Detoxing Online Games

Toxicity and hate are on the rise both offline in political rhetoric and civic discourse and online on social platforms and in digital playgrounds that, by design, convert our connections from relationships to transactions. In the case of online games, player safety is now a pressing academic and industry concern, with 76% of adults and 37% of minors experiencing toxicity, hate and harassment, including extremist and white supremacy rhetoric [1]. Our research lab has been investigating these issues over the last three years, focusing particularly on the experiences of adolescents (ages 13-25) and possible solutions to our shared problem of community. Growing out of research on school-affiliated teen esports programs (NASEF) and their academic and social-emotional impacts on youth, which revealed some of the dynamics of tilt and toxicity and the transformative role of coaches and peer mentors, this research adopted a tripartite model assuming that all online players, at some time or another, have been not only bystanders and victims to harmful behaviors but also, even if rarely admitted, perpetrators as well.

In this presentation, I review our most recent findings on exposure to toxicity and hate in online games, adolescent players’ attitudes and responses to such behavior, and understanding of its real-world consequences. I then explore the question of whether and how online game platforms may normalize toxicity and hate, not by overt design but by negligently steeping players in dysregulated environments that, over time, inculcate players into forms of rhetoric and behavior harmful to themselves and others. The solution, I argue, is not merely ideational but relational: From a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning, belief change occurs through interactions with others in joint activity through which individuals calibrate one another to new representations and interpretations of the world. Cultural tools and artifacts mediate this process, but their meaning is culturally defined, not natural fact. In this light, our liberators will not be the games industry but we the players ourselves. Here, I sketch a generalizable approach to addressing the issues we now face, one based on reconnection, reconciliation, and recognition of the fact that, in a world designed to convince us that our value can be measured in likes, currency, and clicks, we are all only temporarily abled, conjecturally benevolent, and occasionally whole. These shortcomings, however, are indeed the very source of our shared cure: connection. And it is on the basis of such connection that we literally shape and change other people’s minds – through a kind of radical hospitality [3] or radical kinship [2] that recognizes that belonging comes first, beliefs second. There is no other, only us. And joint play is one of our most potent vehicles.