A Conversation with Ziba Scott on Digital Community, Games, and Connection

Ziba Scott is the creator of Kind Words, an award-winning digital space where players anonymously exchange letters of encouragement and support. Set in a cozy virtual room with lo-fi music, the game allows players to share their troubles, respond to others with kind messages, and send "paper airplanes" - brief positive notes that float through other players' spaces. After winning a BAFTA for Games Beyond Entertainment in 2020, the recently released sequel Kind Words 2 (10/7/24) expands these connections beyond the virtual room, letting players explore outdoor spaces, swap recommendations, perform poetry, and share their dreams in new ways.

I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to interview Ziba about fostering genuine connection in digital spaces, the challenges of content moderation, and the impact of creating spaces focused on emotional support.

Building Based on Community Needs

Will: There are many more spaces in Kind Words 2 than in Kind Words 1. Such as poetry, media recommendations, naming cats, life advice - it’s all there. How did you brainstorm those spaces and ultimately decide on them?

Ziba: The big picture was that those were things people were already trying to do in Kind Words. We put Kind Words out in 2019, and then myself and Luigi, the game’s artist, spent five years moderating that community. It’s been active this whole time. And the bulk of our moderation work has been off topic activity more so than trolling or bad behavior.

People trying to do things the game doesn’t really support. And so after all those years, we had a pretty big list of things that people were trying to do that we wanted to make happen.

Will: That’s really interesting. How do you approach moderation? And what have you learned from Kind Words?

Ziba: We’ve had to evolve our moderation over time as we figured it out. Primarily we moderate content, not people. That’s what we try to center it around. So we actually don’t ban people outright. We initially did, and found that that caused more problems than it solved. Because if someone is coming at the game with such a negative energy, and you just cut them off (snaps fingers), that energy is still coming at the game in some direction, just not to the game; it’s coming to the Steam forums, it’s coming to the Discord, or it’s coming somewhere else so, that harsh cutoff wasn’t a good way to correct a relationship problem between someone and the game.

Will: That’s a really good point.

Ziba: So we focus more on directing people to stay on topic, to stay kind to each other, and editing – we don’t we don’t actually change anybody’s messages, but altering how much gets through, when and where it’s not working right. If it’s not flowing.

Supporting Vulnerable Conversations

Will: Yeah, a lot of people have concerns with like social media and the internet and how it can become a personal, public record. People change, but their online presence remains, and there are all these anxieties over privacy and data collection and the internet. It seems like Kind Words is consciously designed with that in mind, but I’m expecting you also not infrequently come in contact with talks of suicide, self harm, threats of homicide, trauma and more.?

Ziba: Actually not much convincing talk of murder. Everything else you said, yes.

Will: Well, that’s good to know.

Ziba: (Laughs)

Will: How do you approach moderating those topics, redirecting and intervening?

Ziba: Yeah, I mean it was very shocking at first. It’s still impactful but I’ve had many years. Luigi and I are the two moderators and we’ve made about 380,000 decisions over the last five years.

Will: Wow.

Ziba: I have a background as a web developer before games and so a big portion of the game is our moderation back end, which is this web administration system. It has a lot of levers to work with that. It was initially shocking to me as stuff starting coming right away. People’s confessions of self-harm and suicidal thoughts and other things in that vein. But one thing that’s also become really apparent is that people think they’re not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff. Particularly self-harm and suicide. People will make up terms: “I’m gonna ‘unalive’ myself” or they’ll replace things. They’ll say everything except for “suicide” because that’s going to trigger an automatic (snaps fingers) “you’re out” or something like that.

Will: A parser or something?

Ziba: Or an automatic dispatch. People are worried that the police are going to show up at their house. I’ve had people email me and say “I talked about suicide in the game. Please don’t send the cops after me. I can’t do that again. I can’t have them in my house again.”

And that’s really heartbreaking. That they’re both dealing with these things and feel like they can only secretively hint and whisper to get help or to express these things. That solidified my resolve that we’re not going to filter. It’s a weird line.

I’m not equipped to give responses to these people. Most of our players aren’t. ?But everyone’s equipped to hear things. And to let others know they’ve been heard. And so that’s where we try to strike a balance. I never announced, “Hey everybody, come here and talk about your suicidal thoughts.” But I want Kind Words to be able to safely absorb that shock. Because it is a shock to a lot of people to hear those things.

It's not just the people coming in and saying these things. The rest of our player base, myself (I see more of it than anybody), and Luigi see these things too. And it impacts everyone. And so a lot of the reports we get are like, “Oh my god. I just saw this thing in your game. You have to help this person right away.”

And I can’t. There’s almost nothing I can do, outside of sending a message to them but, I need to keep that communication open to the players. I say, “Thank you for saying this. We know this is in our community, and we appreciate you paying attention like that.” It’s a weird balance.

Will: Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying I’ve observed in therapeutic settings. People who’ve been hospitalized involuntarily will later find ways to express those thoughts without directly verbalizing them. When those thoughts come again, because it’s not like being hospitalized permanently makes the thoughts go away.?

Ziba: Yeah. Yeah.

Will: It can feel powerless.

Ziba: Yeah, and it’s constant. What we see in Kind Words sort of affirms that people don’t have places in their lives to talk about this stuff.

Managing Community Spaces

Will: What is your approach to Discord? How is it differentiated from Kind Words?

Ziba: I’ve been making games for 15 years, so I started the Discord well before Kind Words, just to have a Discord. I was doing crowdfunding for a different game, and I was sort of pulling a community together for that. But when Kind Words 1 came out and had a lot of attention on it, other people started making social media accounts and platforms for it.

Will: Yeah, I saw the Reddit page.

Ziba: So I sort of had to do this roundup, a mixture of launching my own and wrestling control of others. I had to apply to become a moderator of the Kind Words subreddit. And someone else had started a Discord, calling it the “Official Kind Words Discord.” I had to say, “Please change your name” and then put a link to my Discord in the game. I never really wanted to upfront the Discord, but I realized that people were looking for it, and if I didn’t put mine in, it was out of my hands.

Will: Yeah, what are people looking for from Discord?

Ziba: A lot of what Kind Words is doing is setting the mood and vibe for how we interact with people. It’s this expectation of a circle you’ve drawn around a space: “In this space, with League of Legends, you act this way. In this space, with Rocket League, here’s where you focus that aggression.” In this game, in Kind Words, it’s to find this way of communicating with people that’s more aggressively gentle or something.

(both laugh)

Ziba: And it’s a particular flavor. I think people want to keep the party going, and that’s when they head into the Discord and bring that attitude.

Will: Yeah. Cool. I peeked around. What’s the lore behind the bunnies channel?

Ziba: I am an extremely lazy Discord moderator. I just want to keep it alive, and like I said, it was sort of a defensive move. I love the people and it’s been super super helpful. It was never my dream to organize this community. So when someone makes a suggestion, and there’s no reason to say no, I just do it.

Will: (laughs) So that’s what it was like? “We need a bunnies channel!”

Ziba: After six years of running the Discord channel, someone was like “You should have an announcements channel.” “Okay!” And then they were like, “I’m posting bunnies. Make bunnies.” So most of these channels are just what people wanted. Which is actually a lot of how the Kind Words moderation also goes. It’s a lot of community standards. When people report things over and over, it’s like “Okay. I guess they don’t like people asking for stickers, so we’ll stop that.” A lot of this is just listening. Setting a tone and then listening to how people want to improv and riff off that tone.

Will: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. In grad school I heard an idea that “Policy is reactionary.” Which, of course, can get really dark.

Ziba: (laughing)

Will: But not in the way you’re saying it.

Ziba: Um, I mean, I would say that overall if I had to describe my role in Kind Words, it is as a benevolent dictator. This isn’t a model that can extend very far into society without hitting the problems that benevolent dictatorships hit (laughs). So I’m aware that the patterns I’m following don’t work at certain scales.

Will: Mmm. Yeah, so this won’t become the next Facebook?

Ziba: Ehhh. The steps you’d have to take to get it there, turn it into Facebook, I guess? I don’t know. I’d like to be wrong about that. And I’m encouraging anybody who wants to take up these patterns and ideas that we’ve got going and run with them.

Campfire is an interesting one if you’ve looked at that. They had a compelling demo during Nextfest. And it’s a different game, but it’s a similar sort of asynchronous messaging with a positive vibe. I hope more people explore it.

The Business of Benevolent Design

Will: Do you consider Kind Words to be a game?

Ziba: When I’m applying for things where it needs to be called a game, yes. But I don’t have strong feelings about that. Technically it resembles an email client or a forum. There’s a fair amount of bug tracking software between the middle and the back end. There’s a lot of boring enterprise-esque software patterns in the construction of this game. (laughing)

Will: Yeah, and there’s not a mobile phone version. I imagine you’ve probably thought about that.

Ziba: Yeah, I get asked all the time. Players really want that. There’s a lot of reasons I wouldn’t, and only a few that I would. I would because people want it, and it would be cool. But economically, mobile games and indie development is a tricky spot. Most things go free to play, and that’s really incompatible with the design of Kind Words. And players do need to incur some cost, especially with our moderation burden.

I mean, the business model of Kind Words is tremendously stupid. It’s basically an MMO (massively multiplayer online game) with no subscription fee. And we don’t do DLC (downloadable content) or any other way to get revenue off players. So once you buy the game, we’re basically moderating for the rest of my natural life.

But that’s what I think is necessary to create this “Everybody’s equal” all-in counter. I try to counter the patterns of social media and games that I don’t like. All the things that are designed to squeeze people for money, their attention, or for a fear of missing out.

Not that I’m against those, on my high horse, everywhere. Who knows? I may make a game someday with all those things, but for Kind Words to work, I think it really needs to run away from those patterns and do the opposite.

Will: No seasonal mobile pass. “The Kind Words Battle Pass”.

Ziba: Yeah, well if you notice in Steam, it’s actually tagged as an MMO with PVP (Player vs Player). Those are the tags. And I had to argue with Valve about that. The first game somehow automatically got tagged as “MMO PVP”. The game predated those tags, and then an automated system put them on there. I thought it was hilarious.

So I’m making a second one, I was like, “Yeah, let’s carry those tags over.” And Valve was like, “It’s not an MMO. You can’t say that.” They didn’t say it wasn’t PVP, they just said that it’s not an MMO. But fortunately in the pre-release, mmorpg.com wrote an article anticipating the arrival of it. I was like, “Look. Here. It’s an MMO.”

Will: (laughing) That’s great.

Human Connection in the Digital Age

Will: One thing that came up in an interview from last month was on the ways AI gives very generic platitudes and responses. I thought about that sentiment while reading what you said in the Eurogamer article:

"It's surprisingly meaningful to say something simple and perhaps unoriginal to somebody. I've been surprised over and over in Kind Words at how common platitudes like 'you'll be alright, I believe in you', or 'you're going to get through this' and 'someone out there loves you' can really mean the world to someone.”

Is there any importance in these responses coming from humans?

Ziba: I’m not sure. I know there have been studies like The Media Equation, studies from the nineties where they measured ways people treat technology as people. That equation being “Media = People.”

One of the things they found was that, even if someone knows it’s a computer talking to them and not a human, even when it wasn’t directed at or about them, even if it doesn’t know them, what it says to them is still impactful in some interesting, meaningful way. And so, I can’t say that “People only appreciate it cause it's humans!”

No, they will appreciate it otherwise. Maybe there’s a difference in magnitude. But I do know one of the important parts of what makes Kind Words work is that people find a lot of value in the act of volunteering to talk with people. So as much as it’s the receipt of platitudes, it’s the delivery of whatever you can give from yourself. And people seize this act of volunteering and appreciate their time spent in that.

I think that’s one of the things that made Kind Words work more than some of my other games. I’ve done a number of other writing games, but this one has a successful loop where you can both write and read. And you want to put something out there, and the echo of however it’s going to come back to you is something you also care about and want to consume. It will motivate you to keep going and be part of that.

Will: Yeah. That’s a good point. I really like the… I don’t know what to call it. Like the turn-based conversations of Kind Words 2?

Ziba: Yeah! It’s asynchronous. That was like the flagship feature, and it’s been so hard. I still haven’t nailed the communication. A lot of players are still confused about how it works. Because it’s unclear what’s actually going on. If you look at the logic tree of how it branches, it’s grotesque. It’s not as simple as it should be.

All I ever wanted in the end result was that you walk up to somebody and talk. I wanted to reduce as much typing, so you don’t have to always type in everything. It would be like an adventure game, like Monkey Island but it’s real people. You walk up and you pick a thing.

That was much of the original thrust of the project. And I’m happy with how it went, but I never got the clarity of how to communicate it to players, or even to myself, just right. I still get like, “Wait, if a person talks... and then they receive... but then two other people talked... What’s the menu gonna show?” Like it’s frustratingly complex to have this simple presentation. And I’m still hoping to make refinements on that.?

Will: Yeah, well I really like listening to it too. It’s been fun, hanging in the park and the plaza.

Ziba: Yeah.

The Impact of Kind Words

Will: How has Kind Words changed you?

Ziba: It has meant a whole lot to me. It definitely changed the trajectory of my career. Before this one, Luigi and I spent a long time on another game that actually did very poorly. I was basically looking for an exit to being a sole proprietor of a little indie game company. I had been applying for jobs, and this was just sort of, in my mind, something of a wrap up exercise and throw away game. And actually the same week that Kind Words came out on Steam, I started a contract job at Harmonix (points to Harmonix T-shirt).

Kind Words made me feel like I could add value to the world by continuing to do what I love, which is making small games. And I guess that’s the thing I’ve been searching for: I didn’t want to just be making "things". I wanted to be making things that made me feel connected and like I was pushing forward what I want the world to be. Absolutely no shade to anybody who’s focused on making the delightfully frivolous games that I love.

From all the support and love I have around me, I have a luxury in making a lot of choices about what I do with my time. So I feel a responsibility to do something that enhances the lives of other people. As much as mine has been enhanced by everything around me.

Kind Words was really a Hail Mary attempt at doing that, and it has landed far greater than I ever expected. It’s been an absolute privilege to stay in that lane and keep pushing with it for all these years.

And Luigi, the artist for Kind Words, works on additional meaningful projects. He is the lead designer for Mightier. They make games for kids for emotion regulation. Kids are encouraged to get excited while wearing a band that measures their heart-rate, then they’re encouraged to calm themselves down.

Will: What's it been like when you talk with therapists?

Ziba: I don’t have a ton of contact with therapists. My wife is a neurologist, and we have some therapist friends from med school. Basically, I’ve had enough conversations to have sanity checks. Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to talk with someone like yourself, I make sure that it happens. And I want to connect with the mental health world to make sure I’m not making things worse. Because I’ve put myself at the center of a lot of messaging dealing with emotional topics well beyond my pay-grade and my training for dealing with that. So whenever I have an opportunity to interact with a therapist or someone in the mental health zone, I just want to check to see if there’s any red flags or yellow flags about how I talk, about how I’m messaging things to people, or how I’m responding to things, or what I let happen in that ecosystem. That was one of the reasons I was so eager to take your call, so as I’ve been talking, you’re asking me what I’m doing, I’m looking at you being like, “Is he appalled?” (laughing)

Will: No. I’m not. I came today as a huge huge huge huge fan.

A few years ago, I gave a continuing education presentation about social work in digital spaces. How we promote community development, but social work as an industry has been incredibly tech resistant and lacks digital literacy. And how maybe there’s room for social workers to be doing community development in virtual spaces.

I began the presentation by putting a call out on Kind Words, talking about my nervousness in the presentation. Because I usually am very nervous presenting. And by the end of the presentation, I had a full inbox of people giving encouragement. I used Kind Words as one of the best example I’d seen of that type of space – social work industry or not. So no, I think you’re doing incredible stuff.

Ziba: Oh, oh well thank you. Steam is not the easiest distribution for a lot of people. And I have a lot of inquiries from teachers about using Kind Words in schools. Steam is a technical stumbling block, but then also age appropriateness is complicated. Because kids can handle very different things, and we don’t discriminate. Whatever system I’m applying for, I always mark it rated as "Mature" or whatever equivalent word it can be. Because we do, we get a lot of talk about sexual content and stuff, and then I’ll also get a teacher asking, “Can you help me get like 20 copies for a middle school?”

And I’ll be like, “Yeah, but… You know what they’re going to see there?” I guess if you’ve played it long enough, you may know, and still sometimes you don’t. So I try not to be the arbiter of what is age appropriate. I don’t have answers to that because I don’t want to segment the game. Our community isn’t so big that I can just start slicing it off into like “Here’s the middle school version.” Or we’ve been asked a couple times: “Can you make a version just for this university community?” I think anonymity would crumble pretty quickly.

Will: Yeah, as Yik Yak did?

Ziba: Yeah, Yik Yak! I haven’t heard that in awhile. (laughing)

Will: I still have Yik Yak socks that I wear every now and then (laughing). They ran into that problem of exacerbating bullying. When someone would say something like, “Kid wearing this shirt sucks.” And then everyone knows who’s being bullied.

Ziba: Right, right.

Media Recommendations

Will: What’s your relationship like with the Internet?

(Both laugh)

Ziba: I mean, I’m always on it! I’ve never been into online gaming very much.

Will: Do you play games?

Ziba: All the time. Constantly.

Will: What are your media recommendations? (laughing)

Ziba: Well I’ve been playing Make Ten. It’s a dinky little itch.io thing where you add a grid of numbers up to ten.

Will: Oh?

Ziba: You familiar with that?

Will: I’m not!

Ziba: It’s not huge; it’s just like super addictive: “Here’s numbers. Select the ones that add up to ten.” And it just like scratches a thing.

Will: Yeah.

Ziba: Harold Halibut is my game of the year so far, and the year’s almost over. It’s an amazing point-and-click-esque adventure. Claymation-made, like scanned, handmade models. It’s just beautiful, and it’s a very simple game in terms of what you’re actually doing, but the way they told the story… Every time you think it’s going to get to a cliché, it doesn’t. It doesn't go into these trite things. But it’s still exploring, I don’t know, it’s just the most…. I could go on forever about Harold Halibut. But you should check it out.

Will: I will check it out! I’m always playing something too. But I really like very, very long JRPGs.

Ziba: Oh yeah? What’s your favorite JRPG lately?

Will: Um. Metaphor: Refantazio. I’m very far into it at this point. (laughs)

Ziba: That just came out like two weeks ago, right?

Will: I know. It’s bad. It’s bad. (both laugh) But I'd been looking forward to it, and it's delivering for me.

Will: Okay, so final question. Does Clark Aboud go away, come back, and say, “Hey. I just have this amazing soundtrack…” Cause like-

Ziba: YES! Yes, that’s what he does! It’s such a delight whenever I get an email from Clark. I mean this is like my fifth game working with him. We’ve been working together even before he did the soundtrack for Slay the Spire. And like every time, I’m just like, “Clark we need this. Here’s what we’re doing.” And and like when Clark’s like, “Alright, I’ve got some new music,” Luigi and I are just like, “Alright!!” (Rubs hands together) “It’s Clark music day!!!”

Will: (Laughing) It’s sooo good. It’s so good. I’ve been listening to the sequel’s soundtrack doing notes and stuff.

Ziba: Yeah he’s… I just try not to take advantage of him because he’s just got this energy and enthusiasm that’s incredible.

Kind Words is a really special space, one that I hope you'll check out.

Play Kind Words 2

Soundtrack: Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple | Steam

Play Kind Words 1

Soundtrack: Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple | Steam

Will Ard

LMSW, MBA

?? technotherapies.com | [email protected]