Toxicity is undeniably a very real threat to gaming in its impact on both player experience and a publisher’s bottom line.
In a 2020 paper, ‘Exploring Toxic Behavior in Online Multiplayer Video games’ Rachel Dawn Meyer found that:
Overall, 92% of participants had been exposed to some form of toxic behavior in the last 12 months. 57% of participants had been exposed to some form of toxic behavior at least once per week in the last 12 months
They also found only 22% of participants did not experience any unfair disruption of gameplay that impacted their ability to win in the previous 12 months.
This is consistent with reports from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League who in 2020 reported that 81% of US adults who played multiplayer games had experienced some form of harassment while playing, and 68% experienced more severe abuse including physical threats.
Particularly worrying is the extent to which this harassment targets groups or individuals based on their identity. The ADL report goes on to state:
53 percent of online multiplayer gamers who experienced harassment reported that they were targeted because of their race/ethnicity, religion, ability status, gender, or sexual orientation. Forty-one percent of female and 37 percent of LGBTQ online multiplayer gamers, respectively, were harassed based on their gender and sexual orientation. Roughly a third of Black (31%) and Hispanic/Latinx (30%) online multiplayer gamers experienced in-game harassment based on their race or ethnicity. Twenty-five percent of Asian-American online multiplayer gamers experienced harassment based on their identity. Twenty-five percent of disabled people were targeted as a result of their disability.
Toxicity also impacts the long term business prospects for a game. In 2023, Dr Rachel Kowert, Research Director at Take This, in collaboration with Nielsen, explored the impact toxicity has on players and in turn on a game’s revenue, and found that 70% of players reported avoiding games with toxic gaming
communities.
At Intorqa we spend our time making games more secure so they stay fair and safe for players. So, it may seem surprising we’re focusing so much on toxicity in this intel briefing. Afterall, what have aimbots got to do with players being harassed or exposed to extremist abuse? Well, as it happens, quite a lot.
Hand in glove
As we’ll see, cheating and toxicity go hand in glove much of the time; it’s no coincidence that if you Google a list of the most cheated games, it’s pretty similar to the list you get for the most toxic games.
And it’s this relationship we’re going to explore and seek to understand more; looking at how cheating is considered a form of toxic behavior itself, and more importantly, how cheating is a cause and an enabler of toxicity.
We’ll look at the vicious circle, where toxic communities encourage cheating, cheating makes communities more toxic, so players cheat more to fight back, encouraging yet more toxicity.
We'll show why anti-cheat and game security need to be at the heart of any drive to create less toxic communities in multiplayers, and why toxicity is yet another reason publishers need to tackle cheating.
There have always been links between cheating and toxicity - indeed as we shall see, cheating is often viewed as a form of toxicity itself - more on that later.
Perhaps the most obvious connection - and start point - is that cheaters exhibit toxic behavior. You only need to visit a few forums to see that players who cheat are quick to engage in toxic behavior such as trash-talking, harassing opponents, and in particular being abusive when confronted about their cheating.
None of which is surprising as they spend time in cheat communities which are riddled with, and take pride in aggressive and insulting behavior.
In their paper “Unpacking the dynamics of harm in cheating communities: A guiding framework for cross-industry intervention” Selina Cho, Jonathan Lusthaus and Ivan Flechais stated:
Our analysis reveals a significant gap in ethical awareness among individuals engaged in cheating, characterized by a disregard or misinterpretation for norms in contexts of cheating. This behavior is driven by a desire for recognition within the community, where positive interactions often overshadow the detrimental impact of toxic behaviors, such as griefing. As a result, negative practices are internalized as mechanisms to uphold community integrity without external oversight…The lack of moderation then makes a space where the community becomes permissive of expressions that in other spaces wouldn’t be permitted or there would be significant pushback.
This behavior is then mirrored by ‘honest’ players who encounter cheaters and become toxic (and eventually cheaters) themselves. The frustration of dealing with someone who is blatantly breaking the rules can lead to anger and aggression, and toxic outbursts from those who were playing fairly, not to mention flaming and making accusations towards any player who beats them.
The 2023 article, “Is it Legit To You? An exploration of Players' Perceptions of Cheating in a Multiplayer Video Game: Making Sense of Uncertainty” by Aianna Boldi and Amon Rapp analyzes how players perceive cheating and are affected by it.
As well as noting how amateur players feel their efforts to attain a certain objective are in vain because they might be defeated by others using cheats, they point out:
Blaming others for playing dirty might thus have a positive emotional effect for players, but at the same time it may have unwanted side-effects: (with the) identification of cheaters uncertain, aggression might be directed towards any target, fair players included.
Next, the growing toxic culture creates an environment that doesn't just permit cheating but encourages it.
As a result of disinhibition In online environments, the usual social norms and checks on behavior can become weakened. This can result in players engaging in cheating or toxic behavior more freely than they would in offline, more personal contexts. If a community normalizes or even glorifies toxic behavior, cheating will be seen as just another tool for gaining an advantage or asserting dominance. After all, if everyone else is doing it…
Finally, cheating itself is a form of toxic behavior. It disrupts fair play, undermines the game’s integrity, and ruins the experience for honest players. It’s often accompanied by other disruptive behaviors such as account fraud, boosting and griefing, all of which contribute to a lack of trust and sense of community.
Several surveys and academic papers treat cheating this way. For example Unity’s 2023 Toxicity in Multiplayer Games Report report found Cheating was in the most commonly encountered form of toxic behavior according to the players:
Similarly, in their 2020 paper for the University Of York, ‘Exploring Toxic Behavior in Online Multiplayer Video games” Rachel Dawn Meyer proposed the following framework for encapsulating different types of toxic behavior together under one umbrella.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this - after all cheating is toxic, whether that’s in video games, baseball matches or exams.
But by reducing everything down we risk missing some important factors about the relationship between cheating and toxicity, and ultimately how to tackle the problem.That's because, as we noted earlier, cheating isn’t just a form of toxicity, but is also a cause and multiplier of it.
Cheating doesn’t always lead to toxic behavior, but it can do. There are several ways this can happen.
There’s the frustration and anger caused when coming across a cheater in a competitive game. When you've played a game for hours,and often spent money leveling up your character, it’s no surprise you’re angry if someone uses a wallhack to ambush you. Of course you’re going to call them out!
Things only get worse as now you don’t trust anyone you play against. You start accusing everyone who beats you of using cheats. Soon the community is overrun with accusations and counter accusations. You’re suspicious of everyone and trust no-one.
In turn, you begin to think, if you can’t beat them, you may as well join them. If no-one’s stopping them, using a cheat against other cheats is the only option if you want to win.
And so, the vicious cycle picks up pace, ruining the experience for more and more players. Most importantly this normalizes cheating and gives players the option of either joining in, or leaving the game - particularly newcomers, thus impacting the player base.
All this time, the same account fraud that allows cheats to carry on after a ban, is ensuring toxic players can also continue without fear of any permanent consequences, thus further poisoning the community.
Uncovering the correlation
However, to what degree can we say cheating is correlated with toxicity? Can we quantity the level to which an increase in cheating leads to increased toxicity? Can we say for sure reducing cheating will positively impact levels of toxicity?
To help answer this, the statistics department at Intorqa recently examined possible statistical associations between cheating and levels of toxicity in the player communities of three of the biggest AAA multiplayer games.
The level of cheating in a game is by definition hard to quantify as so much goes undetected. As a result we used the ‘mentions’ of each game in the cheat communities around the games (e.g. vendors and buyers looking to sell or buy a cheat for a particular game, or a developer claiming to have updated one) as a proxy for the level of cheating.
For the level of toxicity in the games sampled, we used ‘mentions’ of toxicity, i.e. complaints, in the respective player communities on Reddit. It’s worth noting that as a proxy this sets the bar high and most likely understates the problem, as only a portion of those experiencing toxicity, will go on to complain about it.
Data from the start of 2024 up until September was analyzed, giving us a total of 951,998 mentions of the three games within the cheat communities, and 166,344 mentions concerning toxicity from players of these games.
The time series charts below visualize these inputs for each of the three games.
A Mixed Effects Model was then used to examine the association, whilst taking into account both seasonality and the different games as a random effect.
From our analysis we can be confident that when there's an increase in mentions of a game across cheat communities, there is a statistically significant increase in mentions of toxicity and toxic language across the associated player communities.
Specifically, for every 1k mentions of the game in the relevant cheating ecosystem, there's an average increase of almost 16 (between 9 and 22) mentions of toxicity in player communities. This may sound low as a comparison, but when you consider the volume of mentions in the cheat communities is close to 1m, it adds up, and the number of mentions of toxicity will no doubt be lower than actual toxic behavior in the game.
Bottom line – increased cheating means increased toxicity.
So, what to do?
With quantitative analysis supporting the anecdotal evidence and research from countless papers and articles, we can be more certain that an increase in cheating will cause an increase in toxicity in video games. Whether that’s by disrupting fair play, fostering distrust, and escalating negative behaviors, or all of the above.
The degree to which cheating does this will vary depending on the genre of the game, the player community, the actions of the developers, and the broader culture, but it will occur.
In turn, unchecked toxicity will likely create an environment where players feel less inhibited about cheating those they’re competing against, and often suspect of cheating. If you want an analogy here, tax evasion feels pretty close!
What’s needed is a multifaceted approach. This will include robust anti-cheat measures, proactive community management, player behavior moderation, the promotion of positive behavior among players, and of course penalties for both cheaters and toxic players.
A key part of this will be the teams responsible for Game Security and Anti-cheat, working closer with the Trust and Safety or Player Support teams, by collaborating on intel and data, coordinating activity, and sharing relevant objectives and KPI’s.
Above all, an approach which targets both cheating and toxicity, to reduce the triggers for both. Less cheating means less toxicity; less toxicity means less cheating.
This won’t be easy. But by understanding the relationship between the two behaviors, strategies can be better targeted and coordinated, ROI better understood, and budget and resource allocation optimized.
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