Community Guidelines

Date of Last Revision: October 14, 2011

Our Principles

Glitch is a game we build together. Three important principles drive our culture and our community:

  • Play is of fundamental and critical importance to a good life — and the most meaningful forms of play all involve human interaction.
  • Diversity of thinking, perspectives, strengths, and life experiences makes the world more interesting.
  • This is all one big improvisation: we aim to create a game that can be played for a long, long time—one where new worlds and new rules of play are discovered and explored in an ever-unfolding way.

It’s Made of People!

Glitch is, by design, one persistent, shared world. It was designed this way so that many people can play together. Players may make individual decisions about what they want to do, and may also take part in decisions at a group level to coordinate action. Playing in a world which is inhabited by other players is inherent to the very idea of game.

Since you will always be playing in the same world with other players — even often playing in the very same place as them — you will be interacting with others from time to time.

If you can act respectfully towards other people, even when they are totally wrong about something, and you can disengage from another player when they have expressed that they don’t want to interact with you, you will probably never have a problem playing Glitch with others (and if you ever do, we are standing by to help.)

Given that, here are few expectations we have of our players:

The Guidelines

Act with Respect Towards Others

  • Absolutely no personal attacks or hateful speech directed at others’ gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic background or anything else you should have the good sense not to hate on.
  • Public areas in the game deserve the same sort of decorum, tact and consideration that public areas in your neighborhood do: excessive obscenity, vulgarity, or other kinds of generally offensive behavior are not welcome.
  • No griefing or harassing other players. It’s not fun, or funny. Really. If you are in the game for the purpose of pissing other people off, you can’t play.

Make Glitch a Welcoming Place

It’s hard to create and sustain great communities on the Internet. Glitch is a great community and sustaining it will take effort, from you as well as from us.

  • Public areas are public, so treat them as a shared resource.
  • Though we may compete or have rivalries and conflicts inside the game world, we are all playing together. Competition in the game does not preclude offering help and hospitality to other players.
  • Avoid assuming bad intentions in other players: some of them will think differently than you; or English might not be their first language; or their kid will have spilled a glass of milk on the cat a second ago; or they might not understand the particular nuances with which you play. Or … who knows? A willingness to forgive will go a long way, especially when directed towards new players who might not yet have fully learned what effects their actions have on others.

There is no “Right Way” to play Glitch

  • Creating new game play by adopting roles (good or bad) is good. A little mischief can be welcome (as long, of course, as it is within the guidelines articulated here and our Terms of Service).
  • Vigilante action against players who are, in your opinion, playing “incorrectly” can be griefing too and it is not allowed. If you see abuse in the game, you should report it. But calling out another player in the forums or public channels and organizing people to bully them is itself a kind of harassment and will be moderated as such.

Play Fair

In Glitch, the journey matters far more than the destination. This game is not about just winning, leveling up, or amassing the most currants.

  • Using bots, mules, or other hacks to gain significant and unfair advantage in the game is not allowed.
  • Multiple accounts controlled by one person playing at the same time is not allowed.
  • Duping or deceiving other players into doing things which benefit you at their expense is not allowed.

Don’t Just Speak Up, but Listen Too

Active participation is important to building the game together, but listening to other perspectives is important too:

  • If people don’t respond to what you have to say, move on. Flooding public areas with the same idea is not OK.
  • We may moderate public areas of conversation (forums, global chat, live help, and other areas of the site) when it feels that the conversation is being hidden behind people shouting.
  • Use appropriate channels for your conversation
    • Each of the forums and public channels is for a specific use — respect our guidelines.
    • Some conversation is just for friends or personal chats, keep this conversation out of public areas and in IMs, Mail, in Groups or other channels of communication.
  • Hectoring, badgering and continuing to talk to people after they’ve expressed that they don’t want to talk to you is just another kind of harassment: don’t do it.

Though Glitch is a moderated community, the ideal is a community that is mostly self-regulating. But keep in mind that no one has a right to play Glitch and access to the game is at the sole discretion of the game’s administrators (the team at Tiny Speck). If you can’t abide by the guidelines above, you can’t play. It is our job to keep Glitch a safe and welcoming place. We might not catch everything that goes wrong, but we’ll try our hardest, with your help.

Please note that when using the services offered by Tiny Speck, Inc., other terms that may be posted on our website from time to time will apply, including our Terms of Service located at www.glitch.com/terms/ and our Privacy Policy located at www.glitch.com/privacy/.