Keenan Talamo
Games and Play
Maggie Greene
5/7/15
Gaming and Toxic Online Behavior
Millions of people around the world play video games and many of them play games for the sole purpose of competition. Not all of these people whom play competitively are pro players, in fact most aren’t, and an unfortunately large amount of these non-pro players seem to have one thing in common amongst each other, their toxic behavior regarding the games they play. The toxicity comes out in many ways that tends to change depending on what type of game it is. One place that is always toxic, though, is game discussions on the internet through outlets such as Facebook, game forums and comments on twitch. For some competitive game players this is their only outlet because there is no in game chat or mic system on the game they are playing. Other competitive players who have in game chat programs still go online to troll other players with false information about the game or to vent their frustration with the game, generally using homosexual or racist terms. If it is available in the game then players will generally use the in game chat to complain about another player either being good or really bad (if the bad player is on their team). Toxic behavior comes out in numerous ways in gaming communities but one question that everybody wonders is why so many people, who seem normal during their day to day activities, turn into awful people when playing a game or talking about it online.
There are numerous types of competitive games that can cause similar types of toxic behavior. Fighting games generally aren’t played online for tournaments due to lag issues and the precise character movements needed at higher level play. As someone who attends fighting game competitions I have seen people who online act incredibly rude but in person are much quieter. When discussing a fighting game online rude gamers tend to pick on the specifics of a person, specifically their sexuality or race. Numerous articles and blogs are full of stories of people who have been told sexist or racist remarks, although when it comes to fighting games people aren’t as rude as other gamers. Fighting game discussions generally deal with characters that some deem to be annoying or people who play certain characters annoyingly and someone else is unable to beat them for that reason. Generally after the match it is considered common curtesy to shake the other players hand at the tournament and report the match to whoever is running the tournament and most players do just that. After the tournament, however, they go online to talk about the match and talk about how whatever character the other person was using is imbalanced, only used by “scrubs” or is just the most “gimmicky” character in the game. This is generally followed by a fight between people who like the character and those who agree with the sore loser. Why is there a change in behavior towards the game after they lose? According to research by the American Psychological Association it is as simple as after losing there is significant post game aggression and many people feel that “trash talking” their opponent in some way will help alleviate the anger, but it doesn’t[1]. The only reason most people don’t erupt in anger immediately after the match is because of the social expectations at a tournament and the presence of people. Gamers, like many other people take the anger to the Internet because of it anonymity[2]. Occasionally debates about the games at tournaments begin at the tournament where it is for the most part it is just a discussion about the game or some of the tournament rules. When the debates continue online in forums, as T.L Taylor observed, the discussion turns “vitriolic” and that’s when the name calling would start[3]. Not all gamers can make it too their computers though, on rare occasion someone is so angry about losing that they start to freak out in front of their opponent with their rage or disbelief about what happened. I have seen this at the local Bozeman tournaments from two people who came from other cities in Montana. Gamers refer to their rage as being “Salty” which sometimes only makes the other person even angrier. The saddest part about this type of toxic behavior is that there isn’t much the gaming community can do to fight against it besides just encourage people not to act that way.
Another way that gamers express toxic behavior online is through forum posts about the game and certain characters where racist, homophobic and sexist remarks become more prevalent. I recently started playing a game called League of Legends and one of the first things that I noticed people saying when talking about the champions is referring to some of them in demeaning ways such as calling a black champion named Lucian “the N*****” or any female champion something horrible about women. This kind of toxic behavior isn’t even directed towards any type of person is particular, it is only the champion they are discussing but the words they chose are still hurtful and in poor taste. The only explanation that is commonly accepted by people regarding this kind of behavior is that it is linked to the anonymity of the internet[4]. In her article about the anonymity of the internet and how that causes this behavior when discussing video games, Emma Teitel also blames the projections of women and ethnicities in video games for encouraging this kind of behavior. She says that when the representations of women in video games are less sexualized then video gamers will stop objectifying the women they are talking about in the games[5]. One part of T.L Taylor’s book Raising the Stakes talked about the gaming community and how it has changed and grown over time, including the spectatorship community that only wants to watch their favorite players win in tournaments. One thing she noted was that as the spectating community grew so did the amount of annoying gamers in it[6]. These spectators whom are giving the gaming community a bad name are fought many different ways but the most notable one is by simply banning them. This is generally the job of moderators whose job it is to moderate chat boards on sights like Twitch or forum communities on any number of those websites. I was a moderator of the chat at the most recent fighting game tournament in Bozeman which had only one incident where someone called someone else a “N*****”. I promptly banned them from chat and deleted their post so that no one else could see what they posted. People noticed that the person got banned and were upset that it happened if it was their friend but for the most part chat became a less toxic place where people were bad mouthing players and instead focused on the specifics of the game. It was a small tournament where I was a moderator so bigger tournaments are bound to have more problematic people in chat but simply banning the person worked for us. An article on Wired titled Fighting Online Harassment talks about the importance of explaining to these players why their behavior is troublesome to the community and why their words have meaning to the other players. The article mentions a gamer who goes by the name Haniver who is constantly berated on forums for being a girl game only after attention. After toxic people were reported and eventually banned for their posts about her many didn’t stop being toxic after their ban ended, instead they continued to troll people and sometimes even go back to harass her again. Riot games, the developers of League of Legends, actually started their own method to reform the community rather than outright banning people. By explaining to people why they were banned and monitoring their chat after words Riot was able to get a lot of success and a less toxic community in their game[7].
One of the places to experience the most toxic players is when you’re simply playing a game with a chat option. For games like League of Legends where chat is essential to victory because of the necessity of team work the game developers don’t have the option to get rid of chat to fix their toxic players problem. An article by Kotaku perfectly describes an unfortunately common experience in League of Legends where one player is using the chat option to complain about how terrible his team mates are at the game. As they verbally abuse their team, they continue to get further and further behind because no one wants to help them out. There are other kinds of toxic behavior in the team chat, for example I have been called a “dumb G** N*****” after I died in a game which is both a racist and homophobic insult in one. Luckily, due to Riot’s method of dealing with the problematic people, racial and homophobic insults are becoming less likely and are now only used in 1 % of games[8]. In a game with 20 million active players every month 1 percent of every game containing a racist remark is still a lot though, but it is good that it is decreasing steadily over time. One article I found relates the amount of time it takes to play a round of a game, or the minimum amount of time you can play a certain game, and related it to the types of people that play that game. Some male gamers feel like the game is superior if it takes them longer to play such as a round of league taking around forty minutes to get through[9]. Female gamers generally don’t want to play a game for that long which is why many casual games are more popular with them. This has caused a split and many male gamers to feel superior to women in the gaming world for playing harder or longer games[10].
Toxic Behavior is an incredible problem in the gaming community, especially since a lot of research indicates that not many people are actually toxic but it seems so prevalent regardless of the game community that you are in. This toxic behavior appears in all sorts of ways and in many games but specifically competitive games where people may get angry for losing. Fighting games don’t give people as many opportunities to be toxic but when discussing the game using the anonymity of the internet people find a way to spread their toxicity. Forums where people talk about game mechanics and characters also become hotbeds of toxic behavior, but the worst place to find rude gamers is in the chat logs of the games that they are playing. In these chat logs people are verbally abusive and racist, homophobic and sexist towards other gamers. Luckily game developers and moderators are actively looking for a solution to the toxic gamer problem that has infested the many types of competitive games and some of their solutions have been incredibly successful and reduced the behavior to 1 % in games like League of Legends.
[1] Sore losers? A reexamination of the frustration–aggression hypothesis for colocated video game play.
Breuer, Johannes; Scharkow, Michael; Quandt, Thorsten
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Vol 4(2), Apr 2015, 126-137
[2] The Final Frontier of Boorishness, Teitel Emma, Maclean’s. 7/16/2012, Vol. 125 Issue 27, p66-66
[3] T.L Taylor, Raising the Stakes, (Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT press, 2012) p. 74
[4] The Final Frontier of Boorishness, Teitel Emma, Maclean’s. 7/16/2012, Vol. 125 Issue 27, p66-66
[5] The Final Frontier of Boorishness, Teitel Emma, Maclean’s. 7/16/2012, Vol. 125 Issue 27, p66-66
[6] T.L Taylor, Raising the Stakes, (Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT press, 2012) p. 74
[7] Laura Hudson, Curbing Online Abuse isn’t impossible. Here’s where we start, 5/15/14. http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/
[8] Dillion Skiffington, League of Legends’ Never ending war on Toxic Behavior, 9/19/14. http://kotaku.com/league-of-legends-neverending-war-on-toxic-behavior-1636894289
[9] Helen Lewis, Game not Over, (Fierce Urgencies, The Nation, 4/6/15) p. 128-130
[10] Game not Over, Lewis ^