Impoliteness in Online Gaming

Digital Communication, Online Gaming, and Conflict

Online gaming occupies an ever-growing place in the daily lives of all kinds of people, and has grown from a small-population’s leisure activity to a global, multi-billion dollar industry. There are academic journals and college majors devoted to the topic of game studies, and universities have even begun offering eSports athletic scholarships for players to represent their schools in national and international eSports competitions. It is no surprise, therefore, that online gaming has become an object of study among academics across disciplines as diverse as business management, communications, anthropology, sociology (including digital sociology), linguistics, psychology, game studies, neurology, and many more (see Figure 1). Each discipline has its own terminology and is grounded in its own foundational theories, but there can also be a great deal of overlap. For example, since the goal of sociology is to learn about society, a sociologist might explore the role that gaming plays within a given society or culture (perhaps viewing language as manifestation of that role). The goal of linguistics, on the other hand, is to learn about language. A linguist might therefore study how the language of gaming reflects or reinforces social structures. Both involve language and both involve gaming, but they approach them in different ways and with different purposes. While this paper highlights the linguistic research on gaming (using linguistic citations and terminology), it is important to remember that the underlying themes are cross-disciplinary and therefore overlap with other fields.

While many believe that online games are an entertaining leisure activity, others express concern that games provide an environment that allows (and perhaps even encourages) negative behaviors such as rudeness, aggression, bullying, and face-to-face violence away from the keyboard (AFK). Impoliteness and other toxic behaviors in online gaming are therefore an area that is heavily discussed by parent groups, the gaming industry, and players, each of which has a different perspective.

In 1994 in the US, in part because of parent lobbyists, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), established a rating system that ranks video games according to their levels of violence, nudity, and explicit language. Despite these types of regulations, however, the gaming industry is still perceived by many as a destructive environment that encourages negative/immoral behavior, and calls for censorship of violent or otherwise controversial games continue.

Linguistic Research on Digitally Mediated Discourse

Before discussing online conflict, it is necessary to provide an overview of the features of digital communication more broadly. Since the 1990s, linguists have been researching interaction in digital contexts. Initially labeled computer-mediated communication (CMC), a key focus in this early research was an attempt to discover the ways that CMC differed from face-to-face (f-t-f) interaction—for example, how people adapted oral communication to a written transmission format (e.g., Locke, 1998; Yates, 1996). Later research (e.g., Benwell & Stokoe, 2006) questioned how (or if) CMC was actually different from spoken interaction, and largely concluded that the differences were not as great as was initially assumed. More recent research has argued that making such a distinction is impossible in any event, since our current communicative practices blur the boundaries between digital practice and life that takes place ‘afk’ (Locher, et al. 2015).

Nevertheless, some features of CMC do distinguish it from oral communication. Susan Herring, a pioneer in CMC research, proposed a faceted classification scheme to categorize the interwoven characteristics of digital communication with regard to (1) technical parameters and (2) social attributes of interaction (Herring, 2007). Some of the technical categories she proposed were:

• a/synchronicity: how much delay—if any—there might be between the time a message was sent and the time it was received,
• message format: how the platform requires messages be composed and transmitted (e.g., email has unlimited length and known recipients, while Twitter has limited length and unknown recipients)
• anonymity: how/whether the platform allows pseudonyms or nontraceable usernames

Some of the social and situational factors were:

• participant characteristics: characteristics that participants share—which to some extent determines the tone of the group (e.g., knowledgeable, engaged, informal, business-like, topic-focused)
• topic: the reason that brought the participants together (e.g., discussion of horses, books, or politics)
• norms: features of behavior that are expected and seen as normal—which differ from group to group (e.g., teasing, joking, markers of respect, formal titles)

By using these categories to classify digital environments we can assess the ways that digital interactions unfold, and gain a more thorough understanding of how the digital medium(s) affect conflict and perceptions of impoliteness.

A second development in digital discourse research relates to multimodality. Whereas the label “CMC” was adequate for initial explorations, it is now the norm to use devices and platforms far beyond those used in early CMC research. Rather than being restricted to a computer, communication now may also include interaction via mobile phones, tablets, televisions, and smart devices (such as Apple’s AI assistant Siri). Researchers have therefore modified the CMC label to reflect this evolving complexity, proposing labels such as digitally mediated communication (DMC) and digitally mediated discourse (DMD). While to some degree we might argue that these labels are unimportant, the underlying idea—that digital communicative practices go far beyond the limited facets and capabilities of an ‘old-style’ computer, is an important concern when examining digital conflict and impoliteness.

What Is Impolite?

As with research on the nature of DMD overall, conflict and impoliteness have also been the subject of academic inquiry for decades. One prominent area of exploration has focused on the phenomena of flaming and trolling—two of the terms most commonly used to describe digital conflict. Much of the early research on flaming and trolling saw them as being destructive and often intentionally harmful behaviors that took advantage of the characteristics of the digitally mediated environment (e.g., anonymity) to avoid consequences for problematic behavior.

Applying a framework similar to that of Herring’s outlined above, Graham & Hardaker (2018) examined the ways that community norms and technological capabilities affected impoliteness in DMD. This and similar studies highlighted the interplay between complex combinations of technological features that play a role in the ways that conflict and problematic behavior is identified and punished. In many cases, this research demonstrated that behaviors that in one community might be viewed as highly problematic and impolite, can instead be viewed as normal and even positive, fun, or ‘cool’ (Ensslin, 2012) among members of a community’s ‘in-group.’

A critical component of this process is identifying conflict/impoliteness in the first place. Since the 1990s, researchers in pragmatics have debated the nature of (im)politeness—whether it could be identified by predictive rules, or whether it must be identified according to the contextual influences of the given interaction (for an overview of this early research see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2019). Although online sites do not necessarily use the label ‘impolite,’ many have FAQs, codes of conduct, or other guidelines outlining what constitutes unacceptable behavior. It is common for these guidelines to include an explicit prohibition of racist, sexist, or other discriminatory language, as well as spamming, flaming, trolling and other negative actions specific to the community. The difficulty is that these terms, while common in DMD, do not always come with definitions, and may vary widely in interpretation from community-to-community. Flaming, for example, is often defined as communication in which an individual or group is targeted with negative or harmful messages, but it is unclear what, in a given digital community, might be classified as negative or harmful. Similarly, spamming can be defined very differently among different groups. And while it may be a marker of a hoax (and therefore highly problematic) in some instances (Heyd, 2017), it may be expected and even positive in others. In Graham & Hardaker’s study (2017), in fact, rather than being viewed as destructive, spamming was used as a way to build community and solidarity. There are also behaviors that go far beyond spamming, flaming, and trolling that can have dire consequences. Some examples include doxing (releasing someone’s physical contact information or address), DDosing (overloading their electronic resources to make them unusable), and swatting (falsely reporting illegal behavior to authorities resulting in arrival of a SWAT team to their physical address). While it seems obvious that acts such as doxing, DDosing, and swatting go far beyond what might normally be classified as impolite, a recurrent question in impoliteness research is where lines should be drawn between behavior that is impolite, insulting, aggressive, threatening, or downright violent. It is clear, then, that vague and inconsistent definitions of conflict and/or impoliteness can be problematic and may require knowledge of the norms of a given digital community of practice (Lavé & Wenger, 1991; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992) to evaluate whether impoliteness has occurred.

Online Gaming as a Communicative Environment

As a venue that continues to grow exponentially each year, online gaming is a fertile environment for research on communicative practice. At the forefront of linguistic research in this area is the work of J. P. Gee who has explored online gaming’s relationship to teaching literacy since the mid-1990s. As online gaming has become more varied and complex, his investigations have broadened to focus on both the use of games in the classroom and games as an avenue through which social structures more generally are developed, enacted, and (re)negotiated. Gee’s research presents gaming as a lens through which we can evaluate not only teaching practices, but also argues that gaming (and research on it) is a vital activity because it is there that we conceptualize our societies and our roles within them (Gee, 2015). As Ensslin and Balteiro (2019: 1) put it, videogames “carry enormous ideological weight that can inform people’s views and behaviors inside and outside the fictional gameworlds they inhabit.”

The focus on gaming as an avenue through which to establish and negotiate social relationships has led to a great deal of research that takes a constructivist approach to topics such as identity and community in gaming (e.g., MacCallum-Stewart, 2014). Such studies often examine the ways that the preset characteristics of a given game influence the ways we form relationships and craft our in-game identities (which we then communicate to others). These studies examine questions such as how the genre of a game (First-Person Shooter, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, etc.) affects communicative practices and how the game features (e.g., choice of avatars, ability to communicate with teammates) affect our practices both in-game and away from the keyboard.

Increasingly, there is also growing research on game broadcasts either on mainstream television (e.g., ESPN) or via personal channels on platforms such as YouTube or Twitch.tv. Research on communication in ‘traditional’ competitive sports is well established, but research on live-broadcast game streams and eSports is also growing. These investigations attempt to enhance our understanding of the way streamers balance multiple (multimodal) demands amidst the rituals that are inherent in competitive sports. Game streamers who broadcast their matches, for example, must balance communicating via chat with viewers while simultaneously sending written messages to teammates and playing the game by directing images on the screen. It is reasonable to expect that, as online gaming continues to grow in popularity and complexity, research on multimodal communication and language use in this highly dynamic setting will continue to grow.

How Impoliteness & Conflict ‘Play Out’ in Online Gaming

Finally, within the larger context of online gaming research, there are many studies that focus more specifically on conflict, impoliteness, and ‘toxic’ communication. One area that has received attention is role of gender in online gaming. The gaming industry has been recognized by many researchers as being the domain of the straight white male (e.g., Salter & Blodgett, 2017), with other groups being either un(der)represented, or relegated to stereotyped roles and tropes (e.g., Grey, 2012; Salter, 2018; Shaw, 2011). Gender is frequently acknowledged as fuel for conflict, where women are often ostracized or attacked with misogynistic insults when other players discover that they are female.

In August of 2014, Anita Sarkesian published a series of YouTube videos where she noted that females in games were represented as stereotypical tropes: the powerless damsel-in-distress who must be saved by male characters (e.g., Princess Peach), and the slutty warrior who fights battles with flowing hair and impractical ‘armor’ that leaves her arms and midriff exposed and vulnerable (e.g., Xena, Warrior Princess). After publishing her exposé, Sarkesian’s private address was doxed (i.e., leaked to the public) and she received harassment and death threats severe enough that she moved to a hotel for a period of time.

This case, which was labelled ‘Gamergate’ in the media, led to a flurry of research across many disciplines where scholars set out to assess impolite and conflictual behavior as they intersected with gender in online gaming. Some studies assessed how women adopted invisibility in response to impolite/aggressive behavior. Amanda Cote, for example, in her 2017 study of gender and online harassment of female gamers, found that females were active participants in gaming subculture. She also determined, however, that they carefully navigated their participation within the gaming community so as to not expose themselves as ‘outsiders’ and risk further harassment. Other research has determined that females take advantage of the stereotypes and expectations of the male-centric gaming environment. Graham (2018), for example, found that some female gamers fight harassment by adopting hypersexualized identities. This strategy allows them to control the narrative and thereby co-opt the power of the stereotype that placed them in a disadvantaged position.

Harassment remains a pervasive characteristic of video gaming. Estimates are that 83% of adult video game players have witnessed toxic behavior while gaming. Inappropriate behaviors in multiplayer games include foul or abusive language, acting out, and general rudeness. Gaming behaviors can delve into even darker areas such as Holocaust denial, racism, and even physical threats and stalking. Studies suggest these types of behaviors are on the rise. Gaming organizations and publications have attempted to raise awareness by issuing guidelines on acceptable online behaviors. More such efforts are required to counter a negative aspect of what otherwise is an engaging environment for tens of millions of gamers.

Looking to the Future

Expansion of research on online gaming is inevitable as gaming takes on increasing prominence in society. Constructivist explorations of gaming as a force for identity building and social action will no doubt continue to expand, including an evolving examination of conflict, aggression, and impoliteness. Given rising awareness of demographic disparities in the online gaming community, we can hope for increased research examining demographic groups that have historically been ‘invisible’ in this context. A rising awareness of multimodal strategies is also likely to direct future research, including greater attention to the role of AI/bot-generated communication as a component of online gaming.

About the Author

Dr. Sage Graham is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee. Her research addresses conflict, misunderstanding, and impoliteness in a variety of contexts, including digital environments, medicine, and professional interaction. Most recently, her focus has been on ethical responsibilities when conducting research on multimodal and digital interactions.

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