Description
This project will be in direct collaboration with the Esports Team Twente.
Toxic behaviour and online aggression are recurring challenges in competitive gaming environments. Examples include flaming, blaming, verbal aggression, harsh negative feedback, exclusion or other behaviours that may negatively affect team dynamics, player wellbeing and performance.
This thesis project focuses on empirically exploring how toxic behaviour and online aggression are experienced within esports teams, what situations or risk factors contribute to them, and how teams can prevent or respond to these behaviours in a constructive way. The project can build on existing literature on online toxicity, esports, digital communities, team dynamics and conflict behaviour, while also collecting insights from players, coaches or other stakeholders.
Depending on the study outcome and setup, there is an opportunity to publish this research in an international peer-reviewed journal. The final outcome should be both academically grounded and practically useful. Depending on the thesis level and research design, this could result in recommendations, prevention guidelines, a team agreement, an escalation procedure, a coaching tool, onboarding material, awareness training or another practical intervention that can support safer and healthier esports teams.
Research Questions
Possible research directions include:
- How players experience toxic behaviour and online aggression within esports teams.
- Which situations, pressures or team dynamics contribute to harmful behaviour.
- How players distinguish between competitive feedback, frustration, banter and toxic behaviour.
- How toxic behaviour affects trust, psychological safety, wellbeing and team performance.
- How players, coaches or team leaders currently respond when toxic behaviour occurs
- What practical strategies could help teams prevent, recognise or address harmful behaviour.
Type of Research
Mixed methods, likely wit hqualitative focus.
Key words
Toxicity, Agression, Conflict, Games, Online behaviour
Data-analysis
Quantitative Statistics are expected to be done with R or an R-based system and qualitative work will likely primarily involve the use of Atlas.ti
Information
If you are interested in this assignment, please contact Iris van Sintemaartensdijk via i.vansintemaartensdijk@utwente.nl.
Literature
Donner, F. (2025). Structures that tilt: Understanding “toxic” behaviors in online gaming. New Media & Society, 27(12), 6551-6568.
Kou, Y. (2020, November). Toxic behaviors in team-based competitive gaming: The case of league of legends. In Proceedings of the annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play (pp. 81-92).
Frommel, J., & Mandryk, R. L. (2024, May). Toxicity in online games: The prevalence and efficacy of coping strategies. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).
Frommel, J., & Mandryk, R. L. (2024). Toxicity in esports. In Routledge handbook of esports (pp. 529-539). Routledge.
Wijkstra, M., Rogers, K., Mandryk, R. L., Veltkamp, R. C., & Frommel, J. (2023, October). Help, my game is toxic! first insights from a systematic literature review on intervention systems for toxic behaviors in online video games. In Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 3-9).
Adinolf, S., & Turkay, S. (2018, October). Toxic behaviors in Esports games: player perceptions and coping strategies. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on computer-human interaction in play companion extended abstracts (pp. 365-372).
Lapolla, M. (2020). Tackling Toxicity: Identifying and Addressing Toxic Behavior in Online Video Games (2020). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs), 2798.