Toxic Behaviour in Multiplayer Competitive Video Games

Toxic behaviours in online competitive video games are often discussed but very nebulously defined. This is despite toxic behaviours being rampant in competitive online video games with most matches seemingly containing some unacceptable behaviours. A focus is given to understanding feelings towards toxic behaviours from the perspective of gaming community members. Seeing these behaviours from a community perspective is vital to ensure that games create and enforce rules with their communities best intentions at heart. These may or may not align with video game rule sets provided by developers and publishers. A study was conducted first to inform on community experiences with toxic behaviours to increase understanding. This increased understanding and examples were used to create a further study to directly assess community members feelings on the behaviours given as examples. An attempt to categorise these behaviours was made using game rule sets and the accuracy of this assessed by community response. From these studies, conclusions can be drawn relating to real world experiences with toxic behaviour. It is found that toxic behaviours are heavily linked to the type of game being played with competition playing a key role. Several different categories of toxic behaviour are defined and assessed for community understanding and expectations. Suggestions are made to improve understanding of toxic behaviours in future studies and possible other avenues for future research