Reputation and Social Consequences in Online Games

There is a certain unease that settles in when you spend enough time inside modern multiplayer games. It does not arrive suddenly or announce itself. It builds slowly, through repetition and familiarity, through the feeling that something once vibrant has thinned. Each year introduces more moderation systems, more Terms of Service, more automated layers working quietly in the background. These systems are designed to protect players from one another, and their intentions are largely well-meaning. Yet they carry an underlying assumption that human interaction, left on its own, is dangerous and must be shaped, softened, and controlled in order to remain viable.

We see this tension in how contemporary games approach communication itself. During the Marathon beta, proximity chat was framed as a liability, something that might need to be removed entirely to prevent toxicity. Silence was considered safer than speech. Arc Raiders made the opposite decision. It preserved proximity chat and accepted the uncertainty that followed. The result was disorderly and unpredictable, but also unmistakably alive. Alliances formed and dissolved, and players learned who one another were not through systems, but through repeated encounters. The contrast between these approaches asks a question about design philosophy, whether safety is best achieved through control, or through structures that allow players to regulate themselves.

Early online multiplayer spaces lacked nearly all of the safeguards we now consider essential. There were no reporting tools, no automated moderation, no invisible systems filtering behavior in real time. By today’s standards, these environments should have been unbearable. Yet for many of us who lived in them, they felt more social, more memorable, and in many ways more humane than what exists today.

I grew up during that transition, when the internet first entered the home and online games felt expansive rather than optimized. Through them, I met people whose names I still play with, people with whom I argued, collaborated, and slowly built familiarity. We unfold our conflicts rather than a system that vanishes. Relationships, whether friendly or antagonistic, had continuity. In contrast, modern multiplayer interactions often end the moment a session does. These encounters are efficient and anonymous, leaving little behind beyond fleeting memories or emotional impressions of the experience.

This is where reputation enters the discussion, not as a moral concept, but as a design mechanism.

Vanilla World of Warcraft understood this almost instinctively, perhaps even accidentally. Progression was slow, and that slowness gave identity real weight. Reaching the maximum level took at least sixty hours, even for highly efficient players who actively communicated and collaborated with others. Characters were not disposable, and neither were their names.

At the endgame, this structure became even more apparent. Raids and high-level dungeons were not automated; groups formed through in-game chat, negotiation, and shared memory. Over time, players learned who was reliable, who treated others well, and who undermined collective effort. I kept a handwritten list of players I would not group with again, and I knew others did the same. When I behaved poorly—losing patience and leaving a raid mid-fight—that moment carried social consequences. The following week, the same raid leader did not invite me back, and the reason was clear. We both remembered our previous encounter.

No external authority enforced these outcomes. The community regulated itself because identity was persistent and costly to abandon, much like childhood games where participation depended less on formal rule enforcement and more on mutual trust. Excluding the killjoy, rule-breaker, or persistent misbehaver functioned as a form of social correction rather than punishment; it reflected decisions made by the players themselves, signaling which behaviors were acceptable within the group, independent of formal rules, Terms of Service, or external enforcement.

Huizinga wrote that "in play we practice life", and early online worlds made that idea tangible.

These spaces allowed players to practice cooperation, conflict, negotiation, and forgiveness within systems that remembered them. 

Arc Raiders, perhaps unintentionally, has touched this structure again. In my time with the game, overt toxicity has been rare, not because players are fundamentally different, but because the design creates incentives for restraint. Progress depends on cooperation, and repeated encounters allow memory to form. When betrayal occurs, it is not erased by anonymity or matchmaking. It lingers, shaping how players approach one another in the future.

The ability to reset identity through name changes threatens the very conditions that allow reputation to exist. Without persistence, social memory dissolves, and with it the informal systems that encourage accountability. Reputation is what transforms Arc Raiders from an extraction shooter into a social ecosystem, and it feels so much more social than so-called Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

Competitive games suffers from non-reputation based systems. These spaces are already charged with stress and emotional intensity. When identity becomes disposable, frustration has no place to settle. In Valorant, the ease of creating alternate accounts allows players to escape social consequences almost instantly. Watching a player sabotage their own team, leave when they face any hardship or discomfort, and casually can move to a smurf account reveals how little reputational weight exists in the system.

In 2018, I interviewed professional CS:GO players as part of my research, and one participant’s words have stayed with me ever since. He said, “At the highest level, we all know each other. We know the names, the tendencies, the playstyles, and, if needed, which buttons to push to gain a psychological and competitive advantage.”

In competitive environments like this, persistent identity and reputation add a crucial layer of depth to the game. Psychological dynamics matter because players are remembered, studied, and anticipated over time. In Valorant, however, even at high levels, in-game names and identities rarely carry the same weight. They are difficult to track and easy to reset, therefore these psychological patterns to dissolve and the mental layer of competition to thin. At the very top, where mechanical skill margins are minimal, psychology should be a big part of the game. Instead, constant identity resets strip away that depth, flattening competition into something almost purely mechanical.

Perhaps this is also one reason we struggle to practice mental strength through games today. If, as Huizinga suggests, in play we practice life, then removing persistent identity and reputation removes the very conditions needed to practice resilience, emotional regulation, and psychological adaptation. Without reputation at stake, there is little incentive to grow. Without consequence, there is little reason to reflect.

The problem isn’t that players have become more toxic. The problem is that modern game design has removed the social consequences that once kept toxicity in check.

Early online games weren’t magically wholesome. People yelled, people argued, people trolled. But the difference was that reputation stuck. Your name meant something. Your identity traveled with you. Your actions echoed into future interactions.