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Half of black adult gamers in the U.S. say they experienced racist harassment in the last year, and identity-based harassment in online games continues to trend at an alarming rate, despite efforts by game companies to curb it in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police.
According to an annual report compiled by the Anti-Defamation League, an anti-hate group, 50% of Black adults reported being harassed because of their identity in 2023, up 19 percentage points from the group’s 2020 survey.
Additionally, 48% of female gamers reported experiencing harassment because of their gender in 2023, a slight increase from the previous year, the report found.
Brian Tae-hyuk Kum, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Boston University in Newton, Massachusetts, said that while some major gaming companies have taken steps to address the problem, the cumulative effect can be very costly for victims.
“There’s the ability to report people for moderation, censorship, or even banning of their accounts,” said Keum, who has studied the psychological effects of racism on Black, Asian American and Latino youth. “But how many times can you report someone? With online platforms, you’re limited in what you can do. You can’t confront the person, and you can report them, but you don’t know how that report is going to help rectify the situation.”
The ADL survey found that harassment against young gamers is on the rise across the board: Three-quarters of teens and preteens reported being harassed in online multiplayer games, up to two-thirds in 2022. Among this age group, 37% reported experiencing identity-based harassment, up from 29% the year before.
The survey found that identity-based harassment increased among Black, female and younger gamers, while harassment of any kind decreased among all adults for the first time in five years, dropping from 86% of adults to 76% in 2022.
“Harassment in online games is still prevalent and has become the norm, and while any reduction would be encouraging, players have become numb and prepared to face harassment on these platforms,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. “This is a reality we cannot accept, especially as young and vulnerable people are increasingly targeted and we know what happens online can have dramatic consequences offline.”
The annual survey, “Hate Isn’t a Game: Hate and Harassment in Online Games 2023,” released by the ADL Center on Technology and Society, collected responses from 1,971 U.S. gamers ages 10 to 45. Comments were also solicited from parents or guardians of gamers aged 17 and under.
The ADL called on game companies to continue strengthening content moderation tools for in-game voice chat, improve systems for reporting harassment and providing support to victims, and undergo regular independent audits.
Exposure to racism, sexism and extremism can be psychologically damaging
More than 212 million Americans play video games, representing a market worth $56.6 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2023 Industry Report. However, a growing body of research shows that racism and extremism on online gaming platforms can have a negative impact on the mental and emotional health of those who are directly or indirectly targeted.
One in 10 adults surveyed by ADL said online harassment had made them consider suicide, and slightly more said they had taken steps to reduce threats to their physical safety. One in 20 said they had reported harassment to police, and the same number of young people said their experiences had caused them to perform worse in school.
According to the survey, the games where adults reported experiencing the most harassment were Dota 2, Call of Duty and Valorant, while the most common platforms among young people were League of Legends, PUBG and Call of Duty.
Overall, exposure to white supremacist ideology declined from 2022 to 2023, from 15% to 9% among young people and from 20% to 15% among adults, according to the survey. But those who encountered white supremacist ideology did so at least once a week, a surprising share, the survey said.
“The ongoing and regular exposure to white supremacist extremism in the gaming industry, and even possible evidence of recruitment, makes the need for these companies to address extremism more urgent than ever,” said Daniel Kelly, the ADL Center’s director of strategy and operations.
Kelly said these issues are part of a broader ecosystem in which hate is growing both offline and online, so the responsibility to tackle these issues falls not just on the games industry but also on governments, law enforcement, media, civil society and public stakeholders.
Responses from some game companies
Kelly said that following Floyd’s killing in 2020, several gaming companies issued statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and several pledged to donate to nonprofits working to bring about change, but few had made explicit commitments to address hatred against Black people in their online games.
Not only that, but misogyny is deeply rooted both within online platforms and the gaming industry itself.
“In general, the games industry is years behind the entire online platform ecosystem in recognizing its responsibility to address hateful conduct and making appropriate investments to combat it,” Kelly said.
For some, smaller companies are proving to be more agile: A gaming report released this week by LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD found that nearly half (48%) of LGBTQ gamers feel they are more represented in indie games made by small teams than in mainstream games made by larger companies, compared to just 28% of non-LGBTQ gamers.
The group says about 17% of active gamers, or roughly one in five, are LGBTQ.
Last year, Rep. Lori Trahan released a summary of responses her office received from 14 gaming companies requesting details about their efforts to combat hate and extremism on their platforms.
While nine of the 14 companies did not mention any policies or actions specifically targeted at extremist content, the ADL praised notable anti-extremism measures taken by gaming platform Roblox, calling it “an important investment that other companies should emulate.”
In August, game publisher Activision Blizzard introduced technology that can actively moderate hate and harassment over voice chat in its multiplayer game “Call of Duty,” following a similar announcement by Xbox the previous month. In November, Epic Games introduced a similar feature in its game “Fortnite.”
“It’s a band-aid approach.”
Stephanie Ortiz, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, north of Boston, said many of these efforts are beneficial but amount to “treating all negative behaviors as the same.”
“If companies only focus on common flame wars, or, less commonly, white supremacist ideology, I think they miss a lot of the things that white women, Black women and Black men experience on a daily basis, a range of insults and harassment that don’t fit neatly into either category,” she said.
Keum said the games’ business model does not account for necessary structural changes, such as training programmers to be knowledgeable about the psychology that underlies problems of harassment and hate.
“The government has started to hire some people to think about the psychological impact, but it’s more of a band-aid approach than a real change of direction,” he said. “Unless they really change course, things will continue to go up and down and reports like this will continue.”