Hello everyone, my name is Yubo Kou. I'm an assistant professor from Penn State.
With my colleague Xinning Gui, we studied toxic behaviors and how players report toxic behaviors in an online game.
Toxic behaviors pose a serious challenge to online games.
I’ve experienced many instances of toxicity firsthand with League of Legends
(League of Legends is) a team-based online game where strangers form teams to compete against one another.
Here are two examples:
In the first example, the player said 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 behaviors. I can select from the seven toxic categories, click the report button, and let the moderation system do the rest.
Flag is important in the moderation cycle for many reasons.
First, behaviors must first be identified by flags to enter a moderation process.
Second, flag is commonly implemented across today’s most platforms.
Third, flag is scalable for a platform even with billions of users, because it requires a simple click from the user but significantly narrows down the number of problematic users the platform needs to pay attention to.
Recent years we have seen lots of research on moderation, studying how moderators think, what moderators do, and how moderators use tools, but there is not so much attention to flag.
So, in this study we want to understand how community members actually use flags against toxic behaviors.
Our study site is League of Legends. And, our research methods are a combination of interview and online data and thematic analysis.
We have many interesting findings in the paper, but here I will just talk about our key finding, which is flaggability.
Flaggability is how players actually use flags.
In other words, although the game developer expects players to flag what they consider toxic, players do not necessarily do so.
Sometimes, they flag behaviors that are not toxic. And sometimes, they do not flag behaviors that are toxic.
There are definitely many times flaggability aligns with toxicity. In this example, the player would report racially intolerant players. But there are also cases where flaggability and toxicity disagree. Next, I’ll share three scenarios.
The first scenario is when players flag casual players. In this example, the participant told us that he would flag players who played the game casually and didn’t try their best to win.
The second scenario is to blame a player for a game loss. The participant said that they would report even if the player was not toxic in game.
The last scenario is when players negotiate a flag. This usually happens when players don’t like one of their teammates so much that they want their opponents to flag the said teammate.
So, they want to negotiate with the opponent team, exchanging a surrender for flags.
The empirical evidence we just showed tells us that flaggability is diverging from toxicity
and what triggers this divergence is the highly competitive gaming culture where players care about competition and achievement as central values.
This is what Christopher Paul called toxic meritocracy. Flag is used to facilitate competition, first and foremost, and flaggability and toxicity overlaps when flagging toxicity could facilitate competition.
The current design of flag treats community members as merely data labelers,
and in turn community members don’t care about moderation as an important topic, and are oriented towards meritocratic values.
Against this backdrop, designing better algorithms to detect false flags does not resolve this dilemma and only is a cat-and-mouse game.
Instead, we argue that it is more important to think about how to engage community members across the full moderation cycle.
That's all, thank you very much for watching this.