[rbshadel]

I'm absolutely wary of any technology that's going to enable/encourage bullying or trolling. I think there's a fine line between censorship and ensuring a safe community (especially in the wake of the Oregon shooting and corresponding reddit thread), but I see this app leading to Bad Things happening.

That said, the thing I'd like to see the discourse focusing on is not necessarily an app that encourages bullying, but bullying itself. I think the intensity of the uproar this is causing is throwing up a huge red flag - people as really scared about bullying. I think we as a community/country/world should absolutely talk about Peeple, but in talking about the symptom, I hope we can also get to talking about the root cause and what we can do to treat it.

[rcthompson]

Bullying is something that people do because it's easy -- picking fights with people who can't fight back. So this maybe be a fine distinction, but I think that anything that enables or makes bullying easier is not just a symptom, but is contributing to the root cause. In any communication tool, certain kinds of interactions are easier than others and are thus encouraged. For instance, the fact that Facebook has like button but not a dislike button is a deliberate choice that affects how easy it is to express different sentiments on Facebook. I believe it's possible to design a communication tool that encourages positive interactions and discourages negative ones.

Other good examples: George Orwell's concept of Newspeak from 1984, a language literally incapable of expressing concepts like freedom or dissent against the government. For another example, consider Journey, a multiplayer video game where the only possible interactions between players are positive or helpful.

[Kristine1975]

>Journey where the only possible interactions between players are positive or helpful.

There was a GDC presentation a few years back where the lead designer Jenova Chen talked about how difficult it was to make only positive/helpful interactions possible. In playtesting even the ability to collide with another player was used against them, e.g. to push them off a cliff.

The presentation should still be online for free at http://gdcvault.com very interesting from a game-designing point of view.