TY - GEN
T1 - Traumatizing or Just Annoying? Unveiling the Spectrum of Gamer Toxicity in the StarCraft II Community
AU - Laato, Samuli
AU - Kordyaka, Bastian
AU - Hamari, Juho
PY - 2024/5/11
Y1 - 2024/5/11
N2 - The aim of this work is to explore the forms of toxic behaviour that players encounter in competitive multiplayer real-time strategy (RTS) games. To this end, we carried out ethnographic observations and player interviews within the popular RTS game StarCraft II, and approached the data inductively, leading us to discover ten categories of toxic behaviour. While the harmfulness of toxic actions can be obtained as a product of severity and frequency, players' assessment of the severity of toxic behaviors was contextualized by, (1) directly observed; (2) background; and (3) extraneous factors. Following our empirical findings, we derive a conceptual model for differentiating toxicity from mildly annoying and more severe behaviors. The discovered view of toxicity challenges the prevailing paradigm of treating players' toxic behavior as a monolithic construct with a linear intensity spectrum. Instead, we advocate for a more granular approach, encouraging an understanding of the underlying dynamics behind negative online behaviors.
AB - The aim of this work is to explore the forms of toxic behaviour that players encounter in competitive multiplayer real-time strategy (RTS) games. To this end, we carried out ethnographic observations and player interviews within the popular RTS game StarCraft II, and approached the data inductively, leading us to discover ten categories of toxic behaviour. While the harmfulness of toxic actions can be obtained as a product of severity and frequency, players' assessment of the severity of toxic behaviors was contextualized by, (1) directly observed; (2) background; and (3) extraneous factors. Following our empirical findings, we derive a conceptual model for differentiating toxicity from mildly annoying and more severe behaviors. The discovered view of toxicity challenges the prevailing paradigm of treating players' toxic behavior as a monolithic construct with a linear intensity spectrum. Instead, we advocate for a more granular approach, encouraging an understanding of the underlying dynamics behind negative online behaviors.
UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642137
U2 - 10.1145/3613904.3642137
DO - 10.1145/3613904.3642137
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 1
EP - 18
BT - Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Sytems
PB - ACM
T2 - CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Y2 - 11 May 2024 through 16 May 2024
ER -