Toxicity or Prosociality?: Civic Value and Gaming Citizenship in Competitive Video Game Communities

Abstract

Background Online multiplayer video games are characterized by competitiveness and collaboration: the former resonates with toxicity and the latter with civic values. While it is urgent to consider efficient ways to cope with toxicity, it is worth interrogating how gamers shift between toxic competitiveness and gaming citizenship. Aim Drawing on feminist game studies, gaming citizenship, and ludic ethics approaches, this study examined how gamers embrace and resist toxic behaviors simultaneously in community contexts. Method We conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-two Overwatch players from June 2021 to May 2023 to elaborate the players experiences of toxic behaviors, their coping mechanisms, and the roles of gaming communities. Purposive and snowball samplings were used to recruit participants who regularly played competitive modes in Overwatch. Results From the interviews, two types of toxicity (tolerable, intolerable) were identified. Of the anti-toxic measures, ignoring was addressed as a common but problematic measure, while intervention as most effective measure. Gamers’ involvement in communities was discussed within three common frameworks: prosociality, gamer education, and gamer transformation. Overall, the interviewees showed ambivalence toward usage of anti-toxic measures. With limitations, we found that game communities can serve a venue for gaming citizenship to provide institutional supports for gamers. Conclusion This study contributes to scholarship on gaming toxicity and gaming citizenship. Our study illustrated that gaming communities are battlegrounds between prosociality and toxicity. We do not see vilification of toxicity as a panacea for toxic gaming problems. In that sense, gaming citizenship discourses helps to rekindle debate about stigmatized assumptions about toxicity.