When Trash-talk becomes Abuse: Examining Problematic Speech and Behavior in World of Warcraft

Joshua Jackson, North Carolina State University

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Abstract

Building on Rubin and Camm’s (2013) heuristic regarding online griefing and trolling, this paper considers how anonymity, avatar creation, and online identity play into, and characterize, perceived-negative behavior in World of Warcraft. Using semi-structured interviews, ten World of Warcraft players (five self-identified men, and five self-identified women) with at least two years of constant playtime, were interviewed to try and gather a picture of their understanding regarding what types of behaviors, interactions, and social elements of World of Warcraft created ‘negative’ behavior.

Keywords: game studies, griefing, avatar studies, toxicity.

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Essay

Introduction

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) are persistent, computer-simulated online spaces in which players pursue various social and non-social goals such as questing, winning player-versus-player (pvp) matches, or gathering in groups to defeat powerful enemies (Bessière, Seay, Kiesler 2007). MMOGs are also a common place for forging social identities and trying new ways of communicating (Turkle, 1995). Often times, the condition of relative anonymity that MMOGs provide allow players to interact in ways that they would not normally, such as sharing controversial viewpoints without fear of real-life ostracizing, building self-confidence by practicing conversational skills, and, for a small percentage of players, participating in behaviors that are perceived to be negative, such as making inflammatory remarks or behaving in a negative way to bait players into reacting, or to distract or deter another player from completing the game goals (Buckels, Trapnell, Paulhus, 2014).

This article will explore how perception affects how players of the MMOG World of Warcraft (WoW) react to aggressive behavior, racial slurs, and any other in-game behavior that they perceive to be negative. These behaviors are commonly referred to as “griefing (Rubin and Camm, 2013). The current concepts of griefing are all binary; there is no accounting for the varying perceptions of players, only that certain behaviors are considered to be griefing, in any variety, regardless of intensity. This article will endeavor to expand upon Rubin and Camm’s 2013 heuristic of griefing, and provide a more appropriate, focused heuristic for MMOGs that accounts for behavior specific to MMOGs. I will start by examining current literature and theory on the issue, starting with online identity formation, then examining avatars and the degree of anonymity that they offer, and finishing the literature review section with a definition of common griefing practices. In the methodology section, I will go over the types of interview questions that I asked participants, and how I chose participants. In the results section, I will go question-by-question and examine trends that emerged in my interviews. Finally, in the discussion and further research section, I will attempt to make Rubin and Camm’s heuristic of griefing more appropriate for accounting for MMOG spaces, and examine how gender and perception affected participants’ perceptions of the events they described in their interviews, ending with my offering of recommendations on applicable future research.

Online Identity Formation

Online identity has been approached from many different theoretical backgrounds. Prior to MMOGs being an avenue of identity formation, Turkle, in Life on the Screen, described how, when we connect to the internet, and in an ever-increasing culture of connectivity, we have to redefine ourselves and see ourselves as “technobodies. (Turkle, 1995)” She speaks of the internet acting as a way to see identity multiplicatively, as opposed to fragmentarily as Friedberg did (Friedberg, 2006). Virtual spaces allow for a person to create multiple renditions of themselves to try out new ways of communication; new niches and new ways of thinking (Turkle, 1995). This multiplicity allows for different ways of expression that a person in singularity may not normally participate in. And with the dual mediation of two screens (one between the primary user and the online space, and one between the individual in which they are interacting with), an individual may feel a sense of invincibility in relative anonymity. One iteration of self may be boisterous and jolly in an online space, engaging with whomever is in the space with them without fear of being told to stop talking, or seeing the facial expressions of the people around them. Another iteration of self may make aggression comments and sexually charged statements as an outlet for intrusive thoughts, or as a way of projecting bullying they experience in real life; a sort of power swap in which the individual feels more powerful online than they do in day to day life (Law et al, 2015). Yet another iteration may choose to gender-bend and pretend to be the opposite gender just to experience what it’s like, or, in the sense of MMOGs, to obtain items, or attention (Song and Jung, 2015). Most of these theoretical backdrops are contingent on the observable user committing these actions, but the person being acted upon is not taken into clear consideration. Another issue is how perception effects how the person acted upon, reacts. Online identity formation theories widely do not take into account user empathy; simply what the user is doing, and the behavior that they are enacting.

Avatars and Anonymity

Some virtual spaces take identity expression and formation to another level in the form of customizable avatars, which allow for people to create an image that they may feel represents them (or what they would like to be) better (Bessière, Seay, Kiesler 2007), or it allows for modes of experimentation with gender (Song and Jung, 2015). Most MMOGs allow for extensive avatar customizability, in which a player can choose their race, color of their avatar’s skin, their hair color, facial hair, height, weight, anything. This customizability creates ways of projecting a real-life image into a virtual space, and allows for augmentation to ways of communicating and behaving. How an avatar looks can also lead to a player being made fun of, excluded, or picked on. One of the most studied examples of avatar attachment and identity formation centers around the game Uru, an MMOG that closed down in 2004. Pearce and “Artemesia (Perarce’s avatar in Uru)” (2007) penned a chapter for SECOND PERSON (2007) regarding how the social constructs of identity form and develop in MMOG worlds. Uru gave many players who were making their first forays into MMOGs a sense of embodiment and identity (Taylor 2002); it allowed for reinvention and reimaging; in some cases, as with some of the leadership of The Gathering whom were disabled, it allowed for an even playing field; a place where they could reembody themselves (Pearce, 2007). Pearce quotes members of The Gathering (the name of her guild) as saying that, in real life they were mostly shy, or loners. But, the anonymity and embodiment of an avatar provided them an avenue to shed the bonds of reluctance and form social attachments.

Often times, though, anonymity can lend to instances of problematic and aggressive behavior becoming a problem (Yang 2012). Turkle’s theory of multiplicity is especially relevant in this scenario. Players are creating an artifact of themselves; a vessel that they can choose to fill with whatever they choose. And as players fill these artifacts, they start to create a multiplicative image of themselves that acts as a shield; they can engage in behaviors that are aggressive or problematic and they themselves cannot be held responsible. Their avatar, instead, becomes the aggressor. This aggression can be classified into two forms: proactive aggression and reactive aggression (Crick and Dodge, 1996).

Reactive aggression (Crick and Dodge, 1996) starts to work on an angle of online negativity that builds on Turkle’s sense of multiplicative self. Reactive aggression, as opposed to proactive aggression, is centered on perception. If an individual in an online spaces perceives that a negative or hurtful comment is directed at them, they may react in like kind (Yang, 2012). If an individual’s perception of events online mirrors their real-life perception of events, often time virtual spaces can become lightning rods (Behesti & Large, 2012). Hertz and David-Ferdon (2011) posit that those that show aggression online are more likely to be experiencing some form of bullying or abuse in their non-virtual lives. As time goes by and the abuses suffered in real-life continue, the online aggression may escalate and perceptions may keep trending negatively for the user; everything may seem like an attack on them, and the reactive behavior becomes proactive behavior (Law et al, 2012).

Griefing and Common Practices Therein

Over time, this shift in behavior can simply become what is known as “trolling,” or a player making inflammatory remarks or behaving in a negative way to bait players into reacting, or to distract or deter another player from completing the game goals (Buckels, Trapnell, Paulhus, 2014). Another term commonly used lieu of “trolling” is “griefing;” the definitions are nearly identical. Rubin and Camm (2013) say that griefing is “…a situation in which a gamer, rather than completing the tasks outlined by the game, intends to cause grief to the opponents and disrupt their enjoyment of the game (Coyne et al., 2009; Dibbell, 2009; Foo and Koivisto, 2004).” Negative behavior and speech, such as actively excluding a player from activities based on sexual preference, race, or gender; cursing or using racial slurs; and abusing a position of power, such as a guild leader, or raid leader position, are often lumped unceremoniously into the melting-pot of griefing (Rubin and Camm, 2013). Blizzard specifically cites two categories of harassment in their support forum (Activision, 2015); things such as spamming and minor defamation are considered minor violations, while things like obscene language, hindering teammates or being nonparticipatory in team games, are considered serious violations. Sexual harassment and releasing real-life information are two examples of severe harassment.

Griefing is generally perceived as very black and white; a griefing practice is either bad, or not-so-bad. What this generalization of these behaviors fails to account for is player/participant perception of the behavior. For one player, a certain behavior may not constitute “griefing,” while for another player, the same behavior may go past simple “griefing” and into the realm of abuse.

Although only a small percentage of the player-base takes part in these activities (around 3%), the effects are far-reaching (Foo and Koivisto, 2004). A survey conducted by Coyne et al in 2009 revealed that 95% of the 86 individuals surveyed admitted to having experienced griefing in one form or another in their interactions on Second Life, a popular online social MMOG.

In World of Warcraft, the art of trolling has had over a decade to evolve and ingrain itself in the game’s culture. Foo and Koivisto (2004) describe some aspects of trolling (or griefing) as:

 

Rubin and Camm (2013) proposed a 5th dimension of griefing behavior called “non-malicious griefing” where players refuse to follow the rules of a virtual space just for entertainment. This category, grouped with their heuristic of griefing varieties gives a salient, if black-and-white, picture of common trolling and griefing activities.

What most of the current literature on problematic behavior in virtual spaces fails to take into account is the player’s perception of the event occurring. Is the event happening/the speech in the chat channel/the actions of the other participant(s) as bad as the participant is perceiving them to be? Are the events worse than the participant is perceiving them to be? Perception has a great deal to do with what message a player receives from an interaction, as well. Without the human elements of body language, facial tics, voice inflection, or intimate knowledge of the person on the other side of the screen (Merleau-Ponty, 1945), simple-seeming interactions in WoW can quickly turn into misinterpretations. Additionally, literature does not take into account the gender of the player, which creates a bias in and of itself (Ridgeway, 2011).

Additionally, a good amount of this literature fails to account for nonbinary gender identification. Due to the severe lack of theoretical framing or knowledge regarding how nonbinary gender identification is treated regarding online harassment in MMOGs, this article’s scope cannot responsibly account for anything outside of the gender binary of self-identified male or self-identified female. Each of my ten participants self-identified to me as either male or female in their informed consent document; the option of “neither/other” was present in the informed consent document, but no participant self-identified on their paperwork in that way.

Methodology

This study will consist of ten semi-structured interviews (Riessman, 2007; Patton, 2012; Merriam, 2009), and in those interviews I will ask participants about specific times they experienced varying degrees of problematic behavior. Appendix A will contain a skeleton of my interview questions. The first two questions ask participants to recall a problematic and unacceptable experience (problematic and unacceptable meaning they perceived the interaction to be so negative that they had to remove themselves from the situation), and a problematic but acceptable experience (problematic but acceptable meaning they perceived the interaction to be negative in nature, but not so negative that they wanted to remove themselves from the situation). The next question asks participants to recall a time when they participated in behavior that they recognize as problematic or negative. The next question asks participants where they think a situation goes from problematic but acceptable to problematic but unacceptable. The next question asks participants whether they think men and women perceive negativity differently in online spaces, and asks them to think of an example. As a note, participants were asked specifically ‘men’ or ‘women’ because, as I said before, the scope of this article cannot account for gender nonbinarism regarding griefing due to a severe lack of theory regarding gender nonbinarism in MMOGs. The final question asks participants how they think the general community atmosphere of World of Warcraft has changed since they started playing.

Whereas Rubin and Camm’s analysis of the Something Awful thread that their study is based on was primarily from the viewpoint of the griefers, the interviews I conducted put the participant in both the victim and the perpetrator’s roles to see how, if at all, their own perception of the negative things they’ve done in the past affected how they perceive negativity. The criteria for picking interview participants was as follows:

 

I recruited my participants from widely different sources. Two participants volunteered because they used to play with me, four other participants were recruited through posters at DePaul University, and the final four participants came from the official World of Warcraft forums. This wide array of experiences, backgrounds, and temperaments will yield a more diversified picture of what negativity is.

I will analyze each interview (per Krippendorf, 1980) and group prevailing trends question by question.

Results

In this section, I will go question-by-question and highlight relevant trends in the interviews I did. I will start with the question asking participants about their most problematic experience, then their problematic but acceptable experiences, then I will move on to their personal experiences doing something they deemed problematic. Next, I will examine trends in the question asking if participants think that men and women perceive negativity differently in online space, then their take on how the community atmosphere of World of Warcraft has changed since they started playing, and finally, I will end this section with participants’ experiences using the report feature and how they think it affected the behavior they were reporting.

For the clarity of this article, my participants’ self-identified gender will be included here so that readers may make better inferences of how their gender affected their experiences:

Participant A—Male
Participant B—Female
Participant C —Male
Participant D—Male
Participant E—Female
Participant F—Female
Participant G—Male
Participant H—Male
Participant I—Female
Participant K—Female

Problematic and Unacceptable Behavior

The first question I asked participants was “Tell me about a time you experienced negative or problematic behavior so bad that you wanted to remove yourself from the situation altogether.” This question yielded interesting results in that eight out of the ten interviewees cited experiences that did not take place in the game as one of the most negative experiences they’ve had. These events, which I will label as “Real Life Aggression,” occur mostly over voice-clients like mumble or ventrillo, which don’t have any connection with World of Warcraft. Participant A said:

I used to raid with a pretty progressed guild, and towards the end of this one guy being raid leader, he… would yell at you if, on Valithria, you let any adds get to her… He yelled at me for a solid 5 minutes in ventrillo once after I accidentally used Heroism before a pull.

Participant C’s experiences were very similar:

…he started this crap with me, and I told him to fuck off, that he wasn’t the raid leader and if any of the management had a problem with what I was doing, then they could talk to me. Dude freaks out, starts screaming at me, calling me a faggot and telling me to never fucking talk to him again like that, that he was my better and my elder, and that he deserved my respect. Literally 10 minutes of screaming at me in mumble, calling me every name under the sun, telling me I was the worst Arms warrior in history, and that he wished my mom had had an abortion.

The overwhelming trend that this question brought to light is that most of the participants’ most negative experience came at the hands of another player, but not in the game, hence why I deemed it “Real Life Aggression;” the mechanics of the game itself played a role in bringing out the negativity in others, but far and away, it was due to the aggressor trying to assert themselves into a position of power over the participant. All of these examples, too, came from raid-based gameplay. Each participant that reported “real life aggression” reported that they experienced it at a time when they were playing in raid groups of 10 or 25 people. Participant D’s experience was not directed at him, but rather at someone in his raid group, and he cited that there was so much vitriol that he felt uncomfortable.

The raid leader used to pick on this one healer, a resto shaman, extra. As in, she already topped the healing charts by a big margin, but every time he got low on health, he’d say something like “Where are my heals, you useless cunt.” … We come back in [after wiping the raid], and he starts out all quiet and asks her “Do you know how or why my earth shield dropped off me? She’s like “No?” And then he goes on, I shit you not, a 10 minute tirade about what a worthless cunt she is, what a stupid piece of shit she is, how she’s lucky that he even brings here anywhere…

The dynamic of a raid lends itself to abuse if power falls into the wrong hands; generally, there is a raid leader who calls out mechanics that are occurring (rocks falling, fire from the boss, platforms crumbling away) to allow other players to pay attention to damaging the boss (Paul, 2010). Raid leaders, traditionally, will call out when other players do not perform their duties correctly. This isn’t to shame them, but to keep them on their toes and for them to recognize that they did not perform the correct action. Implicitly, this gives a raid leader an elevated position above the other people in the raid. Participant E experienced this, as well:

We had a raid leader who would regularly hold us past time to quit and threaten to kick us and replace us if we left or dc’d… So we’re doing Lei-Shen, and we’ve been doing it for the whole raid night, four hours, and its quitting time, and we’re all so sure that he’s going to hold us after… so we put an attempt in at 1:56 am and we wipe around 35%. He just loses it. He starts like… primal screaming. Not screaming anything coherent at first, just screaming. All of a sudden we hear glass break, and his wife screaming in the background. She’s yelling at him to calm down, stop, and then he comes back and starts screaming at us that we’re all useless and that we can’t do anything right and he’d rather kill himself then raid with us anymore and then his wife starts screaming something and then everything goes silent. We sit there for like five minutes before the GM dismisses us.

The stress that raid leaders put on themselves is a double edged sword. Situations like Participant E’s occur when the stress becomes too much, but on the other hand, that stress can lead to raid leaders thinking they are above reproach, like what happens with Participant I:

[The raid leader] wasn’t loud or anything, but when you fucked up, he always called you out… I was really sick for a while… and even thought I kept all of the guild leadership in the loop on it… I STILL got called by [the raid leader] when I would mess up… I got tired of getting called out because the medication slowed down my reaction times, so I started calling [the raid leader] out every time he messed up. Stand in fire for longer than a few seconds? Called out. No active mitigation up? Called out. When we were working on Ra-Den, he messed something up with the oozes, and I called him out and he just started screaming at me. Like just screaming. He told me he hoped I died, and that I shat my kidneys out, and all this other stuff. He guild kicked me in the middle of this terrible tirade…

With most cases of this real life aggression, there is a power imbalance, to some extent. This may be due to performance, or perception that the aggressor is better than the victim, or just simply from, like Participant I’s situation, a role leading to an imbalance of power.

The other two trends that emerged from this question were issues of sexual harassment, and prolonged PVP aggression (or PVP griefing). Participant B’s experience with PVP griefing was:

…when I first started, I played a character on Illidan, an Alliance character, and I could not level past 5 because of how often high level characters were killing me, or killing quest givers… I started a character on a Friday, and by Sunday I was so through with that I deleted the character altogether. I even tried playing in the middle of the night, but there were still a bunch of people camping the Alliance starting area.

PVP griefing is still a contested issue in the community. There have been official posts from World of Warcraft community managers saying that they do not see this kind of PVPing as problematic, most famously being Vrakthis’ post about griefing (2013):

When it comes to PVP Realms, it’s unlikely that In-Game Support will intervene when players are subjected to corpse camping. Instead, we encourage players to band together with your faction to bring down the person who is after you. Creating a character on a PVP realm carries with it the inherent danger of being attacked out in the wild, often repeatedly.

With Blizzard taking such a decided stance on the issue, they offer no quarter for players who choose to roll a character on a PVP server and experience this kind of game play. Yet, even though it’s not against the terms of service, players still find it to be a negative experience. Participant C experienced a similar situation, but counted it as negative for a different reason:

I was first starting out [and] someone camped me on a PVP server for literally an entire day. I was trying to level, and this dude kept killing me and “slash e”-ing dirty stuff like “whatever his name is just shat all over you.” … I hopped on an Alliance toon and asked him to stop, and he told me to fuck off, that if I couldn’t handle the heat, I shouldn’t have rolled on a PVP server… I filed a report with Blizzard… the GM said that that stuff was ok, and that I should just try and straddle my game times so that I missed him. Stupid advice.

Two participants experienced very pointed examples of sexual harassment while playing World of Warcraft as well. Participant B’s experience was:

I went on [my first guild’s] Team Speak server. It was a large guild, probably 50 or 60 active people at any given time. I went into a chat channel that had a few folks in it and I said hello, and a few people said hello back. All of a sudden, some guy started asking me about my breasts, how old I was, and if I was a “squirter.” I was 15 at the time, so I had no idea that this was fairly common place for women.

And Participant G:

…he was super cold to me and he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it, and it got uncomfortable, and once I messaged him to ask something about the next lock out’s progression order, and he sent me literally 10 messages in a row about how I broke his heart, and that I was a cock tease, and that he would have fucked me better than any man I’d ever been with before. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but definitely the weirdest.

It’s telling that both participants who experienced sexual harassment commented that this was common place, or that it had happened before. This, and the PVP griefing, are cogent examples further of how power imbalances yield negative and problematic situations.

Problematic and Acceptable Behavior

The second question I asked participants was about times they’ve experienced problematic behavior or speech, but not bad enough that they wanted to remove themselves from the situation. Seven out of ten respondents cited chat channels as the main source of problematic but acceptable behavior in game. Participants A, D, F, and K all cited politics in chat as annoying, saying:

A: “I was sitting in my garrison doing something and reading trade chat and someone started in with the “CAN’T STUMP THE TRUMP” bullshit, and people, of course, got riled up.”

D: “Really honestly, all of the political talk in trade chat. People are dropping “N” bombs, calling other people retarded and stuff all over some social movement or a politician.”

F: “Well, trade chat is the most distinct example I can think of… it’s a complete cesspool. All the vitriol and hate over political stuff hurts my head.”

K: “But really, all of the political stuff lately has been really, really annoying. If I hear Trump get brought up one more time, I’m going to blow Azeroth up.”

Participants B, G, and H cited gender insults as annoying:

B: “Used to, jokes about gender made me very angry, and I would try and fight in trade chat about how women aren’t sexual objects or kitchen slaves. I feel like I was lashing out as an oppressed person, treating these instances like I would treat someone saying it to my face. But, I feel that these things have become less hurtful and more of an unfortunate circumstance of playing a game with millions of other people.”

G: “The only other thing I can think of is like… modern trade chat. It’s a circle jerk of memes and 4chan stupidity and gender bias. Just a bunch of idiots trolling each other, making fun of women, and causing everyone grief.”

H: “In my new guild, a lot of off color things get said in guild chat. A lot of “women belong in the kitchen” type stuff.”

The remaining participants cited events that led up to the event in their first question as the problematic but acceptable behavior. Overwhelmingly, participants cited some sort of speech or chat channel interaction as the sources of their problematic but acceptable experience. Quite a few participants’ tones towards these events also belied a grudging acceptance of these negative and problematic speeches as just an unfortunate part of playing a game with many players.

Self-Identified Problematic Behavior

The third question I asked participants was about a time when they participated in problematic behavior. The answers were fairly varied, ranging from Participant A griefing beggers:

…when people would like beg for like 10 gold or whatever, and they would whisper you asking for gold, I would open up trade with them, put in 1k gold or however much ever, and wait for them to hit accept and then close trade. I would do that a couple of times and then tell them to fuck off or something… I dunno, I feel bad, but on the same token, it was so annoying getting bombarded with whisper, you know? What else was I supposed to do?

To Participants G and H, who lied to guild members, and pretended to be the opposite sex/”date” those members for in-game currency:

G: “So anyway, I was his “girlfriend” for gold. When I broke up with him, aka blocked him, he evidentially reported me and I got banned for online prostitution.”

H: “Back in Cataclysm, I “dated” a guild mate. I’ve always played a female character because I think it’s funny, but when I joined the guild… I didn’t have a working mic, and since I heal, everyone thought that I was a girl, I guess? Anyway, a guildie who had the server-wide reputation of being loaded started hitting on me one day through whispers, and I was like “screw it, I want a spectral tiger.” So I “date” him for like 4 months. We’d text, and I’d send him pictures of this girl I knew on facebook. I actually got my spectral tiger for our 3 month anniversary! Once I got a working mic, I made a big joke about it all and he blocked me.”

This question yielded an interesting phenomenon: each participant’s perception of the event was couched, to some degree, meaning that they tried to rationalize and lessen the severity of the behavior. As with Participant A, each participant felt justified in doing the behavior because the opportunity for self-betterment either financially or emotionally presented itself. At the same time, though, they understood the behavior would be perceived as negative, but still couched their perceptions in such a way that what they were doing was the lesser of two evils. Participant F told about buying gold:

Well, I bought gold. It was just once, and it was before anything like the token system was implemented, so this was the only way to get the quick gold that I needed. I bought a couple hundred thousand, and I swore I would never do it again. I just needed it quickly, and I didn’t have time to work for it. I know it’s wrong, but I didn’t have an alternative. I mean, everybody does it, right?

Participant F needed gold quickly, and instead of putting off her goals of cornering a sector of her realm’s market, she broke the terms of service to buy gold from a third-party website. She rationalized it by saying that everyone did it, and that there was nothing like the current system for buying gold ingame by buying a time token with real-life currency through Blizzard’s website and selling it in-game for a fixed amount of in-game currency.

Every participant who told me their own history with problematic behavior violated the terms of service of World of Warcraft with this behavior except for Participant E, who created an interesting dichotomy. Recall that Participant E cited real life aggression as one of the most problematic and unacceptable experiences of his World of Warcraft career.

I’ve lost my temper a few times, and I’ve said some questionable stuff… My old threes partner, for example, when we did RMS, played the Shaman, and he didn’t even have purge on his bars. We lost so many matches because he wouldn’t purge when the mage and I would open, and it was just so annoying. I told him so many times that he has to get in the habit of purging, and he was always like “yeah ok just play your rogue and I’ll keep you alive.” Well, one day, he said that after we lost a match we had no business losing, and I lost my mind. Screamed at him for a solid minute at least. I know I shouldn’t have, but I was just so frustrated, and he wouldn’t learn and do what he needed to do. He felt so superior, but he was the reason we kept losing, and in a way, I felt like he needed a jolt.

Participant E’s perception of his own behavior is the epitome of couching perception. In the example he gave for the first question, his raid leader had been attempting to get his raid team to play to their best potential, citing that they had had multiple sub-30% health attempts on the boss, and when the team didn’t respond in kind, he resorted to anger. Participant E mirrors this behavior here, but deflects the negative nature of attacking his old three’s partner because of his unwillingness to play to his best potential. Like all of the other participants, instead of recognizing the negative behavior for what it is, and what effect that behavior has/had on other players, they all attempt to deflect the severity of the behavior, and make the situation fit the behavior.

What Makes Behavior Problematic

The fourth question I asked participants what they thought marked the threshold for a behavior going from problematic but acceptable to problematic but unacceptable. Seven out of ten participants thought that, above all else, the length of time someone experiences a set of negative or problematic behaviors was the threshold. Six participants listed the severity of the behavior as a secondary threshold, citing examples such as Participant A’s:

If someone says I look nice, or they compliment my transmog, I’m not going to be put off. But if someone says that they’d like to see what’s underneath with like… a winky face, I’m going to be slightly weirded out. And if someone REALLY crosses the line and says they’d like to like… f my downstairs business and do other really sexually explicit stuff to me, that’s the worst. But that’s just one example, and it’s in a pretty finite space of time, I would imagine.

Participant E’s response added some quantification to the doubled up answer of “length of time and severity,” saying:

A lot of it has to do with circumstances, I think, and how people perceive the event. I can slash spit on two different people and get a vastly different reacon. One person might think that I’m jmust being funny and slash point and slash hug me and move on. The other might whisper me and cuss me out. I don’t there is a quantifiable and uber-general line… [except] like how long someone is being harassed… Maybe the severity? Like the whole screaming at people and losing your mind about small stuff thing? It’s more of an escalation instead of a delineation, though. I don’t know.

Participant E makes a good point with his example, and in the next question, he further quantifies how perception affects negativity by saying that the real life baggage we bring to the virtual world alters how we perceive events. Participant F cites severity as the key determining factor, saying:

Anything that causes someone to be uncomfortable is a problem. I think it’s really black and white: behavior is either problematic of not. My example of trade chat: I think every person who says anything with a slor or anything rude in it deserves to be banned for a while just to teach them to be kinder… I still think that the point in time where someone becomes uncomfortable with what’s going on around them is when things go from bad to really bad.

Participant F’s example opens up the possibility of perception being affected by intent, much like how Participant H cites intent, and only intent, as the indicator, saying:

Probably with intention. Like in real life, if you hit someone with your car and kill them, they try and figure out if there was intention behind it as wehther to charge you with manslaughter or murder, right? I don’t think it’s much different here… You’re missing out on the human element when you’re interacting with someone online… But, I still think that intention is where things go from bad to worse. If someone intends to make you uncomfortable by calling you a dumb fag, that’s a lot worse than one of your friends saying it to you jokingly right?

Participant H’s example makes it clear that intent is certainly an important element of negativity to consider, it does not affect how someone perceives the event or behavior they are experiencing because they have no way of experiencing feelings of intent. Instead, intent is more of a self-gauging measure. As with Participant E’s example in the first and third questions, intent was the element that kindled the events, but it did not affect the perception of the event on either side.

Gender Affecting Perception

The fifth question I asked participants was about whether they thought men and women perceived negativity differently in online spaces. Of the ten respondents, all ten said that they believed that perception changed based on gender and, in some form, every participant also cited the nature of modern gender inequality as being the main fact of differing perception. This problem is increased in magnitude when people with “questionable gender conceptions (Ridgeway, 2011)” are given the magnitude of screen and platform mediation that an online game like World of Warcraft provides (Friedberg, 2006). Participant E provided a salient explanation of this:

I don’t think I could deal with some of the stuff people say to girls online… Sexual harassment all over the place, and the girls still play. And that whole gamer gate thing? How bad that got, that should have shown us all, and anyone who doubted it before, how bad it is to be a girl in this community. I think it’s easy to forget that not everyone is wired the same; men, women, children, whatever. We all have slightly different ways of perceiving events, and I think we take a lot of our preconceptions into the virtual world. So you can have a really dynamic sense of perception among the genders.

Participant E laments how much harder women have to try to seem equal, and what a harder time they have playing online games. He also cites what was one of the most vitriolic sets of events to ever take place in the video game industry. Participant A corroborates this by saying:

If someone messaged a dude and told them the sexual stuff that people have told me, they’d probably just laugh and be like “I’m a dude, you idiot.” Being a girl has been tough not just from like… playing a girl character perspective; when I joined raiding guilds and I talked in vent for the first time, there would inevitably be an uproar that holy hell a girl plays such and such class and it’s not a healer! Oh my god! Are you hot? Do you have a boyfriend? That kind of stuff. If anything, all of that has kind of made me numb to the stuff that gets said around me. It takes a lot more to make me cringe now.

Participant B takes this thread and expands upon it:

I think that men, it’s hard to attack them or really be negative towards them as people. Aside from attacking their stkill, which is gender neutral, or their progression, again, gender neutral, what is there really to say to a man that is negative as a man telling me he wants to “wreck my…” you know.

Ridgeway commented on gender inequality in this light as saying that, because men have been the dominant sex for much of human history, and in the vast majority of cultures, it is both an ingrained and a learned reinforcement to belittle and question the ability of the “lessers.” Participant D further corroborates this, and comments on how outside factors such as upbringing affects perception:

We come from different backgrounds, different upbringings, differetne computer and internet use, even. Some of the toughest people I know ar women; they go through a lot online. We don’t’ really think about it as guys, but women get talked down to or told that they aren’t as good as us a lot.

Participant G comments further on how gender affects negativity:

So much so that I think that men and women perceive totally different things as negative. Would you think it was negative if someone cape up to you, a guy, took off all their clothes and slash danced on you? No? What if they did that to a woman? She would probably feel uncomfortable because they have no way of making this random stranger stop imposing themselves on them. Inherently, I think women are actively looking to protect themselves and remove themselves from situations where they could be made to feel uncomfortable. That’s what I do; I don’t play with people who I know are even remotely misogynistic or sexist.

Participant G makes an important point in considering how the different sexes feel when experiencing negativity. It is simple to academically examine the functions of negative behavior, but how a person reacts during and right after experiencing negative behavior, and their coping mechanisms are things that aren’t easily quantifiable, but still important to consider. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine how base human emotions and feelings affect perception, but the take away from Participant G’s explanation is to further remind us that the baggage that players carry outside of the game, and outside of virtual spaces in general, affects their interaction online (Rubin and Camm, 2013).

Community and Atmosphere Shifts in World of Warcraft

The final question I asked participants was about how they feel the community atmosphere has changed over the years that they have played World of Warcraft. Out of ten participants, 8 of them said that the community atmosphere has gotten progressively worse over the years they’ve been playing. A number of different reasons were cited as to what they thought was a major contributing factor, but mostly it can be distilled down to a rise in elitism, chat channels lacking any sort of order or structure, and the rise in gender, sexually, and racial slurs. Participants seem to be in agreement that the player base has gone into decline due to the age and nature of modern World of Warcraft and uber-accessibility of any and all forms of content. Participant A cited elitism rising due to item level and raid size changes:

Well, I started in late Vanilla, and then, everyone seemed a lot nicer. Like, everyone was still new, and there weren’t a bunch of fan sites and stuff, so people gave advice in general chat, and they sold stuff in trade chat, and recruited in guild recruitment chat. You didn’t have people trolling that often, and it was rarely ever through stuff they said… In late BC, people seemed to start to get more like full of themselves and more mean. You got talked down to if you didn’t have flying, or if you didn’t have such and such piece of marks gear or whatever. In Wrath, it seemed to kind of not be that way for a while. Naxx was a joke, there was no real progression race or anything, so people were more chill, and chats just seemed more spammy and stupid until Ulduar and 3, 2, 1 no lights. There was a sense of elitism again with hardmode stuff and 239 gear… from Ulduar on, there was always a sense of elisim; like if you weren’t in a 25 man guild doing the highest difficulty, you were a scrub… in WoD, I think a lot of people are just tired. No one is really mean about the game anymore. It’s more about politics and off topic stuff. I don’t think anyone cares what you do in the game anymore.

With the advent of “self-help” in WoW in the form of fan sites such as mmo-champion.net and wowhead.com, the community’s sense of entitlement and the baseline standard that a player is judged on went up, especially when the achievement system was put in the game. From that point on, pick up groups (PUGs) were exclusive, and you couldn’t go unless you linked the achievement for killing the end boss of whatever raid tier was current. When hard modes were introduced into the game in Ulduar, the sense of elitism ramped up farther; exclusive gear dropped from successful hard more encounters, and players with that gear were seen as the best of the best on server. That trope continued through the rest of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, through Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and has started to die out in Warlords of Draenor.

Participant D said that there seems to be a general pallor over the community; no one seems happy, or content with the content that Blizzard has produced, and this has caused vocal minorities to become even more malicious and vitriolic than normal:

I think the quality of the playerbase has gone downhill, and I think with that, it’s created a divide in the playerbase. On the official forums, and the fan forums like mmo-champion, you have elitists yelling about content that is too easy and how they need more content… and Blizzard is doing a terrible job of keeping the game fresh, and then you have the casuals that are yelling about not having enough to do because they don’t want to raid. And I think both of these groups are really vocal minorities, but in the past, it didn’t ever seem like there was all of this passive-aggressive animosity towards each other and towards Blizzard… And I think a lot of it has to do, too, with how long the game has been around. Over 12 years! That’s unheard of.

Participant H echoes this sentiment, and says:

All of my friends have gotten more tense as the expansions go on… Everybody I raided with was chill and super nice when I first started raiding with my current guild. But as we started hitting heroic progression and doing well, everyone buckled down another notch and took it to another level, and they just kept buckling down and getting more serious and forgetting to laugh. I see it in my friends who aren’t raiding seriously, too. They’ve lost their sense of fun. Everything is min/maxing or getting more money. Nobody really jokes harmlessly anymore. It’s all sort of malicious now. And I know I said I wouldn’t talk about trade chat, but even THAT seems more malicious than it used to and less fun. All I hear is about the election and I don’t care.

Just like in academia, when adaptation and new styles and methods are not incorporated into research, the research becomes stale, and old research loses its relevancy. Persistent video game worlds like World of Warcraft are no different; it has hit a stagnancy point where the world, the lore, the mechanisms and systems are all starting to break down and subscriptions are plummeting (Purchese, 2015). The community deflation is to be expected. Blizzard has made many decisions that people have felt alienated by, and it has directly affected their subscription numbers, which, in turn, limits their ability to innovate and create. Participant I comments further on this:

It has felt, the last expansion or two at least, that a lot of people have lost their sense of humor and general sense of happiness playing this game. Every time someone brags about something in trade chat, people shoot them down and call them try hard or say something like “lol you’re JUST now getting that? I had it 6 months ago.” Back in BC, when you got epic flying and you got excited in chat, people got excited with you! Now, if you get the achievement for 310 flying, people make fun of you in g-chat.

Participant F picked up the same thread:

Well, when I started in Burning Crusade, I didn’t spend much time in the main cities… in subsequent expansions, the chat channels seemed to get muddled, and it became less about game stuff… a lot more mean and ignorant things were getting said by the end of Wrath of the Lich King than at the beginning, and it just got worse in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. It seemed to me that people were just bored and they wanted to cause a stir by saying any old stupid thing.

This general sense of disenfranchisement leaves people with a void. What are they supposed to do when they’ve done everything? Many people use World of Warcraft as an escape, and when that escape is diminished, it creates negative emotions, through which negative behavior may manifest (Martončik and Lokša, 2016).

Discussion and Future Research

One of the most interesting trends I found from this research was how much abuse the female participants have suffered just playing one video game. All five of them had been playing at least 5 years, and each of them pointed out some example of sexual harassment or abuse from each expansion they have played. The general population and community of World of Warcraft has lost much of the decorum that it once had according to Bessière, Seay, and Kiesler.

In this common thread, most, if not all, participants cited gender and racial slurs, sexism, and/or aggressive behavior stemming from in-game encounters as negative factors; in fact, most participants cited two of three of these behaviors as examples of problematic behavior throughout their interviews. This may be because all of the participants are fairly young (less than 40) and are all either actively engaging in college studies or have degrees, having demonstrated critical thinking and empathy en-route to developing social consciousness.

Another thread of commonality in this general trend is that eight out of ten participants said that their worst experience in-game actually happened outside of the world, in their own physical space. Citing mostly raiding-related instances of negativity and abuse, or abuse from real-life people they were familiar with, World of Warcraft seems to just act as an intermediary source for venting aggression; a lightning rod of negativity, if you will.

While gender did seem to have an effect on perceptions of negativity, it was not what I hypothesized it to be; in this batch of participants, both genders seemed fairly attuned to the other gender’s general struggles and perceptions, which created a much less striking differential, but which helped to give a fuller view of how both sexes see the other in terms of MMOG negativity.

Rubin and Camm’s heuristic of griefing accounts for, and highlights, the following as aspects of griefing in online spaces:

 

Based on the prevailing trends in my participants’ answers, it makes sense to integrate Harassment and Power Imbalance more closely. Eight out of ten of my participants cited some sort of harassment-based behavior as experiences so negative that it made them want to remove themselves from the situation, be it Participant A’s example of an abusive raid leader, Participant D’s example of being stalked and being messaged horrible things, Participant G’s sexual harassment example, or Participant I’s example of his raid leader snapping at him. All of these examples exhibited harassing behaviors such as negative name-calling and belittlement, sexual harassment, or being made to feel unsafe; these behaviors, at their root, exhibit a power imbalance between the victim and the perpetrator because the victims are made to feel unsafe or less than their abuser.

Secondly, Rubin and Camm’s proposed fifth dimension of griefing needs a retooling in definition if it should fit MMOGs. They defined this dimension as “people who refuse to follow the rules of an online world just for entertainment value.” This definition is too broad to fit into an MMOG because, as my participants’ examples showed, people can perceive a lot of things as negative that other players don’t necessarily mean to be negative. Like Participant H cited, intention is a hard thing to judge, especially when the player who is on the receiving end of the negative behavior has to decide what the intention of the behavior being enacted upon them is. There does not seem to be a “non-malicious” griefing practice that can be agreed upon in a majority; going back to my third question, where participants’ roles were reversed and they went from victim to perpetrator, the severity of the actions they identified themselves having taken part in as less severe. This couching of perception makes a black-and-white system of figuring out where behavior universally goes from negative but acceptable to negative but unacceptable almost impossible to create. It certainly cannot be done in the scope of this type of paper, which leads me to further research steps.

In the future, I would like to actively research how greed play and scamming are different in an MMOG than in just a general online space. In much the same way as this batch of participants seemed to be raiding-focused, I would like to recruit participants that are more focused on commerce in World of Warcraft. It seemed like the participants of this study were geared more towards raiding than PVP, or questing, or commerce, which could have skewed their perception of what constitutes a negative event, especially considering that they spend, or have spent, so much time in the microcosm of raiding that it would limit their exposure to other events that could prove negative.

Additionally, I would like to redo this study in light of newer scholarship (both in game studies and out of game studies) that does actively recognize gender as a spectrum, and not as a binarism as the scholarship presented in this paper conceives of it. In a future iteration of this study, greater diversity must be sought in participant groups. This will be generative as it will allow a less problematic conception of how gender can and cannot function as a way of understanding how griefing affects different people differently. This research project presented a binarized understanding of griefing insofar as it: only took into account the perspectives of self-identified men and self-identified women, only asked the binarized opposite gender how they conceived of the other binarized gender’s struggles regarding griefing, and did not take into account how marginal identities, such as being a person of color, or a queer person, or a differently abled person, can affect perception of an incident of griefing. In future iterations of this work, more care must be given to breaking binary understandings of gender and personhood in the hopes that wider game studies may start to incorporate the same un-binarized thinking.

The next step once I completed that study would be to pull from a bigger and more varied participant pool, and refine the questions from both interviews to get a much fuller view of how activities and specializations affect perceptions of negativity. I’m almost positive that someone who was a market and commerce expert would have widely divergent experiences and predispositions than the participants of this interview.

Appendix A

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Biography

Joshua Jackson is a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. His dissertation is utilizing Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism mixed with architectural theory to examine issues of inequity, precarity, and neoliberalism in modern videogame production spaces. He is in the process of conducting interviews with marginal videogame production workers to understand their relationship with the architecture of the spaces that they work in. Additionally, he is working on a project involving how vectoralism and meritocracy in videogame production function as a dual control mechanism for managers to further exploit labour practices of workers. His other work revolves around citational politics in game studies and creating ways of introducing diverse citations and scholarship into the game studies classroom, and wider communication classroom. He is the plant dad to five succulents that he has, somehow, managed to keep alive for 2 1/2 years.

© 2018 Joshua Jackson, used by permission

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Technoculture Volume 8 (2018)