From toxicity to healing: Changing the culture of online gaming

The world seems to be in a bad mood these days, so much so that even ostensibly enjoyable pursuits like video games have become venues for harsh, abusive language and behavior. Constance Steinkuehler, UC Irvine professor of informatics, says the situation has "gotten so much worse" over the 20 years that she has been studying gaming.

Her desire to gain an evidence-based understanding of what she had been experiencing firsthand - and what organizations like the Anti-Defamation League have been documenting - led Steinkuehler and her team to conduct a survey of youths and young adults who regularly play online games.

"A few years ago, around the time when George Floyd was murdered by the police officer and there was the beginning of a new civil rights movement, my interest in the issue of harassment in gaming began to grow," she says. "I wanted to know what its roots were and to understand the prevalence of this kind of behavior. We had some funding from the ADL and wanted to work with them to ask the question, 'Are games normalizing hate, extremism and toxicity?'"

Steinkuehler and her group surveyed about 600 teen and young-adult players, encompassing a cross section of genders, ethnicities and other social characteristics.

They sought responses to three key questions: At what rate are gamers exposed to hate speech in online games, and how do they perceive those incidents? How many players become bystanders, victims or perpetrators of harassment in game spaces? And do certain game-play habits or forms of hate lead to its normalization? The project was meticulously crafted, piloted and validated over the course of about a year, Steinkuehler says.

She and her co-authors shared their survey results in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Most strikingly, they wrote, 85 percent of participants reported encountering some form of hate speech in multiplayer online games, most prevalently misogynistic attacks on female gamers and denigration of Muslim and Asian players.

Other key findings

• Male and heterosexual players found hate speech to be less of a problem than players of other genders and sexual orientations.

• Participants responded to hate speech either by calling out and reporting an inflammatory event and supporting the victim or by withdrawing from the game and interaction completely.

• Teens laughed off events more often than adult players, showing a generational difference between those growing up in an era of established toxic gamer culture and those who did not.

• Males were more likely to perpetuate toxic behavior, while female players were more likely to withdraw.

• A large majority of adolescent players had been bystanders to hate-based harassment, and more than a third reported being a victim.

• Women, nonheterosexual people and individuals with disabilities were more likely to be harassed.

• Players with higher levels of impulsivity and narcissism as well as those who are motivated by destruction or frequently engage in competitive brackets were more likely to engage in hateful conduct than those with more positive personality traits and broader motivations for play.

Steinkuehler says that although many of these survey results are alarming, they're not entirely surprising.

"You can find some lower-level correlations between the amount of game play or the length of game play - you know, how heavy of a gamer you are - and some behaviors that we would call normalizing," she says. "But the real patterns that stand out are the strong links between exposure to toxicity and hate and normalizing it. The lesson is clear and hardly new: Harm begets harm begets harm. Game companies may not build hatred and unkindness into their designs overtly, but their lack of guardrails basically platforms cruelty."

Harassment and heartbreak

"I had no idea what to expect at my first San Quentin game event," says Constance Steinkuehler, UC Irvine professor of informatics, whose recent research found alarming levels of hate speech and toxic behavior in the online gaming realm. "And it was one of the most moving experiences I think I've ever had." Credit: Steve Zylius/UC Irvine

Steinkuehler says that abuse and harassing behavior can be found most often in team-based competition: "The one place you see the worse behaviors is in those competitive brackets, because if you're trying to increase your [team's] rank and you think someone didn't make the right choice, players tend to go off about it. They get very mad and can be really spicy."

She adds that the pseudonymity cloak of the digital world makes it possible for people to hide their faces while hurling racist or misogynistic language. Compounding the toxicity of the environment are the games themselves, which often offer depictions of humans that can fall back on racial and gender stereotypes.

"So anyone who's not a white, cisgender male is minoritized and treated like garbage," Steinkuehler says. "I'll be honest: I've played these kinds of games, and I really don't enjoy them. You get online and hear things that you can't unhear, and it's very stressful. Almost as many people now have horrifying, terrible, antisocial, nasty, mean experiences as positive ones."

The game industry could do a lot - and many companies did at one time - to address this issue, she says, but lately they've taken a stand-back approach: "The industry as a whole is mostly just defensive, saying, 'Well, it's political speech, so why would we ever want to kick that off the servers. We can't do that.' And my response is, 'Yes, you can.'"

Steinkuehler says that the C-suite executives of game companies are not going to provide stronger moderation of games if they don't see a threat to their bottom line.

"I think one of the problems here is that companies can't see the money that they're not making. We asked how much people would spend on toxic versus nontoxic games and showed empirically that it would be a 75 percent revenue gain if they would simply stop this kind of behavior from happening, which they have the tools to do but don't," she says.

"I wanted to work on this problem with the ADL because of what we were seeing nationally, and I'm glad we did that survey, but after three years of looking at the dark side, or dark participation in games, I will say that reviewing some of the data is stressful," Steinkuehler says. "It's a bucket of cold water for me after I've spent so much time studying games and conditions where they flourish, where they do so much good and bring people together. Whether you're young or old, games tend to be very prosocial and make people feel like they belong, feel like they have something in common, like they're connected."

Hope in an unlikely setting

In the summer of 2024, Steinkuehler was working on revisions to the journal submission while nursing a broken foot. Sitting on her patio looking through the Los Angeles Times, she was struck by a photo of a chess piece being moved by a rough-looking hand with the word "HOPE" tattooed across the knuckles.

The image was part of an article about a reform program at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, in the San Francisco Bay area, to help improve outcomes for incarcerated individuals and reduce recidivism, the return of a person to prison after their release.

"From the article, it was very clear that they were using games inside that prison - a historically famous facility - as one place where people could be with each other and hang out across racial lines, across gang divisions and other points of potential conflict," Steinkuehler says.

"I was just a research advisor at that point, and they never asked me to do anything, but then reading the article, I realized, 'My god, I'm on the board of this program,'" she says. "I called them immediately and asked when I could go up and meet with them. Within three weeks, I was on a plane headed to San Quentin to attend one of their game-day events."

The gaming initiative emerged within the framework of the California Model - a statewide effort to improve public safety by transforming prison culture through rehabilitation, responsibility and connection. Drawing inspiration from Scandinavian penal systems, the model emphasizes relationship building and collaboration between staff and incarcerated people.

Steinkuehler (left), plays a round of Dungeons & Dragons with (from left) San Quentin Rehabilitation Center corrections officer Richard Kruse; incarcerated individual Michael Crucè, a participant in San Quentin SkunkWorks, a reform program led by people in prison in collaboration with outside professionals; and SkunkWorks co-founder and incarcerated individual Kai Bannon. Credit: Marcus Casillas/San Quentin News

Building from within

In 2022, a group of incarcerated individuals at San Quentin launched a prisoner-created and -led nonprofit called San Quentin SkunkWorks. Its mission is to test bold ideas that improve daily life inside while gathering real-world data to inform broader systemic change.

Kai Bannon, who has been incarcerated for more than a decade, is one of the founders of SkunkWorks, which includes dozens of his fellow inmates who collaborate with more than 50 outside professionals.

"SkunkWorks is named after a subunit at the aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin that was a small group of innovators working on world-changing projects," he says. "We took that as inspiration. If you can build programs that actually work and you can prove that they work, we thought, here is a place where you can really create a lever for change."

Bannon says that in his younger years, he played the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and he's seen how games can foster safer spaces for connection, even in higher-security environments. At San Quentin, a lower-security yard, he's found that tabletop gaming serves the same purpose, offering a constructive, communal space.

"A lot of the people that are playing games are playing them specifically to be in a safe space. You can think of prison like it's a city, and there are good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. The game space is just a good neighborhood," Bannon says. "In prison, you can just walk down the stairs and look at someone the wrong way or bump into somebody, and it can turn into a pretty vicious fight. But that's not happening at the game tables."

The SkunkWorks folks tried to think differently about their gaming events. One example is the way they set up chess tournaments. Instead of the typical one-on-one approach, they established teams made up of one incarcerated person and one corrections officer or other prison staff member, such as a librarian.

"Our chess event that we did with the officers was formulated from our previous research, and it was a first-of-its-kind competition," Bannon says. "We learned that adding the component of collaboration between people who were normally on opposite sides from one another was a key to breaking down barriers."

The gaming events have humanized relationships between inmates and corrections officers, says Steinkuehler, whose work with SkunkWorks receives financial from UC Irvine's Campus-Community Research Incubator.

"I was blown away, because through the toxicity and harassment survey project, I had just spent so much time looking at commercial games unfettered by any constraints and the resulting generation of antisocial patterns," she says. "But then you look at games in this very difficult context of the prison setting - where it could not be harder to even play the game, let alone get others to play it - and what are they finding? They're finding that it's become the space where people will socialize beyond those divisions.

"I had no idea what to expect at my first San Quentin game event. And it was one of the most moving experiences I think I've ever had."

Steinkuehler has been a regular at San Quentin game days over the past year, participating as a competitor, and she has been lending her support to the SkunkWorks organization by helping members build up their internal capacity to evaluate their own program.

"Working with Professor Steinkuehler has been nothing short of incredible," Bannon says. "She brings such a deep insight and perspective to what we're doing here. She's not just advising; she's collaborating with our team and treats us like co-designers, not just research subjects, which makes all the difference."

He says that Steinkuehler has helped SkunkWorks design spaces for "learning trust and transformation" and that together, they're building a program that can be a replicable model for other correctional institutions around the country.

Real-world impact

San Quentin corrections officer Richard Kruse is a champion of the program from the staff side, largely because of the results he has been observing.

"Personally, it's had a positive impact on my time on the job. Any day when I get to come in and spend time involved in games with incarcerated personnel is great, and I know for a fact that we're seeing a reduction in issues across the board at San Quentin," he says.

"Even on days when we're not playing Street Fighter or Uno or Magic the Gathering, we can still have surprisingly productive conversations. We're talking more now about things like politics or world events and even some more philosophical matters. I've had guys share their thoughts about redeeming themselves or improving themselves after the things that some of them have done."

Steinkuehler adds: "Games have this capacity for positive change. I've seen it before, but I've never seen it in circumstances so dire. And I've never had such a complete, compelling counterexample from what industry has turned games into, all in the name of profit.

"The [online] gaming world has become a space that is actually divisive and leaves people feeling less safe, less connected, less whole, less seen as humans than they did when they started playing," she says. "But the people at San Quentin are using games in this completely, dramatically opposite and incredibly productive way."