Hostile Players
Hostile Players
Hostility, antagonism, toxicity, and cynicism are all feelings that people experience every day. Yet, many play games to escape such negative realities of their day-to-day lives.
However, even in games these aspects are present – providing contention and disharmony for players who are often attempting to escape these aspects from their realities.
Though, there are players in games that serve as the source for these antagonistic behaviors. But what are they? Why do they exist, and how can the ill effects of their behavior be mitigated by game designers themselves?
This article will examine the concept of “hostile players” in games. Hostility will be analyzed through four different lenses including cynicism, antagonism, griefing, and toxicity in gameplay.
The reasons behind hostile behaviors will also be examined across specific dimensions: emotion, disconnection, social structure, game structure, leadership, and iterative development.
Examples of hostile player behaviors will be covered along with the kind of negative effects that these hostile players impart on both other players and the game state.
This article will close on some positive and applicable steps for addressing hostile player behavior including remediation, player agency, and designing games for positivity in player experiences.
What is Hostility?
Hostility is not often discussed in terms of gameplay and player experiences. Therefore, this article will examine “hostile players” though the lenses of cynicism, antagonism, griefing, and toxicity.
Cynicism
Cynicism is a form of emotional detachment. It can originate from various sources, but is often characterized as distrust, callousness, and emotional numbness. So, it can be summarized as a kind of emotional detachment from a specific action or activity. In everyday behavior, it can also be seen as contempt, frustration, hopelessness, disillusionment, and distrust.
Overall, cynicism stems from a loss of purpose and connection. While games mainly combat these feelings, they can occur if the player feels that there is no means of progression or change of their progress within the game. Though cynics exist in areas outside of games and can be observed in workplaces and organizations.
Cynical employees are those who distrust leaders, resist change, and focus on negatives. This is usually actualized in indifferent attitudes and mental resignation from their responsibilities.
At its most basic level, cynicism is motivated disbelief. It is an emotional response to feelings of anger or frustration. This can come about from workplaces that are especially stressful but include dull or uninspiring projects or tasks. It can also come about from gameplay from particularly difficult levels, opponents, or activities.
Cynicism can also be observed on several different levels. Personal cynicism can often be traced to character traits and can be difficult to change. Societal or institutional cynicism is often based on disillusionment in broader systems. Occupational cynicism is based on the disenchantment with one’s own profession, but not necessarily the details of one’s own job.
The combination of the three can manifest in employee cynicism where one displays frustration and distrust of one’s organization or leadership. This is usually seen in change cynicism which is specially targeted towards organizational change efforts.
All these different types of cynicism can originate in games that have disenfranchised players. This is usually the result of removed decision-making capability, self-efficacy, or hopelessness at improving their own conditions or game state.
Therefore, all aspects of cynicism involve the belief in the absence of hope and acts as a corrosive component of experiences (whether they be employment or game-based).
Antagonism
Antagonists could be considered a step up from cynics, as they include all of the previous characteristics in addition to making someone highly disagreeable to those around them. Antagonism is mostly characterized by traits like immorality, combativeness, arrogance, and distrustfulness.
Antagonists take the aspects of cynicism one step further by being actively disruptive in their interactions. This is usually observed in being argumentative and rude with others.
Antagonistic people and players are often more willing to sacrifice interpersonal harmony with others for personal goals. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t competitive, but rather that they are willing to make the extra effort to be purposefully combative with others. This is usually accomplished by exploiting game structures to enact their own personal malice via griefing.
Griefing
Griefing can be described as applied cynicism and malice. This is usually seen as a “bad faith” player or someone who deliberately disrupts or annoys others outside of intended gameplay. This is usually observed in multiplayer video games as griefers are those who cause distress in others for their own amusement.
What is most stressful about griefers is that their activities might not intentionally break the game’s ROC (Rules of Conduct) but can often violate implicit rules for player engagement, which are harder to enforce.
Griefing activity is mainly seen in playstyles and actions that intentionally disrupt other players’ gaming experiences. These are usually activities that block, stop, or undermine other players’ agency that has no in-game benefit for the griefer, other than to amuse themselves.
Therefore, the combined philosophies of cynicism and antagonism are realized in the activities known as “griefing” which creates opportunities for player harassment, trolling, and the eventual creation of a toxic environment.
Toxicity
These combined aspects create a space that supports and reinforces toxicity between individuals. These places exist in many places and include workplaces where the combined actions of cynical and antagonistic people are actualized into manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting.
The results of this toxicity are prevalent where individuals feel punished, dejected, humiliated, and eventually fearful based only on their presence. These feelings extend from more than just the workplace and can include educational environments where such toxicity stems from environmental factors that make it systemic and eventually personal for those within it.
This toxic behavior can also be seen in games where the combined aspects of cynicism and antagonism create griefing behaviors which support toxic environments that become abusive, harmful, and disrespectful of others.
While these four areas inform what hostility is, the next section will discuss why these core aspects inform the root causes of hostility.
Why Does Hostility Exist?
This section will break down the six core reasons that cause these hostile activities in individuals. These are based around emotion, disconnection, social structure, game structure, leadership, and iterative development.
Emotion
Politeness may be the default behavior for individuals in many settings, but hostility occurs when politeness is no longer an understood and acceptable behavior. Rather, hostility occurs when the emotions involved default to hostile behaviors and feel “automatic.”
These feelings are also seen in the beginnings of cynicism, where individual behavior is based on past negative experiences. This could come about through gameplay with the past game experience of players from the same game, same group, or different games and different groups. These past experiences form the basis of emotional pain. Therefore, individual cynicism is often based on self-protection rooted in their history of past negative experiences.
Additional emotional causes for hostility is the phenomenon of “tilt” in gameplay. This is often embodied by an overwhelming state of anger, frustration, or discouragement based on gameplay. It often leads to emotional outbursts and passive-aggressive activities through griefing.
These griefing activities are often undertaken as part of cynical “self-protective” behaviors as well as escapism to avoid real-life issues. This can carry over to other infective emotional activities in other players through “grousing” which can amplify the overall negative sentiment of interactions with others if left unresolved.
Disconnection
Disconnection serves as another source of hostility as there are no clear relationships between individual effort, changes in interactions with others, and the game state. This closely resembles the “alienation of labor,” between what individuals produce and what the final product of their efforts are.
In educational environments, this disconnect can occur when instructors prioritize content over individuals. In high-impact traditional learning environments, this can cause hostility and toxicity in learners as they are not full participants, but rather “attendees” of learning. This prioritization of content is seen in scaled learning environments through eLearning where content is produced as a “one-size fits all” approach to training and learning that doesn’t fully realize students efficacy and agency.
This disconnection is also seen in the transactional nature of learners and their environment. Such an interpretation creates disillusionment with the value of learner’s education as well as a loss of a sense of engagement and purpose.
Social Structure
Another factor surrounding the prevalence of hostile players is the structure that surrounds them. One of them is the social structure and how power relationships are formed between individuals. This could come from organizations that value individualism and collectivism separately. Games, gaming communities, and organizations that promote more individualist behavior may empower those to take on more hostile characteristics compared to those that favor collectivist mindsets.
This focus is also based on constructivist views where organizations of people help identify and shape norms and expectations of other members. Therefore, when hostility arises from communities – it is often originates from the social structure that formed and cultivated them.
This cultivation can come about through individuals making emotional investments into the community such as asking questions and hoping for improvement. But their actions are shamed by others that often results in their own disappointment. This lack of respect and empathy towards others contributes to the creation of hostility between players.
Game Structure
The social structure of the organization and community often goes hand-in-hand with the game structure as it affects the prevalence of player hostility. This can come about through the formal structure of the game itself. This is most common in communities where game knowledge is hard to acquire, is decentralized, and is ever changing. Such features can be found in groups created around collectible card games. As the “meta-strategy” of the game is continually growing, and evolving, it is usually only significantly influenced by the actions of a privileged few.
This is further exacerbated by games with mechanics requiring greater investment of time and resources in learning how to play at an adequately competitive level. This aspect is often combined with the disinhibition of anonymity in online gaming communities that makes a ripe environment for hostility between players.
The competitiveness of these games online creates players who conform to specific social contracts around one another. This is usually associated with games that are based on “zero-sum” rewards systems where progression of one player can only be accomplished through the loss of another. Such systems are inherently contentious and can further exacerbate player hostility.
Leadership
Privileged leaders in communities often form both formal and informal social structures which promote and disseminate hostility between individuals. This can carry over from games to other environments such as workplaces where workers disbelief in management’s motivations create cynicism around specific changes.
Another workplace that sees hostility between individuals is education, where empty jargon and overused buzzwords can have a detrimental effect between instructors, students, and administrators alike. Such activities lead to an overall disconnect between parties.
Leadership in both workplace and educational environments affect and influence hostility in gaming environments due to the structure of the relationship around them. Hierarchical organizations that promote conditions that create hostile behaviors do so when there is a disconnect and separation between leadership and other organizational members.
Iteration
All of these areas create the conditions for player hostility to thrive, but the individuals and players themselves also play a role in perpetuating this behavior to others. These actions are not always just tolerated in games, but can often be rationalized, reframed, and passed onto other gamers when not addressed.
When this occurs, such hostility becomes a habitual practice for players and hostile behavior is responded to in kind. It’s important to address this for certain communities of individuals as this iterative development of toxicity is incredibly harmful. Nowhere is this more apparent than in communities of young learners or players where such negative behavior is easily emulated. Therefore, it’s important to act in communities with integrity and credibility of both thoughts and actions so as to not perpetuate hostile behaviors.
What are Hostile Behaviors?
Player hostility is based on antagonism such as aggression and antisocial acts. Previously, we explored griefing as hostile behavior in gamers. This manifests itself through team-killing, destroying player made creations, as well as stealing from, or harassing other players
These hostile behaviors treat other players not as fellow collaborators within the shared space of the magic circle, but as true opponents in implicit or explicit actions. These actions can be found in educational environments where teachers and students see each other as opponents instead of another person to cooperate with.
Likewise in work environments, these hostile behaviors are observed as manager lead activities where all mistakes are critical ones, achievements are ignored, and general confidence is undermined. Employees that are subject to these hostile behaviors express persistent frustration. This often coalesces into burnout through actively cynical or negative outlook through work. Otherwise, those working in hostile environments can also express quiet cynicism which includes low energy, low buy-in, and detachment from coworkers and the mission of the organization.
The results of hostile behaviors in games manifests itself in the upset of the flow experience. This interrupts players immersion and enjoyment. This can come about in games through the compromise of the integrity of the ludological agreement for players which can occur in three different frameworks. The first is through players undermining the law of code – what is technically possible within the game. The second includes the rules of conduct – or what players can expect from each other and from their play. The third includes those who fall victim from hostile behaviors and address the implicit rules of games and the assumed social norms and etiquette between players.
What are the Effects of Hostile Players?
This interruption of the “flow” state for gamers is critical as player satisfaction is compromised. With this comes the lack of player confidence in the game environment. In economics this is observed by individuals questioning everything but acting on little. In workplaces the effect is that employees feel psychologically unsafe and are therefore afraid to speak up for themselves. This is seen in employees who are more tense and unfriendly. In games, this harms players’ well-being as well as negatively affecting the game’s reputation and revenue.
The overall impacts of this effect on individuals reverts back to cynicism and the “why bother” effect that becomes the predominant mindset. These further fuels emotional disengagement and detachment from others because individuals feel that the system is “rigged’ against them.
The results of this is an “everyone for themselves,” mindset which, for employees, destroys the culture of the company through a decrease in enthusiasm and motivation and results and lower overall performance. This is met through an expectation of discontentment based on unmet expectations, betrayal, and overall disappointment.
These effects can be seen in gaming environments where hostile behavior is marked by decreased enthusiasm and energy from players. These effects spread like a virus impacting morale and the implicit ludological agreement between players. Hostile player activity through griefing adds to the negative outcomes for player by fomenting frustration and loss of interest in the game. This is due to depressive feelings and hopelessness in a gaming community where it seems pointless to engage and continue playing. A mindset which frames hostile behaviors as not just a morale issue, but one based on very human misgivings.
Remediation for Hostile Players
Hostility is not an irreversible process, but it is a challenging one. The first steps lie in attempting to understand the cause, conditions, and reasons for why hostile activity took hold. The next step involves working with and for others as part of shared responsibility to address the behaviors.
This begins with addressing what specific behaviors are breaking trust and have the greatest negative impact for individuals. Simply calling out hostile players and behavior starts with a small step that leads to larger actions. This honest reflection on player behavior is necessary for brokering an atmosphere of open honesty between players. This is necessary because the next steps require the restoration of authenticity, shared value, and a sense of purpose. While this might seem like lofty ideals for games, these motivations are often rooted in the desire and theory of play.
Therefore, it’s often useful to start with empathy to address hostile players. This could involve becoming your own cynic in attempting to identify and acknowledge activities that might cause cynicism and ultimately hostile player behavior. Hostile behavior cannot be addressed with data or logic alone, therefore it’s important to tap into the emotional reasons and motivations for players first and integrate them into your larger plan to address player hostility.
This collaborative work might be best in addressing the reasons for hostile behavior rooted in disconnection by allowing participants to actively participate in the remediation process. This makes hostile players shift the relationship between themselves and their environment.
Overall, this collaborative work in addressing the negative behaviors from hostile players is the first step. Those with higher emotional intelligence may be used to start this process, but it may be harder to accomplish utilizing only their support if others continue to promote a hostile environment.
Addressing Hostility through Player Agency
One of the best ways of addressing player hostility is through addressing their decision-making framework and player agency. This often serves as a root (disconnection) cause for hostility in the workplace where there is no control over work pace or decisions.
This is mirrored in game environments where there is a similar disconnect between the actions of players and their intended effects, which intensifies frustration. Therefore, one of the key steps to take is to empower individuals to make decisions. After that, it is necessary to provide actionable feedback and guidance so that individuals know the consequences of their choice and can adjust accordingly. This is best done through the removal of ambiguity through the implementation of clear goals, roles, and expectations.
Addressing player agency goes hand in hand with determining what kind of experience players’ want. This is something that they may be open and transparent about – but the question cannot be answered without first being asked. Therefore, in order for players reclaim their agency, you must provide the reasons and scope for why they must make decisions in the first place.
Designing Positivity in Player Experiences
With all that we’ve covered on hostile players, activities, and environments, we have not yet discussed a way to address these issues by instilling a sense of positivity in the player experience. This can come about in multiple ways. Specifically, the designer must balance player freedom, choice structure, and actionable decisions with a positive gaming experience.
This can be integrated in many ways and includes spanning narrative integration and shifts in players perspectives given new knowledge they’ve developed playing the game. This is especially helpful with feedback loops and in-game incentives that gently “nudge” players in one direction versus another.
In fact, designers can use character conflict as an opportunity for in-game drama and development. This is often seen as the main storyline plots for the game’s protagonist (the player character) battling the game’s antagonist (villain). Setting up this battle can be emotionally impactful: especially when it comes towards directing much of the angst that contributes to hostile player behavior.
This is because the presence of villains enhances the hero’s narrative. They give players a sense of purpose and emotional investment. Therefore, one of the ways that designers can build positivity into player experiences is by giving them someone to fight against and defeat.
These villains don’t have to be a grandiose antagonist. They can take on the form of “blockers” or characters that the player doesn’t have an emotional connection with and merely block the way forward in the story. More developed villains can incorporate embodied evil, whereas others can serve as comic relief. These are villains that can be goofy, endearing, and who can lighten the game’s tone.
Other types of villains are those that start off as companions and temporary allies, but then turn against the player (i.e. GLaDOS in the Portal series). This segues into designing and creating characters that have conflicting traits with the player as they evoke affection and repulsion from their activities and interactions. Overall, understanding how these villains affect players emotionally helps provide a richer, engaging, and more targeted and impactful player experience.
As a designer you can ask yourself during the design process: How does this game, the mechanics, and the characters in it make you feel before and after you play? Specifically ask yourself: how can the mechanics that I incorporate into the game affect, change, and manipulate emotion?
The answer to both won’t necessarily solve all issues of hostile players, but it will put you (the designer) on a path towards creating gaming environments where they can hopefully be avoided.
Takeaways
This article discussed hostile players. It covered and defined hostility in four different lenses including cynicism, antagonism, griefing, and toxicity. The reasons for hostility were discussed and included a review of the six dimensions that cause it in gaming experiences as well as in education and the workplace. This included emotion, disconnection, social structure, game structure, leadership, and iterative development of hostility over time.
Different types of hostile behaviors were covered as well as the overall effects of hostile players on a greater community. This article closed on some action steps that included remediation for hostile players, addressing hostility by building player agency, and finally designing positivity in player experiences.
This article covered hostile players in games. To learn more about gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.
Dave Eng, EdD
Principal
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Cite this Article
Eng, D. (2025, May 20). Hostile Players. Retrieved MONTH DATE, YEAR, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2025/5/15/hostile-players
Internal Ref: UXPJGRJDXTJ0