Hello everyone, I’m Yubo Kou, an assistant professor from Penn State.
I’m going to talk about toxic behaviors in team-based competitive gaming, and my study site is league of legends.
Today it has been well known that toxic behaviors pose a serious challenge to online games.
And League of Legends is oftentimes cited for its players’ toxic behaviors.
As a brief description, League of Legends is one of the largest eSports games today.
In League of Legends, two teams each composed of five strangers fight against each other.
Here are two examples of toxicity in my own experience.
In the first one, the player admitted that they were trying to lose the game from the very beginning.
In the second, the player used offensive words to attack their teammates.
So what can I do?
I can report toxic players.
I can select from the seven toxic categories, click the report button, and let the moderation system do the rest such as assessing toxicity and issuing punishments.
But there is at least one problem with this process.
This is the report function from the year of 2012.
If you look closely and compare, there isn’t much difference in terms of how players report, and what categories players can pick from.
The vocabulary remains almost the same after eight years.
And this is the problem.
We can consider the official toxic classification as platform rules, and then how players feel about toxic behaviors as norms.
Previous literature has characterized platform rules as static, ambiguous, and having unintended consequences.
Therefore, there is oftentimes a mismatch between rules and norms.
What this study did is to try to establish a toxic classification based on how players themselves understand and experience toxic behaviors.
Through online data analysis, we produced a new toxic classification.
Compared to the official one, we identified emergent types of toxic behaviors, refined all the official types, and defined mutually exclusive categories.
Due to the time limit, I will just highlight four observations.
First, toxicity is highly related to its context.
In a highly competitive context,
the most important things that player care about are winning the game,
and whether certain behaviors are toxic seems to be secondary to many of them.
They could tolerate toxic teammates if their teammates are good and carrying the game.
Friendly people could become toxic if they are about to lose a game.
Second, in our data, there are almost always certain negative emotions associated with toxicity.
People who experience negative emotions like frustration and anxiety could become toxic towards their teammates.
Their teammates in turn could experience negative emotions too and even propagate toxicity.
So this is basically a vicious cycle.
In the third point I wanted to stress that toxicity is also ordinary
in the sense that in a competitive and stressful gaming context,
and many players could exhibit toxicity at some point.
The fourth point I wanted to make is that there is a particular type of toxicity.
Like this player said, they pretended that they were lagging but they really just wanted to lose the game.
I think this is the most problematic and insidious type
because it is deceptive and tries to bypass the moderation system.
Lastly, there are two general design implications.
First, moderation design should consider how to make their toxic classification up-to-date, and more aligned with player norms.
Second, we should support punished players.
There can be more constructive and proactive ways of helping punished players,
such as explaining to them why they are toxic, and perhaps something beyond a game like how to promote and teach emotion management in video games
That is all, thank you very much for watching this.