Toxicity in Valorant: a general panorama and analysis of a female player experience

• Autor(a) principal: Amorim, Jéssica Lopes
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/48923
• topic: Oxicity; Sexism; Valorant; Gaming; Toxic behavior

Video games have become one of the most lucrative industries in the world with a substantial growth specially after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. With its raising importance, research about the gaming industry and its issues had also come to a growth. A lot of these works approach the toxicity inside this gaming community as main Thema and the causes and consequences surrounding it, as well as how machismo and gender bias can affect a player experience both as casual player and professional ones. Valoran, a game from the First-Person-Shooter (FPS) gender, collaborative multiplayer from Riot Games Company, was released in 2020, being a relatively new game that contains a high toxicity rate, it became, then, relevant to focus research on the purpose of studying toxic and disruptive behavior inside the game and understand if and how toxicity and sexism can affect a player experience inside it. Data from both real Valorant matches, played by the author of this present research, and from a questionnaire available for other players through social media, was collected and analyzed through both qualitative and quantitative analyses to trace a panorama of toxicity in this game. The approach of the methodology was mainly exploratory, encountering corroboration in previous research. The results indicated toxicity still as a big issue inside the Valorant Community independently of a player’s rank, server or gender. However, it was found that gender related toxicity, albeit less frequent, is also still a problem and happens in a way more incisive and aggressive manner when it comes to offend or harm female players, becoming a harder task to cope with when compared to general toxicity related, for an example, to player performance. It also indicated that although toxicity detection in text chat is improving in Valorant, there is still a weak point in toxicity detection and combat from Riot Games when it comes to the voice chat and toxic non-verbal behaviors such as trolling, especially when data indicated that these are the most common toxicity forms of display in game matches.