username... I created something to evoke a reaction from someone in the games to some really bad behavior, especially when we talk about racial slurs, etc. But again, I think that's a relatively small percentage of our player base.

The reason why we tend to refer to it as "disruptive behavior" is: more often than not, if we clearly communicate rules and expectations of behavior in a space, are consistent about how we uphold that, provide the rest of the player base a sense of empowerment that they themselves can also uphold these rules, and then just make sure that we are really punishing the behavior and not the person—we start to see pretty marked betterment overall in behavior.

I don't think that it's an unsolveable problem or an unmitigable problem. We just have to take time to thoughtfully design for the behavior that we want to see.

Jamin Warren: Got it. So you're building recommendations that the game design team can take into account. Like: "Here's what we're seeing, here are the behaviors that we want to enhance, and here are the ones that we want to discourage." Is that correct?

Chris Norris: That's exactly right. And we are, for lack of a better phrase, a central team. There are game teams, and we're trying to create solutions that have sort of central integrity. When we talk about player needs—and generally, my players want to feel like they are safe in the space, that the game they're playing is fair, that their play is balanced, that they feel included and that they're connected—we take those as sort of the base foundation for the work that we run at.

At the same time, how that shows up has to actually matter and be differentiated at the franchise level. So we have to come up with solutions that make sense for the FIFA game team and their player base, for instance, as well. A lot of the way that we're trying to attack it is going to be somewhat federated in that we need to think about what makes sense for that particular player of any specific franchise.

Jamin Warren: Can you walk me through a little bit of the history of how games got to be so social? I think when I was a kid, the way in which video games were social was that I played with my brother or family. Then early days internet... I feel like folks have not fully grasped how social games are today compared to how they looked 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Chris Norris: It's a great point. I love that you brought up your brother and this notion of couch cooperative play. I would actually argue that because video games themselves are rooted in the very notion of play, they've always been social. Either you would be playing with someone who you're sitting next to—I remember sleepovers when I was younger, I'm aging myself—where one person would be trying to pass a level in Super Mario Brothers on NES and everybody would be watching that person and either cheering them or jeering them. Even though they are single-player experiences, there were social aspects to them.

As you note, with the proliferation of the internet and connectivity, that allowed for these new sorts of opportunities. How do we mimic the couch co-op that you played with your brother, but now you can do it across massive distances given the way in which the internet has shrunk the world?

We've tried to design for some of those. Obviously, that implies a much more complex technical base because you have to think about internet connectivity as the hardware itself has become more complex. It's just opened up a lot of opportunities. And so I think we are seeing the evolution of what is social in games, but now at a scale that we probably didn't imagine 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Jamin Warren: It is really interesting. If you look at the most popular games, for the most part, they are by far games that you play with other people, synchronously or asynchronously. The idea that games are a solo activity is definitely part of the stereotype of "gamers." It's like, "Oh, this is something that you do in your basement, you're isolated." It misses that broader context in terms of how games have changed. It might just be you by yourself, but you're playing with close friends on other continents, or communities that you've developed online.

How does your team encourage social relationships to blossom? Because I presume that people are developing relationships in addition to porting ones from the real world into digital spaces.

Chris Norris: That's right. It's really trying to figure out how do those show up. As you mentioned, if we are friends in real life, it's really easy for us to coordinate a game session. Or if we're friends on a third-party platform, let's say that we're friends on Discord, that reduces the friction for us to group up and then go play a game.

Largely what we're trying to figure out is for people who are strangers, or maybe they're acquaintances: how do we still provide for meaningful opportunities for play? How do we understand motivations of play and styles of play? We know we're just going to make those play experiences much more meaningfully connected. They're going to be much more valuable to you versus if you feel that there's a mismatch in style.

Ultimately, it would be great if at the end of a game session you said, "Hey, we're friends now. Let's be friends." Perfect. But I don't know if that matches everyone's motivations. You may just say, "Hey, I've got an hour. I want to play. Jamin seems cool. We had a good time playing together. Great. If I see him again, I'll play with him again." But that's sort of the extent of our relatedness as it relates to the game.

Jamin Warren: Yeah. Just like in the physical world, if I go to a pool hall, some people are there because they're looking for social relationships. Some people are in a league. They want to play competitively. Some people have 30 minutes before meeting somebody. You get body language and cues, and you're like, "Okay, this person is not looking to be friends. They're just looking to find a good match."

Do you have some examples of some of the solutions that you can share in terms of identifying some of these positive traits? What does positive play look like in practice if someone sits down in front of an EA game title?

Chris Norris: We're still on relatively early days in terms of figuring out what can that look like and what are really interesting implementations. But if you think across current game conventions, there are a lot of games that offer a mechanic where we may have just played a match or a game, and I can give a thumbs up. We've seen various systems where I can give you accolades—"Hey, who was the best of this, this, and this in the game?" So you can actually award other people points or honor points to indicate, "Hey, I really appreciated how you played. You displayed good sportsmanship."

We're seeing early iterations of these. What we are trying to figure out is: what do those convey about the play session that you just had? What does that imply about what you as a player may value as a part of that play session? And then how do we start to extrapolate that into design around features and systems?

Jamin Warren: You mentioned the Positive Play Charter. Is that broken down into main areas? What are the ingredients for positive play?

Chris Norris: It's actually relatively wide-ranging. It's currently sitting on our website. It's really a pretty comprehensive list of dos and don'ts that you would probably consider just common sense in terms of how you should interact with other people and how you should think about the shared space in which you're inhabiting.

But you would be surprised at how infrequently we, as a gaming industry, actually provide those rules. So of course there are Terms of Service, right? That's any length of words that most people don't read. There can be a Code of Conduct. But more often than not, that has very little bearing on your play experience. It has very little bearing on whether you as a player feel empowered to say, "Hey, that's not cool what you're doing," other than reporting systems.

It's fair to say as an industry we have probably over-rotated to punishment, rather than thinking about: How do we actually keep you in this game system? How do we nudge you to better behavior? Rather than defaulting to systems that seek to keep people out of our games or punish them for some transgression or another.

One of the truisms that we talk about is: We're not necessarily trying to change people. What we're trying to do is create spaces where certain types of behavior cannot thrive.

I think as an industry, as we become better at that—whether it's around moderation systems and reporting systems, while at the same time thinking about social design and social connectedness—we will start to see some of those more anti-social behaviors recede to the margins. It's just a question of: what do we communicate to players? How do we enforce that? And then further, how do we empower them?

I'll give you an example from a physical space. There are generally accepted rules of engagement when you go to a movie theater. Now, those will change in context. Depending on where you go to the movies, that will probably change. Depending on what movie you're going to see—like going to a Marvel opening night and expecting everyone to be very, very quiet is probably not realistic. But we understand the various affordances within the context of those spaces. We tend to broadly respect the rules. I feel empowered to shush someone else if I feel that they're very loud. And in very extreme examples, you may say, "You know what? I feel like I need to get an usher because I can't resolve this."

What we do in games is we say, "Okay, here's the movie, and here are 100 ushers around the space to look for every little transgression." I just think we need to figure out: how do we provide for those affordances? What are the systems that we put in place to make sure that we are upholding those? And then just what do we communicate to our players in ways that feel human and relatable?

Jamin Warren: One of the questions I get from marketers is this "brand safety" question. The number of people who play games is incredibly large. The diversity of people's experiences and how they're playing is incredibly large. But still, I get questions about: are games a safe place for brands to interact in?

How persistent do you think that stereotype is? And what are some things that companies like EA are doing to hopefully combat against this idea that "gamers are negative people" or they like to fight online?

Chris Norris: This is just my personal opinion. I think it persists because it's far easier to amplify examples of anti-social behavior than it is just common good behavior. If you buy the math that I was talking about earlier—that there's a very small percentage, call it 1% of players that are truly toxic and exemplify the stereotype that you were describing—well, that leaves anywhere from 95 to 98% of the players who are just coming, playing, and having a good time. But we often don't hear from those folks because they're just coming for a good time.

There is a ton of opportunity in game-adjacent spaces. As you mentioned earlier, once you are in a game, there is going to be a certain mindset. You're going to be very specific to an Overwatch, to an Apex, etc. Trying to convey a certain notion of brand value in that context probably becomes difficult because how do you decouple that from the hectic play itself?

Where you start to look at really interesting game-adjacent spaces—whether they are, say, an Apex club space, or the Discord spaces—there are probably more opportunities to more meaningfully connect brand value to player experience outside of what's happening in real-time, at runtime within the games themselves. I think that starts to become really interesting because we know that there are a ton of really interesting connections that are happening between players in those spaces that align very closely along lines of motivation. You think about the sub-channel structure in something like a Discord, for instance. That starts to become a really, really compelling way to reach players.

Jamin Warren: It is interesting because I do think brands understand that context in other play-driven environments. Like, there's a distinction between getting a logo on a jersey and what that implies—so if you're Nike and Oregon, for example, there's a deep connection there. There's a brand story and a history there. Versus what you might do at the stadium, which might be different from what you do outside the stadium, which might be different from what you do in digital.

So much of it is just encouraging folks to find what's the right place to engage. It takes a long time to do something in-game. There are very few games outside of mobile that make a really easy pathway for you to get your brand in there quickly. They're just not designed to be vehicles for brand value. They are designed to be games first.

So, encouraging people to look for spaces where you can help engender some of the values on the community side outside of the game itself, I think that is really incredibly important.

Chris Norris: Yeah.

Jamin Warren: How do you think about your role in terms of those non-EA or non-legislated spaces? Which also can impact the expectations people bring into your games.

Chris Norris: It's a really good question. I think that you hit the nail on the head: we can't really control things that aren't governed by our Terms of Service. Luckily, across EA, we have good relationships with a number of these adjacent spaces where we know a lot of this connection is happening.

Again, I think where our responsibility lies is: once you enter into an EA-owned space or an EA-governed space, that we just make it relatively clear: "Hey, when you're coming into this space, this is the sort of behavior that we can expect from you."

There's a lot of great opportunity for us to have a great time.

Jamin Warren: All right. Well, Chris, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to follow up with you or follow your work?

Chris Norris: My pleasure. Obviously at EA.com is a great place to see all the things that we're doing in terms of Positive Play. You can find me on LinkedIn, Chris Norris.

Jamin Warren: All right. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.