Tilburg University Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Trolls Cook, Chrissy
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Tilburg University Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Trolls Cook, Chrissy Publication date: 2021 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Cook, C. (2021). Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Trolls: An Interdisplinary Exploration of the Who's, What's, and Why's of Trolling in Online Games. [s.n.]. 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Download date: 27. sep. 2021 2 Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Trolls An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Who’s, What’s, and Why’s of Trolling in Online Games A doctoral dissertation by Christine “Chrissy” Cook Cover art by Karl Gruenewald 3 Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Trolls An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Who’s, What’s, and Why’s of Trolling in Online Games PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan Tilburg University op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. W.B.H.J. van de Donk, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de Portrettenzaal van de Universiteit op vrijdag 22 januari 2021 om 13.30 uur door Christine Linda Cook, geboren op 20 january, 1992 te Moncton, Canada 4 Promotores: prof. dr. J. Schaafsma (Tilburg University) prof. dr. M.L. Antheunis (Tilburg University) leden promotiecommissie: prof. dr. N.C. Krämer (University Duisburg-Essen) dr. B.H. Detenber (Nanyang Technological University Singapore) prof. dr. H. Vandenbosch (University of Antwerp) prof. dr. T. Hartmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) prof. dr. M.G.J. Swerts (Tilburg University) ISBN: 978-1-7774987-0-2 Naam drukkerij (Printer): KKP Canada (www.kkpcanada.ca) ©2021 Christine Linda Cook, The Netherlands. All rights reserved. No parts of this thesis may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author. Alle rechten voorbehouden. Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden vermenigvuldigd, in enige vorm of op enige wijze, zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de auteur. 5 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 2: Under the Bridge ............................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 3: For Whom the Gamer Trolls .......................................................................................... 57 Chapter 4: Trolls Without Borders ................................................................................................... 95 Chapter 5: A Bystander State of Mind ........................................................................................... 153 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 195 Appendices ......................................................................................................................................... 213 Appendix 1A ................................................................................................................................... 215 Appendix 1B ................................................................................................................................... 219 Appendix 2A ................................................................................................................................... 223 Appendix 2B ................................................................................................................................... 225 Appendix 2C ................................................................................................................................... 229 Appendix 3A ................................................................................................................................... 233 Appendix 3B ................................................................................................................................... 235 Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 239 List of Publications ........................................................................................................................... 243 TiCC PhD Series ............................................................................................................................... 245 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 253 6 7 Chapter 1: Introduction To say that gaming as a pastime has become ubiquitous would be an understatement. In 2018, the sale of video games in the United States reached a record-breaking $43.4 billion USD (Entertainment Software Association, 2019), not including the equally strong markets in South Korea (Sue & Mintegral, 2019), China (Blazyte, 2019), and Japan (Newzoo, 2018). Even in countries like the Netherlands with much smaller populations than the USA or China, gaming as a hobby and as a profession is on the rise, with developers and gamers alike achieving global success and raking in significant winnings (Dutch Games Association, 2019). People around the world are gaming, and doing so regularly. However, this global ubiquity is not without its downsides. Though the enjoyment of video games is spreading throughout the world, so is one of gaming’s darkest trends: trolling. Trolling has been discussed and defined in a variety of ways by both the media and by academics. It has been particularly vilified by journalists like Joel Stein (2016), who when writing for Time magazine called trolls “the culture of hate”. Scholar Whitney Phillips (2016) echoed this idea when she titled her book about trolls and trolling “This is why we can’t have nice things”, emphasizing trolling culture as attacking and even consuming the mainstream. That said, though media and academia generally agree that trolling is undesirable, there is considerably less consensus when it comes to what trolling actually is. Cocomello (2016) when writing for online magazine MyGaming describes trolling in games as “an art” in which the troll is gratified at the expense of their victim. Donath (1999), in one of the earliest scientific articles on the topic, describes trolling as “a game about identity deception” (p. 6). However, Fichman and Sanfilippo (2014) give trolling a much darker tone, defining it as “deviant and antisocial online behavior in which the deviant user acts provocatively and outside of normative expectations within a particular community” (p. 163). Types of trolling in online games have been described in literature as ranging from loudly (and badly) singing 8 into a microphone to irritate teammates, to viciously insulting the players around them as people and as gamers until they leave the game (Thacker & Griffiths, 2012). We as researchers have plenty of ideas about what trolling could be, but what is it really? Beyond the question of what constitutes trolling, whom does it affect, and how do these effects change depending on how trolling occurs and who is involved? It is this first question of “what is trolling” that sparked the initial idea for this dissertation: to address the most basic, fundamental questions of trolling from a scientific, multi-method perspective. Although when I undertook the dissertation there were a multitude of ideas about trolling being presented in both the media and academia, these were all discrete; one or two articles would appear in one discipline, then one or two in another, but there was no one systematic examination of trolling as a complete phenomenon. Each discipline was tackling its own individual questions of interest related to trolling, which creates a body of knowledge when gathered together, but leaves the foundational questions of trolling unanswered. The goal of the present work is to rectify this gap by exploring the various perspectives involved in trolling – that of the troll, the victim(s), and the bystander(s) – to understand a) what constitutes trolling, b) why trolls do what they do, and c) how victims and bystanders (the surrounding community) react to various types of trolling in various contexts. Together, the answers to these questions should help us better understand what contributes to the spread of trolling, primarily in online games, and what inhibits this spread. I aim to build on existing knowledge by taking into account all the descriptors of trolls and trolling listed in the earliest works on the subject (e.g., Herring, Job-Sluder, Scheckler, & Barab, 2002)