Toxic Language and Video Gaming: A Cross-Genre Approach
by Shu Jie Ting
Faculty Advisor: James Pennebaker, Graduate Student Advisor: Mohini Tellakat
Online games have become a popular platform for people to come together and interact in virtual worlds. Increasing connectivity generates greater audiences, increases community sizes and alters how individuals communicate with their online peers. Online, anonymous virtual environments also cultivate counter-normative behavior in correspondence to the online disinhibition effect, the phenomenon in which people become less restrained in expressing their thoughts in virtual environments. Social norms and moral rules are less rigorous than they would be in the real world due to the weaker presence of authority online. In fact, certain communities of online video games cultivate socially unacceptable behaviors. In the present study, this collection of behaviors is referred to as toxicity. Online multiplayer games often incite toxicity due to its competitive nature and need for cooperation from teammates. This study investigates the toxic language use in communities of different online multiplayer game genres; we predict increased use of negative rhetoric in gaming communities for genres with greater cooperative need. Sample data will be collected from online forums and analyzed using language analysis programs.