'A Band-aid approach' How harassment of women and Black online gamers goes on unchecked

Half of Black adult gamers in the U.S. say they were racially harassed last year, continuing a troubling rise in identity-based harassment in online gaming despite game companies’ efforts to curb such activity in the wake of national reckoning prompted by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of law enforcement.

According to an annual report compiled by the Anti-Defamation League, an anti-hate organization, 50% of Black adults reported being harassed because of their identity in 2023, marking a 19-point increase since the group’s 2020 survey.

Additionally, 48 percent of female gamers reported being harassed because of their gender in 2023, slightly up from the previous year, the report found.

While several large gaming companies have taken steps to address the issue, the cumulative effects can be draining for those victimized, said Brian TaeHyuk Keum, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Boston College in Newton, Massachusetts.

“There’s moderation and censorship, or being able to report people so accounts get banned,” said Keum, who has studied racism’s psychological effects on Black, Asian American and Latino youth. “But how many times can you report someone? In an online platform, you can only do so much – you can’t confront the person, and you can report it but you don’t know how the report is used to rectify the situation or not.”

The ADL study found harassment of young gamers increased across the board: Three-quarters of teens and pre-teens reported experiencing harassment in online multiplayer games, compared to two-thirds in 2022. Among that age group, 37% reported identity-based harassment, up from 29% the previous year.

While identity-based harassment rose among Black, female and younger gamers, the study found that harassment of all kinds declined among all adults for the first time in five years, falling to 76% of adults from 86% in 2022.

“Harassment in online games is still so pervasive that it is the norm today. Any decline is encouraging, but players have become desensitized and now expect to experience hate on these platforms,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s CEO. “This is a reality we cannot accept, especially when young and vulnerable people are increasingly targeted -- and when we know that what happens online can have dramatic consequences offline.”

The annual survey published by the ADL Center for Technology and Society, “Hate is No Game: Hate and Harassment in Online Games 2023,” collected responses from 1,971 U.S. gamers aged 10 to 45. Input was also collected from parents or guardians of those 17 and under.

The ADL called on gaming companies to, among other things, continue to strengthen content-moderation tools for in-game voice chats, improve systems for reporting harassment and support for those affected and submit to regular independent audits.

Exposure to racism, sexism and extremism can take mental toll

More than 212 million Americans play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2023 industry report, fueling a $56.6 billion market. But a growing field of research shows racism and extremism in online gaming platforms can have detrimental mental and emotional health effects on those directly or even indirectly targeted.

One in 10 adults surveyed in the ADL study said online harassment had prompted them to consider suicide; slightly more said they’d taken steps to reduce threats to their physical safety. One in 20 said they’d contacted police as a result of harassment, while the same amount of young people said such experiences caused them to do worse in school.

According to the study, the games in which adults most reported experiencing harassment were Dota 2, Call of Duty and Valorant. Among young people, the most common platforms were League of Legends, PUBG and Call of Duty.

Overall, exposure to white supremacist ideologies decreased from 2022 to 2023, the study found, falling from 15% to 9% among young people and 20% to 15% among adults. However, those who encountered it did so at alarming rates, the study said, experiencing it at least weekly.

“Continued and regular exposure to white supremacist extremism in gaming, including potential evidence of recruitment, makes the need for these companies to address extremism more urgent than ever,” said Daniel Kelley, the ADL Center’s director of strategy and operations.

Kelley said such issues are part of a wider ecosystem in which hate is on the rise, both offline and online. As a result, responsibility for confronting them not only rests with the game industry but with government, law enforcement, the media, civil society and public stakeholders as well.

How some gaming companies have responded

In the wake of Floyd’s murder in 2020, Kelley said some game companies issued statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a few pledged to donate to nonprofits working toward change. But very few, he said, explicitly committed to addressing anti-Black hate in their online games.

Beyond that, misogyny has been deeply rooted in gaming, both within online platforms and in the industry itself.

“In general, the game industry is several years behind the broader online platform ecosystem in terms of both recognizing their responsibility to address hate and to appropriately invest in fighting it,” Kelley said.

For some, smaller companies have proven more nimble: A gaming report released this week by LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD found that nearly half (48%) of LGBTQ gamers felt more represented in indie games created by small teams than in mainstream games created by large companies, while just 28% of non-LGBTQ gamers felt that way. 

About 17% of active gamers — nearly 1 in 5 — are LGBTQ, the organization said.

Last year, Rep. Lori Trahan published a summary of responses received from 14 gaming companies from whom her office had requested details about their efforts to combat hate and extremism on their platforms.

While nine of the 14 failed to note policies or actions specifically focused on extremist content, the ADL praised one notable counter-extremism effort employed by gaming platform Roblox, calling it “a significant investment which should be emulated by other companies.”

In August, games publisher Activision Blizzard said it would introduce technology allowing for proactive moderation of voice-chat hate and harassment in the 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 done as a Band-Aid approach'

Stephanie Ortiz, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, north of Boston, said that while many such efforts are helpful, they “to treat all negative behaviors as one and the same.”

“If companies are only focused on the general flaming behavior, or less commonly on white supremacist ideologies, I imagine they’re missing a huge swath of what most white women and Black women and men are experiencing: routine exposure to a range of insults and harassing behaviors that don't fit neatly into either of those categories,” she said.

Keum said the gaming business model doesn’t allow for the structural changes necessary, including programmers familiar with the psychology underlying issues of harassment and hate.

“They have started hiring some folks to think about the psychological effect, but it’s done as a Band-Aid approach instead of creating something from the ground up,” he said. “Unless they really flip the script, it will continue to ebb and flow and reports like this will continue.”