Permaban recreates the worst of gaming forums

Web forums are one of those things that just quietly passed out of popular view without anybody really noticing, like politicians experiencing shame or Nissan Prairies. 25 years ago they were the chief discourse zone for videogames as a hobby: NeoGAF was the most regularly cited due to its collection of occasionally well-informed industry folk, but every games media brand had its own, notionally created as a place to foster community but invariably in a state of perpetual conflict as members squabbled with both each other and the writers of the work they were ostensibly there to appreciate.

They nevertheless reflected the editorial tone of their origins. I was once delighted to witness the stridently tabloid CVG forum be temporarily evicted for a server upgrade, only to set up in a corner of the more cerebral Eurogamer forum like the gobby kids from the ropey comprehensive temporarily assigned to the grammar school, to largely the same effect; forums that originated from Edge, PC Gamer or the sprawling Ziff Davis portfolio similarly had their own distinct house style. All of them eventually succumbed to schisms that begat rival forums, like cell division, with only the sturdiest lasting long-term. 

Every forum I have ever participated in underwent at least one impassioned community split, usually at the rate of one every eighteen months, resulting in a user cohort striking out to set up their own forum that would be free of whatever tyranny had driven them out. This would be carried out with maximum theatricality and marked by back-channel sniping, regardless of subject matter. I’ve only ever had to personally moderate one forum, the users of which were overwhelmingly pensioners, and its journey through clubby community-building to sectarian warfare was made even worse by the inhabitants' first instinct being to phone me up about each perceived transgression. At least the gaming schisms took place on IRC. 

All of this is to say: I have some experience with forums, and that means I approach Permaban with suspicion. A bargain-priced “simulation” wearing the dread Steam tag of Dark Humor, it has clearly been created by somebody who has clearly built considerable experience among the anime-PFP'd damned, but I’m neither convinced that this is a trauma worth making a game out of, nor that this is the best form for that to take.

The goal is to moderate a dying web forum. The year is 2007 and so is the desktop and most of the jokes, which means gags about browser toolbars, popup windows and MicroShaft of the sort that had them ROFLing in the aisles of AOL messageboards. You are presented with waves of comments, potentially across multiple forums, and have to quickly decide if they should be warned, banned or ignored, with reference to a set of rules that can change with each new wave. Fail to hit the target for each wave – by failing to ban an offender, or being insufficiently judgemental – and you have to repeat it. 

Things scale up with the option to moderate multiple forums at once, and the need to move swiftly to react to escalating post counts. There is a lingering metagame based on forum regulars, wherein if you annoy a key community member it seemingly foments unrest, but I didn’t manage to trigger this in a noticeable way during the short time I was playing.

The chief problem is that it’s possible to fail a wave by banning too harshly, which is very much not how forum moderation works. The way to moderate online spaces is with a firm belief system and a hair-trigger enforcement mechanism, in which any funny business sees transgressors banished forever. Anything less leaves you open to the wheedling Just Asking Questions discourse that has successfully reintroduced open facism to the public sphere, and in any case requires you to spend ages picking through protestations from people who are simply no fun to be around. 

Permaban, instead, makes the latter its chief gameplay loop, and while I appreciate its dedication to period-specific verisimilitude the foundational experience is just not something I want to experience again. Real-world forums are making a cautious comeback, as media owners realise that they need to corral real humans as a bulwark against the forces of AI; if those endure we'll be facing down the dismal trolling of 4chan-trained shitheads soon enough. In the meantime, I would rather leave memories of the phBB admin board to history.