Just about everyone involved in gaming has heard terms similar to “toxicity” by now. Toxicity in the world of gaming could be defined as “an environment in which the majority of players are hostile to other players”. Toxicity includes constant use of vulgarity, harassment, team killing, hacking, personal insults, use of slurs, spamming, and lack of volume control (screaming). We’ve all come across that type of gamer once or twice. Someone starts spewing obscenities and/or epithets through the mic or text chat and you let out a deep sigh, hoping if you ignore them, they’ll just go away. However, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, other people join in and in the worst case, the people being toxic are in the majority. They are bad sports in the worst kinds of ways. Anyone who plays games online has participating in a toxic game once or twice but few seem to be able to explain accurately what causes some gamers to behave in such mean and nasty ways.
My guess is as good as any but I do have a theory. I believe that as competitiveness, which includes several factors about how a game is played and perceived, increases so to does toxicity or the chances of people being toxic while playing that game. Probably the best and most relevant example is League of Legends. It is highly competitive, with a pro circuit and ranked matches and I believe that it is because of that competitive environment and perception, players tend to be more toxic. Similar games that have notoriously nasty communities include Call of Duty, Madden, and Grand Theft Auto Online. Just enter the title of one of these games and the word “rage” to the YouTube search bar and you’ll be greeted to thousands of videos that lend even more credence to what I’m saying here.
We still have a few major questions to answer at this point. The first being “Why does competitiveness breed toxic gaming environments and toxic gamers?” The answer is pretty simple: no one likes to lose. Think about any time you’ve played a first person shooter and died several times in a row. Think about the time you played your favorite MOBA and it seemed like the enemy champions were trashing your team with ease. How did you feel? More than likely, angry. What did you think? More than likely that everyone else was to blame but yourself. Even though many of these highly competitive games require that teams work together, no one likes to admit that their team played together and lost together. Egos take over and even the guy at the bottom of your team’s scoreboard with no kills and 15 deaths doesn’t want to admit he contributed to a bad game in any way. It is in common situations like these that vulgar language and epithets dominate and the situation becomes impossible to defuse.
The next question we have to ask is “Why is toxicity a bad thing?” I can envision someone thinking “That’s just part of gaming. Welcome to the internet.” I would ask that person, do we as gamers really want toxicity to be a part of gaming? Do we want to be thought of as an intolerant, angry community of people no one can stand to be around? I’d hope not. And even if we did, a thought that ought to make you shudder in disgust, I’m of the persuasion that toxicity can lead to worse gameplay. It’s not much of a secret that children who grow up in toxic environments perform more poorly in social and academic settings. This is due, in part, to the mental and emotional exhaustion they experience attempting to cope with toxicity. While not nearly as detrimental, that kind of exhaustion can happen when a game environment gets to be toxic. Players focusing more on dealing with terrible people and less on play.
The final question is “What can we do about it?” We obviously can’t stop games from being competitive and toxic players have just as much a right to play the games that we all do. Still, we have many tools available to us. Muting and blocking helps to, at least, keep nasty players away from you personally. Player banning also helps, but only if players are willing to properly report misconduct and the bans are being handled by some impartial party. Community managers and enforcers could develop and start using better tools to monitor games, like game recording, chat logs, etc. to deal with toxic players and situations. All of these tools are currently in use, and the more people use and improve upon them, the better the gaming community will be because of it.
Before we close, let me make something explicitly clear: Gamers do not need censorship. I am not advocating smacking someone with a ban hammer because they dropped the N-word once in a Call of Duty lobby. I’m saying let those people play with other people like them, and let the rest of us enjoy our games without having to deal with that kind of frustration. It will eventually make gaming more pleasant, if not more fun for everyone.
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