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Inquiry Project Annotated Bibliography

Yarince Pascual-Mateo

Mrs. Jizi

UWRT 1105

12/9/17

Maher, Brendan. Can a Video Game Company Tame Toxic Behavior? Nature News, Nature

Publishing Group, 30 Mar. 2016, www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-

tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647.

In the article Can a video game company tame toxic behavior?, author Brendan Maher

writes about how online gaming is associated with toxic behavior, and how the gaming company

RIOT games is trying to combat it in their game League of Legends. Brendan starts out retailing

his experience with this type of behavior, saying that in less than a minute of playing the game,

in the champion selection phase, he was instantly called a faggot for not choosing quickly,

because of this experience, he went on to research how RIOT games hired a team of researchers

to study the everyday gamer interaction with each other in the game.

What I have taken from this article is that the hired researchers found out that only 1% of

the players in the game are consistently toxic, with 5% of those players being trolls, people who

on purpose act out toxic behavior just to have fun, and the rest being people having a bad day.

With the information they found, Riot Games created 24 in-game messages to encourage good

behavior in players, giving them constructive feedback and telling them that being rude would

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only make things worse. With this system, it decreased the amount of negative attitude, verbal

abuse and offensive language, but by a small percentage.

This Source was published by Nature Publishing Group, was posted on the Nature

International Weekly Journal of Science, and was written by Brendan Maher. The author has a

education from Loyola University, have freelanced for nature for two years before joining.

Before Nature, he was senior editor for the Scientist, and has been writing and editing life-

science news for more than eight years.

Madigan, Jamie, and Jeffrey Lin. Podcast 4: Toxic Behavior. The Psychology of Video Games,

The Psychology of Video Games, 15 June 2015,

www.psychologyofgames.com/2015/06/podcast-4-toxic-behavior/.

In this Podcast, Interviewer Jamie Madigan interviews Riot games head of Player

Behavior Team Dr. Jeffery Lin. They talk about what types of toxic behavior they experience,

what info that Riots research team got from the players about toxic behavior, and how Dr. Lin

and his team is using this data to make a system to combat against toxic behavior.

What I can use from this podcast is to show how Dr. Lin and his team created a special

AI system that is able to catch toxic behavior like spamming, feeding, and saying offensive

things, and be able to deal out the appropriate punishment, but it also helps players to not do this

type of behavior by using positive reinforcement and tips to help them get better.

The interviewer Jamie Madigan got a BA in Psychology at The University of Tulsa and a

PH.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at University of Missouri-Saint Louis and written

a book on video games and psychology called Getting Gamers. Dr. Jeffrey Lin got his PhD at

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University of Washington, has worked in multiple gaming developers like at Valve as a research

scientist, and Riot Games as a Lead Game Designer.

Schreier, Jason. Game Designer Says Developers Would Be More Candid If Gamer Culture

Wasn't So Toxic. Kotaku, Kotaku.com, 25 Sept. 2017, kotaku.com/game-designer-says-

developers-would-be-more-candid-if-g-1818729507.

In this article, Journalist Jason Schreier writes about the long Twitter post that veteran

game designer and programmer Charles Randell talks about how he and other people in the

gaming industry cannot be open about their production because of the fear of harassment and

threats from the toxic side of gaming, he details this by talking about his encounter when a rude

kid was bad talking about his work and in a really rude manner out in public.

I Can use this source to show the adverse effects of toxic behavior in gaming are so

strong that it affects the developers not only in an economic sense, with their games getting bad

reputation which make it lose people which in turn is a lose in revenue, but in a personal take

since they are afraid of being harassed and getting death treats for just for saying something

about a game.

Writer Jason Schreier got his education from New York University, first worked at Wired

as a writer for 2 years, and now works at Kotaku as a news editor for more than 5 years. Charles

Randell got his education from Digi Pen Technology institute, and was in multiple gaming

companies like Ubisoft, Gameplay Ninja, Bioware, and digital Extremes as a lead programmer.

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Works Cited

Lewis-Evans, Ben. Anti-Social Behavior in Games: How Can Game Design Help? Game

Developer Conference. Game Developer Conference, 2015, San Francisco, Moscone

Center, www.gdcvault.com/play/1021799/Anti-Social-Behavior-in-Games.

This Lecture by Dr. Lewis is about the toxicity in gaming culture, and how game

developers can implement different systems to combat the toxic behavior in their games and in

their community.

I can use the different strategy Dr. Lewis has made to deal with this type of behavior by

using the information he got from using these systems and how effective they are with dealing

with this type of behavior. I can also use his experience of toxic behavior to show how prevalent

it is.

The Game Developers Conference is a well know conference that thousands of

programmers, developers and gaming insiders come to learn about new development break

through and what new games are coming out. Dr. Ben Lewis-Evan got his PhD in Psychology in

human factors and traffic psychology from the University of Groningen, and he worked as a User

Experience Lead researcher for Epic Games.

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Works Cited

09/02/2015, Wesley Yin-Poole Published. Valve Issues Warning to Counter-Strike: Global

Offensive ESports Community. Eurogamer.net, Euro Gamer, 2 Sept. 2015,

www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-09-valve-issues-warning-to-counter-strike-global-

offensive-esports-community.

In this piece, Writer Wesley Yin-Poole writes about Valve going to its on-Counter Strike

eSports community to talk about the pros behavior in a the last few competitions and how they

cheated. Valve believes that toxic behavior in their games my come from the pros who play the

games, so they decided to go confront the pros in public, so players can stop following their

behavior.

I would use this to show an example of a company dealing with horrible behavior in their

community by going to the pros who people look up too and tell them to stop cheating or acting

in a rude and deeming behavior to other players.

Valve Is a well known game studio who made CSGO, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Half

Life, they also Created the most used PC game marketplace with steam. Journalist Wesley Yin-

Poole is a deputy Editor at Euro gamer for 3 years and got his education from University of

London City.