Understanding toxicity in multiplayer online games: The roles of national culture and demographic variables

Abstract

Toxic behavior (TB) is a negative response to in-game frustration in multiplayer online games (MOG) that can ruin the playing experience, causing financial damage to MOG operators. Understanding the drivers of TB is an important step to curb the behavior. In this work, we consult the model of national culture (MNC) as well as demographic variables (e.g., education, gender, and age) as antecedent variables of TB using an exploratory design. We surveyed players of League of Legends and Dota 2 with two samples, based on the MNC, from North America (n=155) and India (n=119). We observed significant cultural differences in TB, with higher levels of self-reported toxicity in the Indian sample. In both samples, consistent with previous findings, age was negatively associated with TB. However surprisingly, there was a statistically significant difference among the two groups in terms of the relationship between education and TB.

Conducting Trade Area Analysis Using Mobile Data: The Case of Michigan’s Super-Regional Shopping Centres

“…Second, we understand the relevant predisposition of age as an indicator that practitioners designing countermeasures against TB need to focus not only on in-game aspects, but also need to consider the offline personality of players to design measures against TB in a user-centered manner to increase effect seizes of those measures. This finding adds to previous work that showed the relevance of cultural differences in relation to TB (Kordyaka et al, 2022). Predispositions such as age as a determinant seem to be particularly promising because this data can be easily collected.…”

“…Second, to the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one using a multifaceted theory of motivation postulating a full set of 16 genetically distinct motives (i.e., basic desires) in the context of TB [12]. Accordingly, our findings can be understood as a complementary understanding of motivation indicating valuable insights that can be merged with existing findings related to the technological environment of TB [11] and personal dispositions of players [7,14] to enable a more holistic understanding of the occurrence of toxicity.…”

“…On a level of content, TB is a umbrella term to describe various types of negative behaviors while playing MOBAs such as harassment, flaming, trolling, or cheating [6,10,17]. TB can show itself on different levels of manifestations such as verbally (e.g., voice chat), non-verbally (e.g., text chat) or behavioral components (e.g., intentionally supporting the enemy team) [7]. In Figure 1 a typical scenario showing TB in the MOBA LoL is depicted as an example of text related TB.…”

“…Within the context of entertainment and more specifically of multiplayer online battle arena video games (MOBAs) such as League of Legends (LoL) or Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2), one phenomenon related to the dark side of IT use, enjoying heightened levels of attention is toxic behavior (TB), which is an umbrella term used to describe various types of negative in-game behaviors including harassment, flaming, trolling (e.g. gaining enjoyment from intentionally annoying other players), and cheating (e.g., smurfing other accounts or the use of programs to automate certain in-game behaviors) during games [6,7,8]. On a level of content, TB is considered to be a sincere problem and the main driver of the churn of players relevant for the industry limiting the user experience for players [9,10].…”

What constitutes victims of toxicity - identifying drivers of toxic victimhood in multiplayer online battle arena games

“…First, our sample consisted only of English-speaking participants. Thus, future research is needed to determine whether our results can be generalized to other regions and cultures and cross-cultural research is needed that has been noted in previous work related to MOBAs already (Kordyaka et al, 2022). Additionally, we used M-Turk as a source of data, which might have confounded our results.…”