Traumatizing or Just Annoying? Unveiling the Spectrum of Gamer Toxicity in the StarCraf II Community

Traumatizing or Just Annoying? Unveiling the Spectrum of Gamer Toxicity in the StarCraf II Community

Traumatizing or Just Annoying? Unveiling the Spectrum of Gamer Toxicity in the StarCraf II Community

Samuli Laato, Bastian Kordyaka, Juho Hamari

Abstract

"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 cat-egories 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 fndings, we derive a conceptual model for diferentiating toxicity from mildly annoying and more severe behaviors. The discovered view of toxicity challenges the prevail- ing 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."

Reference

Laato, S., Kordyaka, B., & Hamari, J. (2025). Traumatizing or just annoying? Unveiling the spectrum of gamer toxicity in the StarCraft II community. ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3613904.3642137

Keywords

Gamifcation, Toxicity, Online games