When playing competitive video games, players are subject to various pressures that may jeopardise performance outcomes. Prominent among these pressures is spectatorship: that is, the expectation that one maintains high performance under scrutiny by teammates, audience members, or others. In this work, we explore the influence of spectatorship—and the tonality of response—on player performance in a competitive racing video game. We report results from a mixed-methods laboratory experiment (n=85), counter-intuitively finding that supportive spectatorship is more detrimental to performance than critical spectatorship. We contend that performance may be undermined by expectation threat, nervous activation, and presentational concerns, as well as participant trait self-consciousness. This work makes a novel contribution to the empirical investigation of spectatorship influence on video game performance—positing implications for both game developers and high-pressure gaming spaces, such as esports.

The massive growth of esports has vitalized the need to study human performance in competitive video gaming. The pressure of competitive play elicits a range of emotional experiences, which can affect players during and beyond a gaming session. In this work, we review the state of the literature concerning the role emotions play in esports performance as well as highlight coping strategies players use to regulate emotions during competitive play. We review the findings of N=32 peer-reviewed articles pertaining to emotions and esports, finding that the emotional experiences elicited by competitive play affect esports performance. In response, players attempt to regulate their emotions to maintain performance; however, efforts to do so vary, as they currently lack effective coping strategies. Lastly, we review the potential of technical interventions in esports training for improving emotion regulation among players. Our findings support knowledge development in esports, and present avenues towards promoting the emotional wellbeing of competitive gamers.

Game developers, researchers, and players recognize the harm of toxic behaviour in online games-yet toxicity persists. Players' coping strategies are limited to tools that focus on punishing toxic players (e.g., muting, blocking, reporting), which are inadequate and often misused. To address the needs of players experiencing toxicity, we took inspiration from research in other online spaces that provide support tools for targets of harassment. We iteratively designed and evaluated in-game tools to support targets of toxicity. While we found that most players prefer tools that explicitly address toxicity and increase feelings of control, we also found that tools that solely provide social or emotional support also decrease stress, increase feelings of control, and increase positive affect. Our findings suggest that players may benefit from variety in toxicity support tools that both explicitly address toxicity in the moment and help players cope after it has occurred.

Toxicity in online gaming is a problem that causes harm to players, developers, and gaming communities. Toxic behaviors persist in online multiplayer games for a number of reasons, and continue to go unchecked due in large part to a lack of reliable methods to accurately detect toxicity online, in real-time, and at scale. In this article, we present a modeling approach that uses features derived from in-game verbal communication and game metadata to predict ifOverwatchgames are toxic. With logistic regression models, we achieve accuracy scores of 86.3% for binary (high vs. low toxicity) predictions. We discuss which features were most salient, potential application of our predictive model, and implications for toxicity detection in games. Our approach is a low-cost, low-effort, and noninvasive contribution to holistic efforts in combating toxicity in games.

Video game toxicity, endemic to online play, represents a pervasive and complex problem. Antisocial behaviours in online play directly harm player wellbeing, enjoyment, and retention—but research has also revealed that some players normalize toxicity as an inextricable and acceptable element of the competitive video game experience. In this work, we explore perceptions of toxicity and how they are predicted by player traits, demonstrating that participants reporting a higher tendency towards Conduct Reconstrual, Distorting Consequences, Dehumanization, and Toxic Online Disinhibition perceive online game interactions as less toxic. Through a thematic analysis on willingness to report, we also demonstrate that players abstain from reporting toxic content because they view it as acceptable, typical of games, as banter, or as not their concern. We propose that these traits and themes represent contributing factors to the cyclical normalization of toxicity. These findings further highlight the multifaceted nature of toxicity in online video games.

Video games frequently invoke high-pressure circumstances in which player performance is crucial. These high-pressure circumstances are incubators for 'choking' and 'clutching'-phenomena that broadly address critical failures and successes in performance, respectively. The eruption of esports into the mainstream has vitalized the need to understand performance in video games, and particularly in competitive games spaces. In this work, we explore the potential mechanisms behind choking and clutching and how they are related to player traits and tendencies. We report the results of multiple regression analyses, finding that the propensity to choke is positively correlated with Reinvestment, Obsessive Passion, and Public Self-Consciousness, as well as Approach and Avoidance coping styles. Likewise, we find that the propensity to clutch is negatively correlated with Social Anxiety, and positively with Private Self-Consciousness and player experience with competitive gaming. We propose that these findings can be utilized to scaffold and support performance in high-pressure gaming spaces, such as esports. This work represents an initial step in the empirical exploration of choking and clutching in competitive video game contexts.