Suspecting Sarcasm: How League of Legends Players Dismiss Positive Communication in Toxic Environments

Toxicity in multiplayer gaming is an ongoing problem that threatens the well-being of players, gaming communities, and game developers. Meanwhile, interventions that promote positive interactions and proactively create positive gaming spaces are still in their infancy; little is known about how players respond to positivity. In our study, 959 League of Legends players were presented with either 10 positive chat logs or 10 negative chat logs, and asked to reflect on the content and how representative such communication is of their own gaming experiences. We thematically coded participants' free-form answers (identifying the themes normalize, acknowledge, downplay, cope, blame, and make personal), and compared the positive and negative conditions in terms of theme prevalence. Our findings show that participants were more likely to normalize and acknowledge toxic negativity than positivity. Furthermore, the dominant response to positivity consisted of downplaying messages as not representative and rare, and even expressing suspicion that messages must have been fabricated or intended as sarcasm. Participants overwhelmingly cope by muting chat, protecting them from toxic interactions, but leaving them unexposed to positive communication and other beneficial social interactions within play.