Perceptions of Harm in Online Gaming: Insights from Players and Industry Professionals

A 2024 study by Rachel Kowert and Elizabeth D. Kilmer examines whether players and game industry trust and safety (T&S) professionals agree on what counts as harmful in online gaming. The authors surveyed 100 adult game players, recruited through Prolific (88% UK, 9% US, mean age 33.98), and 34 T&S professionals (mean age 35.27), recruited through professional channels. Harms were grouped into gameplay harms, such as cheating, griefing and trash talking, and social harms, such as CSAM, doxxing, hate speech and swatting. Participants rated prevalence and severity of each category.

The study found that industry professionals reported higher prevalence than players for several gameplay harms, including trash talking, inappropriate role-playing, contrary play and flaming. For social harms, professionals reported higher prevalence for CIB, CSAM, doxxing, fraud, gender-based violence, hate raiding, hate speech, impersonation, incitement of violence, sexual harassment and swatting. Effect sizes for these prevalence differences ranged from medium to large (d = .52 to 1.01).

On severity, the authors report that players and professionals were generally aligned, with differences for behavioral spamming, cheating and several social harms. Those differences had effect sizes from small to medium (d = .32 to .68) for social harms, which the authors describe as smaller than the prevalence differences.