Community forms a huge part of the experience in the lane-pushing genre. Many things contribute: and one piece is the humble Code of Conduct.

In this article featuring my game Causeway, we discuss our journey to write one!

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As a team running a small technical alpha, we have to plan for orders of magnitude more players than we have now.

Exciting as that is, we could get blown off course as players are arriving with their own opinions, or when decisions need to be made quickly. We will face changing circumstances, and it's important for us to understand where we can and can't be flexible.

As well as our own risks, our players are taking a risk with us too! This makes it all the more important that we have a clear vision for the kind of community we want to create together.

With Causeway, this has been a weak point in our communication. Here I'll quote the opening lines of our website for the past two years:

Causeway is a lane-pushing game that captures the impressive teamwork, leadership, and impactful decision-making seen in high-level organized play — and makes that the core experience for everyone.

So... what exactly are we setting out to do?

Would you have identified this as us solving a 'people problem'?

That's exactly what it is! The experience of "being on a team that feels like a team" can only be extended to everyone when the other players on the team want in.

This really means we need to get into the mind of "all of our players" and consider how they think, and how they interact in a team environment.

Here are some questions to think about:

• When one player in a match speaks up: how do others respond?
• How often do they feel encouraged or discouraged to speak up again?
• Who do people listen to the most, and why?
• Who do people listen to the least, and why?
• Who chooses to speak the most?
• Who chooses to speak the least?

The answers to these questions give us a hint of the "culture" in a game. Some of that culture is inherited from broader societal ideas and values ("what is competitive online multiplayer gaming like?"), while some of it comes from the ideas embedded in the game and its platform.

A Matter of Culture

The ideas embedded in a game are many: they range from mechanics, to aesthetics, to the "memes" of the early community (in both the formal and informal sense) and how the developers conduct themselves.

These ideas bury roots early, and may become difficult to uproot later if they aren't serving the game's vision. The more mindful we are early: the better foundations we can lay for a bright future to come.

The right outcome for us is a community where anybody can feel like they're at home AND that this is a place where they can speak, AND where they have opportunities. We might be lucky enough to some day offer these things at the scale of esports, but it starts in the solo-queue lobby, and in our community spaces.

In this article, we'll be focusing on just one instrument: which is the Community Code of Conduct. This is as much an internal document as an external one: it describes how we act, what we moderate, what we celebrate, and it signals some of the things we value most.

Researching Rules

The first thing to do when assembling any document is look at some examples. We do try to make 'standing on the shoulders of giants' into a good habit!

Each game and service we reviewed does things differently, and we saw everything from bare-bones formalities, to well-formatted and detailed pages.

The standouts were from Microsoft:

• The Xbox Community Guidelines hit the mark with a casual tone that is gamer-friendly, and has optional lists of examples of what not to do.
• Sea of Thieves keeps a similar tone with a bit of added piratey fun, and does one better with their simplified Pirate Code that can be viewed in-game. It's great to see that this was valued enough at RARE that one of their Producers even gave a talk about it.

We really like the Sea of Thieves approach, and feel that making our Code a more central document to the player experience will be a plus. Many of our future players will already have established habits and ideas about how to interact in this genre, and we don't want them to overlook some of the new opportunities that Causeway brings.

One thing that stood out across the Codes we reviewed was that examples tended to lean negative. Many spend more time on misconduct than on charting a positive course — and that's okay! A lot of games don't want to be too prescriptive about player behaviour.

As a team game, we felt weaving in more positive examples would help. We also wanted to work with clear headings, and have a light 'hierarchy' of information: key points plus some extra examples and clarity if it was needed.

It's not easy to keep a balance of setting expectations, sharing our reasoning, and keeping it short!

What We Have So Far...

Here's our Code of Conduct (v0.1).

We'll certainly be producing a condensed version for the in-game view, and perhaps one with simple English.

You will also notice some alpha-specific guidelines in there, to spare our testers reading a separate document.

Constructive feedback is welcome — you can find where to give that at the end of the document! Once we'd had a chance to review it: the Code will be added to our website.

(By the way, if you happen to know someone who loves Community Management and might like to get involved, we have an opening!)

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The Crafting Causeway series aims to introduce the features of Kybolt's upcoming game Causeway, while sharing insights about lane-pushing game design and encouraging discussion about how to improve the genre as a whole.

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