Exploring the relationship between game content and culture-based toxicity

We examine culture- and racial-based toxicity and hate speech in player communities and explore how this toxicity might be informed and affected by the design of the game elements and content. To illustrate these effects, we used a mixed method approach to analyze the experiences of players from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions within the League of Legends (LoL) community as a case study. By qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing more than 2 million lines of in-game chats from 30,000 game sessions on 2 LoL servers and also 89 forum discussions containing hundreds of lines of text, we find that despite the world and characters of LoL being fictional, they are recognized by the player base as having connections to the real-world cultures and, accordingly, they affect the way that players communicate. We provide specific examples of both negative and positive inspirations to elaborate on how the design of certain regions and characters affects the way that the MENA players and issues are received or addressed. Additional analysis of in-game chat data describes other topics where toxic behavior emerges and how these topics correlate.