74 Percent of People are Harassed in Games Online, According to New Study

Everyone knows that the video game playing public can be a bit on-edge at the best of times. You can generally expect that if you play long enough, sooner or later you’re going to run into some angry jerk or some salty butthead who tries to ruin it for everyone else. And everyone generally knows that in some games it takes way less time than others to find the bad eggs.

But while that has been common knowledge for a while, the Anti-Defamation League has finally done a study to put it into raw statistics. This survey, which included the experiences of 1,045 respondents, aged 19-45, who identified as LGBTQ+, Jewish, Muslim, African American and Hispanic / Latinx, covered PC, console, and mobile games from April 19th to May 1st of this year.

The study asked two simple questions: how much harassment did these players receive when they played, and what games were they playing. Unsurprisingly, Every one of the 15 games that were included in the survey, at least half of those asked reported they had experienced some form of harassment. But the top five, also unsurprisingly, was DOTA 2 (79 percent), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (75 percent), PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds (75 percent), Overwatch (75 percent) and League of Legends (75 percent).

All in all, 74 percent of those surveyed said they experienced online harassment in multiplayer games, while 65 percent said it was ‘severe’, which includes physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment.

Jonathan Greenblaat, CEO of ADL, had this to say:

“Video games are an important and extremely popular form of entertainment. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults play games online, yet there are significant problems with hate, harassment and discrimination. At ADL, we see online multiplayer games as social platforms, and we need to fight hate on these platforms with the same seriousness as traditional social media -- and for us that starts with quantifying the problem through studies like this.”

So what can be done? Well, most people agree that’s up to game companies to figure out, but generally they’ve done a very bad job of it. Despite active attempts by Riot Games and Blizzard to tackle their extremely toxic communities, clearly they haven’t done enough to make people feel safe and comfortable playing their games.

So… they should probably do a better job.