Moderation Starts Before the Report Button
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to identify one design choice that can reduce harmful behavior before moderation is needed.
Example · Among Us style chat constraints; Gated guild or rank communication
Moderation starts before the report button
When people hear "trust and safety," they picture the cleanup crew: a player says something harmful, it gets reported, a moderator reviews it, action is taken. All of that matters — but it's the last line, not the first. By the time a report is filed, the game has already let the interaction happen, and often made it easy, visible, or hard to avoid.
On a Player Driven panel, Christina Camilleri (Netflix Games) broke moderation into three layers: a proactive side (tooling and detection that stop bad content appearing), a reactive side (removing it after), and the one most teams underuse — game design itself.
“What I think we don't think about too much is game design and game system design and how we can harness that to foster and build a safe community from the start. So instead of just relying on removing or prohibiting bad behavior, how do we build a game that really enables good behavior?”
Communication rules are design choices
Her example: games that drop you into open text chat the second you load in. "Like Among Us, for example, you go in, it's competitive and there's open chat. It's going to be a bad experience." The fix isn't always to lock chat down — it's that who can say what, and when is a design decision that shapes player culture before a moderator sees a single report.
From the same conversation:
- Earn your voice. Kim Wilke described a game where players have to join a guild — itself gated behind a rank — before they can communicate at all. You play solo for a while first, which gives you time to learn the norms before you get a microphone.
- Templated speech. Club Penguin let kids talk in preset phrases. A smart start — but over-censor until "every second word you tried to hit enter on was censored," and you've taught players the game is broken, not safe.
Easy, hard, what happens when it goes wrong
The lesson isn't "every game should restrict chat." It's that every social feature is a safety decision, whether you treat it like one or not. Open voice chat makes fast coordination easy — and makes harassment immediate and personal. That's not just a communication feature. It's a design choice about what your game makes easy, what it makes hard, and what a player can do when it goes wrong.
When you look at any social surface, run it through three questions:
1. What behavior does this make easy? 2. What behavior does this make hard? 3. What happens when it goes wrong — and who has to absorb it?
Your move
Take the riskiest social surface in your game — open chat, DMs, lobbies, names. Ask: what does it make easy, what does it make hard, what happens when it goes wrong? Then mark one design change that prevents harm the report queue is currently mopping up.