Horse Isle 3, War Crimes and LGBTQ+ Visibility – A case study in how NOT to approach Community Management

When I published my article about Horse Isle 3’s development in December, I was certain I was done writing about this game for a while. After all, I had made my peace with the fact that the game is not for me, had put my most urgent criticisms into words, and had offered players a bit of insight into how HI3 is being made, and what problems I see with that. 

And then, the Gulag incident happened. Yes, bear with me here. 

If you’re not already part of this community or its surrounding discussions, much of what I’ll tell you in this article is going to sound absolutely ridiculous. I chose to tackle this subject nonetheless, because I know many players are unhappy with what went down and want it documented, and because this whole discussion can serve as a fantastic example for why community management is a crucial component of game development. 

And for readers who do not usually follow The Mane Quest and the general horse game situation: Dear God, please take notice of how badly we need well made, well managed games in this genre. 

How did we get here?

Horse Isle 3’s main landing page.

“Family friendly games made for horse fanatics” is how Horse Isle 3 introduces itself on its website and promises “Clean, nonviolent fun, with some education tossed in.” 

In Horse Isle 3, players can create their own clubs and stores, and name the horses they breed. This means there is a plethora of player-generated content, which is always a certain risk and something that requires proper moderation. There is a reason popular kid-friendly MMO Star Stable only allows its players to combine names from a list of pre-approved words, by contrast. 

That no inappropriate content appears and stays in Horse Isle 3 is therefore the responsibility of players who report problematic content, and the dev team who reviews these reports and warns or bans offending players accordingly. 

What is or is not family friendly has apparently led to discourse and disagreements in the past. Concrete information about what has previously been discussed in the Horse Isle community is almost impossible to find however, apart from simply listening to what players say happened: The game’s forums announce that threads are removed regularly, “to keep [the forums] clean and recent”. This practice, in combination with the fact that the HI3 forums do not have a search function and don’t seem to be indexed by Google, makes it very hard to find reliable information. 

Over the years – the first Horse Isle launched in 2007 – there have naturally been disagreements, both among players and among moderators. I’ve been able to contact a former member of the HI moderator team, and they tell me that players would disproportionately report mentions of partners and relationships if they were implied to be between people of the same gender. The moderators were instructed by the game’s administrators to heed these complaints and remove such mentions, even though this policy ended up only affecting LGBTQ+ people, since no one tended to take offense at mentions of hetero relationships. In one example, a player had the words “lgbt | married” in their profile, and was asked to remove it or face a ban.

When this unfairness was brought up in the moderator forum, the admin team decided to ban all mention of romantic relationships in profiles. Ironically, two members of the mod team itself were still called “FrogLips” and “MrFrogLips” – exactly the sort of innocuous allusion to a relationship that players were getting reprimanded for, if anyone suspected the people in question might be the same gender. 

Another example – documented by the aforementioned former moderator – is an instance where players claim to have received rule violation warnings for mentioning having two moms or dads, while saying “my mom and dad” is allowed. Only the former example appears to be seen by the team as “dating related content”.

When confronted about such inequalities, the HI team claims that no one is being discriminated against and that mentioning partners or orientation is inappropriate for a children’s game in any context.

Screenshots of a discussion about inequalities between how mentions of same sex or opposite sex relationships were handled in Horse Isle 1.

The Gulag

The recent series of events that we’re looking at began in early February 2020 with a player generated club by the name of “Union of Equine Socialist Republic.” On the club’s territory, the player-run stores had names such as “The Kremlin”, “Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant” and most infamously, “The Gulag.”

Other players noticed these names and began to report them to Horse Isle’s support. In a Horse Isle 3 Facebook group, several of the reporting players shared their direct messages with the HI3 support after being disappointed with the replies they got. The team claimed that the club in question was not breaking any rules, that historical content was allowed as long as it was not “direct, vulgar, profane, adult or violent,” and that a Gulag was simply a prison and therefore inoffensive.

This screenshot was shared by a player in the Horse Isle 3 - Infinite Wilds Facebook group. Several others with similar responses can be found by searching for the term “gulag” in the group.

Considering that the term Gulag refers to the system of labour camps in the Soviet Union responsible for the deaths of about 1.6 million people according to contemporary estimates, many players agreed that ruling this term as anything but adult and violent was not the appropriate course of action. Further outrage was caused by the fact that one staff member’s response to a player asking for “The Gulag”’s removal included the expression “lol” (laughing out loud), indicating that the developers were not taking these reports particularly seriously. 

And before long, players set the decision to allow the “Gulag” to stay in contrast with another topic that has been deemed inappropriate for this family friendly game: the existence of LGBTQ+ people. While the Soviet themed club was not directly related to the handling of players mentioning LGBTQ+ related topics in the game, parts of the community were quick to point out the hypocrisy of labelling the term “Gulag” as acceptable in the game, while banning people for offenses such as putting their own pronouns into their player bio or making any reference to their own romantic orientation in public in-game spaces. 

The players behind the Soviet themed club changed their store name of their own accord in the meantime, by all accounts without being prompted by the development team. At this point however, the community was uneager to let go of what was the bigger issue underneath it all: the seemingly arbitrary approach to what was allowed in the game and what wasn’t, and the implication that any mention of gender or orientation is inappropriate for younger users. People voiced these concerns in the game’s forums, where threads on the subject were removed after gaining a significant number of comments. Voicing any LGBTQ+ support in-game remained a bannable offense – one player and TMQ community member was temporarily banned from playing for posting “LGBTQ people deserve rights” in the game’s forums, for example.

Over the course of two days, the discontent spiralled into users giving their horses, clubs and stores LGBTQ+ friendly names and adding more ambiguous references to queerness, pride and rainbow colors wherever they could. 

In comparing their deeds and consequences, some people gained the impression that support was harsher on non-paying users than on paying subscribers. The storm refused to die down, the demand for an official response grew.

The News Posts

On February 9th and February 11th, Horse Isle 3 lead developer Joe Durbin posted two news posts on the HI3 website trying to address the community’s concerns. Or rather: proclaiming that their concerns were unfounded. Although the posts were deleted within a day of their posting (as announced in the posts themselves), the full texts can be seen in the screenshots below.

Despite their considerable length, I recommend reading these in full, in order to get a proper overview of the style in which these matters were handled by the team.

Protest and Trolling

These official statements did not satisfy many of the discontented players at that point. Beyond attempts to have serious conversations, players kept up with their protests in the form of placing signs and other customizable content in the game world that proclaimed pride or other references to their own queerness or their support thereof.

At some point, the game’s global chat feed was spammed with the phrase “ok boomer” until the dev team locked the chat entirely for several hours. 

In a Facebook group dedicated to the game, players shared screenshots, and opinions, voiced their anger and frustration and occasionally announced their leaving the game entirely over this issue. On Reddit, one player summarized the situation by claiming that Horse Isle 3 had “just lost a huge chunk of its player base” due to “fully supporting LGBT-phobia, and supporting Gulag-themed content”. 

What complicates following these conversations is that players tend to bring up past events that caused frustrations years ago, claiming previous instances of homophobia or other inappropriate behavior at various points in the over ten years of Horse Isle history. Unfortunately, these claims are often voiced without links or screenshots that would facilitate research or verification.

Players voicing their support in the game.

The Mane Quest club in Horse Isle 3 is run by members of this community, many of whom were upset at these developments.

Consequences or the lack thereof

I’ve been trying to gather opinions within the community about the tangible effects these events had on the Horse Isle 3 player base, now that several weeks have passed and the dust has settled. My post in the HI3 Facebook group was first approved, but then removed before I got around to taking screenshots of the comments.
From what I’ve gathered in the responses and from an eye on the current player numbers on the game’s website, user numbers have not significantly dropped following what happened in February. Several people claim that mentions of husbands and wives are usually tolerated in the game, unless there’s an indication that the relationship is between people of the same gender. Other players refute these claims and say that any mention of romantic partners is not allowed in the public chat. 

From yet other players I’ve heard that they are unwilling to speak out or share screenshots of support messages with me, worrying that they would be banned from the game if the dev team saw them in an article and could see or guess their user names. 

In trying to gauge the situation now, I received various responses of players unhappy or annoyed that this subject was being dragged up again. Those for whom the dev team’s handling of the situation was not a dealbreaker were content to go back to playing and feel that talking about this further has the potential to negatively impact their enjoyment of the game. 

I decided to write all of this down anyway. For one, I hope this article serves to document the events in a somewhat more durable way than forum threads and facebook posts, all of which are very easily deleted as we’ve seen. And on the other hand, I think the fact that all of this happened, that the Horse Isle 3 development team has enough of an audience for this to even cause a shitstorm of some size, is one more argument for one of my favorite subjects: horse game fans are incredibly desperate for good content that takes them and their desires seriously. 

So what to make of this

Following the early February discussions as a relatively neutral observer – I don’t really consider myself part of the game’s community, but I read along with what people say in the TMQ discord – I could not help but shake my head in disbelief at various points. 

The definition of Gulag according to dictionary.com

To avoid issues with player-generated content, Star Stable Online only allows players to combine names from pre-approved words.

The original refusal to remove a store called “The Gulag” from a supposedly child-friendly game when a simple Google search will bring up the disturbingly high death count of the Gulag system is already immensely questionable. I further sympathize with those who call out the hypocrisy between calling this a completely normal and harmless reference to a historical event while equating any mention of gender, orientation or pronouns with “discussion of sex and dating”. 

And yet, this crisis could have been averted relatively easily with an official statement that would have – even perfunctorily – made players feel like their concerns were being heard and taken seriously. Instead, the HI3 team ridiculed the cause for the original conflict and blamed its community for costing the developers time in this way. 

Any community manager, anyone with experience in public relations or marketing, any senior indie game developer, will physically cringe at the tone and contents of the news posts shared above. 

Calling this unprofessional is an understatement, and yet it has to be said: Regardless of anyone’s opinion of which content should or should not be allowed in a game aimed at children, yelling in all caps about how players who complain about your moderation are ruining the game is unwise, unprofessional, and perhaps most damningly: ineffective. 

Handling a deeply dissatisfied community that resorts to trolling and virtual protests is of course a nightmare. But instead of taking this problem seriously, the development team added fuel to the fire by belittling the users’ concerns in their official statements on the matter. 

I’ll instantly concur that Player reactions such as abusing the bug report feature to complain about this or spamming the chat are not mature, productive reactions. But when the player base of your children’s game are behaving like children, you should be able to moderate that and do proper damage control instead of throwing a tantrum using official communication channels. 

Children’s TV shows such as “Arthur” are starting to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ representation and child-friendly content are not mutually exclusive.

It’s perhaps needless to say, but no, I don’t believe that the HI3 dev team supports war crimes, or even consciously wants to belittle the meaning of the term Gulag. But upon realizing that they were wrong about the actual meaning and connotation of the word, an apology would have been the right way to go, even once the store in question had already been renamed. 

As for the accusations of homophobia: The notion that same-sex relationships are somehow inherently less appropriate for young children than hetero relationships is unfortunately widespread, however ridiculous it may seem from any somewhat openminded and progressive perspective. Whether or not the label homophobic applies in this case comes down to whether one believes the Horse Isle team is actually concerned about having visible LGBTQ+ players, or more about potential backlash from conservative parents. 

But for many LGBTQ+ people and allies (I include myself in both of those), choosing to cater to homophobes instead of being inclusive is cowardly at best, and actively homophobic at worst. 

Kids’ TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has recently introduced a kid-friendly lesbian couple

Naturally, the admin team has no control over which mentions of partners and parents of various genders actually get reported by players. But choices are made in heeding these reports and determining that saying something as innocuous as “my moms”, or mentioning a girlfriend when you have previously let on that you are female yourself counts as a violation of the game’s rules.

Honestly, moderating a family friendly MMO with huge amounts of player-generated content sounds like a nightmare, the very concept like a recipe for disaster. And yet a lot of this new discontent would likely have been avoided relatively easily with proper communication on behalf of the dev team.  

I also think it is not too late for the HI3 team to learn from this fallout and improve their moderation guidelines and communication style for the future.

What I find particularly sad and frustrating about this situation however, is that I once again get the impression that all this would not even be a discussion if only horse game players had proper alternatives. Players deeply appreciate Horse Isle 3 for its open world combined with complex horse breeding mechanics and wide variety in horse shapes, colors and personalities, as well as for the sense of community and the friends they’ve made in the game.

Unfortunately, it does not matter if Horse Isle 3 is the worst-managed game in its subgenre as long as it is the only game in its subgenre. As long as this audience remains so desperately starved for good games, many people will stay with Horse Isle no matter how fed up they are with its moderators. 

At the risk of repeating myself: this community deserves better than that.  

---

Addendum: I feel the need to add that I find it incredibly frustrating to research and write about this subject, because it is almost impossible to find reliable information, and because I have already written more about my issues with Horse Isle 3 than I’ve written about any other game on here – that’s not really what I want The Mane Quest to be all about.

I don’t intend to report on further drama in the Horse Isle community for the forseeable future, but I do believe that players who intend to spend time and money on the game deserve to know about these events and make their own decisions about whether or not they want to support the game.

And since the Horse Isle 3 team deleted any reference to this community fallout in their official channels, I do feel like it’s important the information above is available somewhere.

The in-game screenshots at the top of this article was taken from the official Screenshot gallery on Horse Isle' 3’s website, where it was originally uploaded by a player.

Horse Isle 3 is free to play and can be downloaded here once you’ve created an account.