The launch of Madden NFL 20 kicks off a big few months where we will be launching a number of incredible games that we hope you enjoy for months and years ahead.
Games are meant to be fun - they create a space where people can imagine, explore and connect without barriers - and we are working to build communities where players are having truly positive interactions. But we also know that harassment is an unfortunate reality in the world today. We are committed to curbing it.
Over the last few months we have shared some insights into our efforts to improve the player experience by building healthier communities in our games. In March, Consumer Insights Manager Jenny Shi wrote on Medium about what inclusion means to players. At EA PLAY in June, 200+ Game Changers and industry experts came together at the Building Healthy Communities Summit for an open discussion about online toxicity, culminating in three commitments that EA made to the community.
One of those commitments is to explore new toxicity tools and in-game features to more easily manage and effectively report disruptive behavior in the community. We provided some initial details during the Building Healthy Communities Summit on reporting tools managed by our EA Help team that players can use to raise any harassment issues they experience when playing our games.
Today we’re sharing more information on our reporting tools and how you can use them to report harassment in our games.
How to Report Toxic Behavior
If you ever are harassed or feel threatened by a player when playing, discussing or interacting with our games, please report it. There are multiple ways to report harassment - in-game via your console, online to the specific site where the toxic behavior happened (e.g. Twitter), or to the EA Help team at help.ea.com.
Abusive behavior includes anything degrading, threatening or discriminatory. Simply put, if you feel unsafe, we want to know. This EA Help article lists all the games where players can report harassment. If it occurs outside of our games, the article will also help guide you on how to report to EA Help if the behavior doesn’t fit into one of the categories from within a game.
When reporting harassment, you’ll be asked a series of questions that will aid us in handling the issue. This will include the type of incident (real-life threat, player, website), a basic description of the incident, the platform it occurred, time and place and any other details you can provide (such as screen shots).
We also have fields where players can report incidents at EA events or with EA partner programs, such as our Game Changers. For partner programs in particular, we expect anyone who works with or represents EA to adhere to our standards and values. If incidents do occur, we will investigate and work with EA’s Trust and Safety team on appropriate actions, which could include expulsion from programs or permanent removal from all EA games and services.
Due to the sensitive nature of these inquiries, we can’t always disclose information about our investigation or what actions we take on another player’s account due to privacy reasons. But rest assured that these reports are reviewed by real, human employees. We take each one seriously and start a review within 24 hours of receiving each report.
We hope this reporting tool will work to build healthier communities, strengthen our convictions as gamers, and inspire the world to play. These are fundamental values for EA. No matter where someone is from or what they look like, video games should be a safe place for people to have fun.
In addition to this reporting tool, we are working on additional tools and technology - in-game chat and reporting tools, technology to filter out abusive language - and will be sharing more details on those initiatives in the coming months.
People who keep others from enjoying games cannot be taken lightly, and we encourage you to use our reporting tool if you experience or see harassment in the community so we can uphold these standards.
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