On Twitch.tv, the gaming-oriented live streaming platform, users interact by sharing and viewing gameplay and participating in live chats. Negativity in online gaming is often explored on a large scale using broad categories. This study offers a nuanced look at Twitch.tv communities dedicated to the Dark Souls game series to examine the descriptive and injunctive community norms surrounding both aggressive negativity and ambiguous negativity, which involves interactions where the valence is not obvious and must be interpreted based on community-specific meanings and rules. This study systematically analyzed excerpts of chats and stream recordings of 22 live streamed sessions. It found ambiguous negativity was prevalent in cases of cursing, game jargon, banter, spam, and sarcasm. Aggressive negativity was rare but manifested in exclusionary language and banter gone too far. The response of community members and collective acceptance or rejection of such negativity was not clearly defined.
BlackburnJKwakH (2014) STFU NOOB! Predicting crowdsourced decisions on toxic behavior in online games. In: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on world wide web, pp. 877–888. Available at: https://www.cse.usf.edu/dsg/data/publications/papers/stfunoob.pdf
4.
BlanchardAL (2007) Developing a sense of virtual community measure. Cyberpsychology & Behavior10(6): 827–830.
5.
BlightMG (2016) Relationships to video game streamers: examining gratifications, parasocial relationships, fandom, and community affiliation online. PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.
6.
ChenVHWuY (2013) Group identification as a mediator of the effect of players’ anonymity on cheating in online games. Behaviour & Information Technology34(7): 658–667.
CookCConijnRSchaafsmaJ, et al. (2019) For whom the gamer trolls: a study of trolling interactions in the online gaming context. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication24(6): 293–318.
11.
CookCSchaafsmaJAntheunisM (2018) Under the bridge: an in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context. New Media & Society20(9): 3323–3340.
12.
CruzAGBSeoYRexM (2018) Trolling in online communities: a practice-based theoretical perspective. The Information Society34(1): 15–26.
EsbjörnssonMBrownBJuhlinO, et al. (2006) Watching the cars go round and round. In: CHI 06 proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Montreál, Canada, 22–27 April 2006, pp.1221–1224. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1124772.1124955
15.
FoxJTangWY (2017) Women’s experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies. New Media & Society19(8): 1290–1307.
16.
GuarrielloN-B (2019) Never give up, never surrender: game live streaming, neoliberal work, and personalized media economies. New Media & Society21(8): 1750–1769.
17.
HardakerC (2010) Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: from user discussions to academic definitions. Journal of Politeness Research6(2): 215–242.
HwangJLeeHKimK, et al. (2016) Cyber neutralisation and flaming. Behaviour & Information Technology35(3): 210–224.
20.
JohnsonMRWoodcockJ (2019) “And today’s top donator is”: how live streamers on Twitch.tv monetize and gamify their broadcasts. Social Media+ Society5(4): 1–11.
MorschheuserBRiarMHamariJ, et al. (2017) How games induce cooperation? A study on the relationship between game features and we-intentions in an augmented reality game. Computers in Human Behavior77: 169–183.
28.
MurnionSBuchananWJSmalesA, et al. (2018) Machine learning and semantic analysis of in-game chat for cyberbullying. Computers & Security76: 197–213.
29.
PostmesTSpearsRLeaM (1998) Breaching or building social boundaries? Side-effects of computer-mediated communication. Communication Research25(6): 689–715.
30.
PostmesTSpearsRSakhelK, et al. (2001) Social influence in computer-mediated communication: the effects of anonymity on group behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin27(10): 1243–1254.
31.
RecktenwaldD (2018) The discourse of online live-streaming on Twitch: communication between conversation and commentary. PhD Thesis, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
RösnerLKrämerNC (2016) Verbal venting in the social web: effects of anonymity and group norms on aggressive language use in online comments. Social Media + Society2(3): 1–13.
SuhAWagnerC (2013) Factors affecting individual flaming in virtual communities. In: 46th Hawaii international conference on system sciences. Available at: http://203.255.161.86/handle/2015.oak/229897
38.
TaylorTL (2018) Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
39.
ThompsonJJLeungBHBlairMR, et al. (2017) Sentiment analysis of player chat messaging in the video game StarCraft 2: extending a lexicon-based model. Knowledge-Based Systems137: 149–162.
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
