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Technology companies want to tackle bullying in games

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Competitive CounterStrike: Global offensive Player Adam Bahriz is sure to kill you in the game. He is so skilled that he got a contract with Team Envy, an esports organization inhabited by some of the highest level players in North American eSports. Bahriz is also deaf and legally blind, with the condition known as HSAN 8.

“What do you want to do? Do you just have to get out? I can buy smoke » Bahriz says. The team members immediately jumped in to make fun of him and shut him down. One of them says, “You’re going to be blocked.” “We know you’re being bullied,” says another. “Very annoying.” “You are already disabled”.

“Okay, I’m not going to talk, I’m sorry,” he says resignedly.

Bahriz spends the rest of the game in silence and begins to cry, revealing the very real and powerful effects that bullying has on experienced players. It’s all that is wrong in a culture of toxic gambling, where insults are thrown away freely, harassment occurs regularly, and racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, skill, and so on, is fair play. “This incident made me feel very depressed,” Bahriz told me. “I just want to have fun playing the game, but it’s hampered by speech impediments that are out of my control.” Bahriz says he ended up being kicked out of the game by toxic teammates and even though “most people are toxic, it’s really weird to throw them out of the game. That’s why it was horrible. You can silence toxic people, but you can’t stop your whole team from talking.

In 2017, a Twitch streamer, Nicole Smith, He recorded the verbal abuse he received while playing Overwatch.

“Go back to the kitchen,” one teammate said.
“That’s the reason girls don’t do anything,” said another.
“Can you really go and die?”

Like Bahriz, Smith experienced numerous insults, harassment, and, in his case, misogynistic comments. Smith remembers GamerGate’s abuse while playing video games women in games and game journalism (as well as anyone who spoke up to defend them) suffered weeks, months, and in some cases years of harassment, including death threats, doxing, and harassment. This changed the response of the gaming industry to online bullying, with some game developers and publishers expanding their initiatives to combat game toxicity, and many of these publishers and developers were widely criticized for waiting until people’s lives were in danger. to take harassment seriously.

A 2020 League Anti-Defamation Survey revealed that 81% of adult Americans have been bullied in online multiplayer games, up from 74 percent in 2019, and 70 percent called them offensive names in online multiplayer games, and 60 percent were trolling or “intentional and malicious attempts to provoke.” [other gamers] to react negatively. ”Overall, there has been a 7 percent increase from 2019 to 2020.

As for Bahrizi, he no longer receives as much abuse as before, but he usually silences them when he does and tries his best to “keep the toxicity from distracting him mentally from the game,” he says. For others, however, silence doesn’t work, even if it’s available in the game they’re playing. In 2019, another ADL survey found that 22 percent of American adults who are harassed in online multiplayer games have stopped playing certain games because of bullying.

The developers of the game want to fight but with their own conditions

In 2017, Activision created Blizzard, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Twitch and more than 200 other companies Fair Gaming Alliance as its website says, “promoting fair play and healthy communities”. In 2018, Blizzard publicly appointed 180 Overwatch Prohibited by toxic players, including abusing audio chats and deliberately throwing away games. There’s nothing wrong with the game that didn’t even have a chance to report attacking players when it was released in 2016. In 2019, Ubisoft made an immediate release half-hour bans for Rainbow Six Siege if the player detects errors in the text chat company. Ubisoftena Code of Conduct It states that “any language or content that is illegal, dangerous, threatening, offensive, obscene, vulgar, harmful, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive or harassing is considered”. Also that year, Electronic Arts a Players Council with the inaugural summit at Gamescom, Cologne, Germany.

Riot Games, a company that has been in the news for both to achieve internal toxicity as well as a toxicity in his games, is also working on the topic. In 2012, he introduced the Tribunal System in the League of Legends, based on acts and offenses that were considered unacceptable by other players who received temporary bans. (The court system no longer exists.) It was published in 2016 report in American scientist which concluded at its base toxicity studyAdding game tips (among other things) reduced the toxicity of the game by 25 percent, both in players who are abused in the lobbies and in games that are abused. Even starting in April 2021, Riot changed its privacy policy to allow a player’s voice communications to be captured and evaluated when a report on their behavior was presented with the goal of reducing toxicity in voice communications. chat game.

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