Phil Spencer, the big boss of Xbox, has expressed the company’s focus on providing a safer gaming environment that promotes diversity, encourages inclusion, and eliminates toxicity within it’s communities. Within an editorial on the Microsoft Blog, Spencer pointed out Xbox’s prime focuses in order to achieve their mission. The first of these key initiatives is meant to spearhead safety as they plan to increase vigilance from the Xbox Safety team.
“The gaming community continues to grow rapidly, and the imminent roll-out of new game services such as Apple Arcade, Google Stadia, and Microsoft’s Project xCloud, will make gaming available to even more people worldwide,” Spencer states. “Our industry must now answer the fierce urgency to play with our fierce urgency for safety.”
They also aim to expand the composition of the team for more perspectives. In addition to creating a safer environment they also want to make it more inviting for players. To accomplish this a group of community leaders known as Xbox Ambassadors will be working on and implementing “community missions.” As for the second key initiative is to create more tools accessible to not players and community leaders in order to cater to the engagement level desired.
During this summer more moderation features will be available to Club managers with other tools to be made available by the end of 2019. There is also the commitment of easier parental control tools and Gaming Summer Camps that will teach healthy habits to children. Lastly, the editorial stated that it will share its findings and technology across the games industry including their research teams, data science, and moderation.
In regards as to what spurred the company to take this approach the letter explained how gaming’s widespread influence has played a crucial part in it. “This widespread embrace of gaming and its global communities have turned video games into the world’s leading cultural industry, bigger than movies or music. But it also comes at a time when digital life includes a growing toxic stew of hate speech, bigotry and misogyny.”