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Alejandro Ramirez
Production
Multiplayer Game Features and How They Influence Online Disinhibition and Toxic Behaviors
My thesis explored toxic behaviors and its relation to online disinhibition in multiplayer online games across known and underrepresented genres in game research literature . Additionally , it explored the differences in toxic behavior usage between different communication methods in games such as voice chat , text chat , emotes , and more .
A new theoretical framework was developed to differentiate the communication features : Communication Restriction Types ( CRT ). The CRT framework serves to qualify the differences in the barriers of entry and usage requirements for communication features which could be used to explain differences and similarities in observations in otherwise unrelated features in my study and future research .
This project was chosen to determine what communication features were most abused by players to express toxic behaviors while also evaluating modern trends in toxicity across different popular games . Through this study , I was able to discover the tendencies of easy to use , rapidly repeatable , and minimally reportable features tended to be abused the most for toxic behaviors . The results contribute to the video game industry by showing the most frequently used and abused communication features and how toxicity in competitive games trends higher than non-competitive online games .
60 PRODUCTION