How StarCraft II Players Cope with Toxicity: Insights from Player Interviews

Toxicity in the context of online interactions is understood as an umbrella term describing negativity-inducing and harmful behaviours. Despite multiple efforts, user’s toxic behaviour remains rampant particularly in multiplayer online games with real-time high fidelity social affordances. In this work, we conducted player interviews among StarCraft II players to understand how they cope with toxicity that they experience while playing. We approached the data inductively, and discovered both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies. We sorted the discovered forms of coping into eight categories (such as functional detachment and affective detachment). Our findings offer new empirical perspectives on coping in multiplayer online games. This work sheds light on the strategies that players opt for managing stressors arising from toxicity, and can help in the design of measures that better enable players to shield themselves from harmful interactions.