The Great Online Gaming Unpleasantness Review needs your help!

[Holtzmann]

The Great Online Gaming Unpleasantness Review
or, Just how many assholes are there, anyway?

So, #Gamergate has been going on for a while now, and gamers as a group had a lot of accusations flying our way, making us all to be deeply unpleasant, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, pedophile nazis.

I asked myself "just how many unpleasant people do we have around?", and realized that we have a lot of anecdotes about assholes calling names, insulting people randomly and just being annoying in general, but I don't think I've ever seen actual numbers for it. We know they are there but we don't even have rough estimates on just how likely someone is to stumble upon one of these lovely types while out and about the online videogame landscape. I figure this is a good time as any to try to gather some data and make some sense out of this.

The Methodology
or, I don't have to do much, do I?

No, you don't have to do much. The entire concept is pretty simple:

0 - Get yourself pen and paper. Leave it by your favorite platform for gaming.

1 - Play 5 matches on any online game with random matchmaking. World of Warcraft's LFG/LFR, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty, Battlefield, World of Tanks, DOTA 2, LoL, or pretty much any other game you play. The key part is that it must be a game played in a game or game mode with random matchmaking and it must be a game with global chat, where the teams can communicate with each other either by text or voice.

2 - At the beginning of each match, count how many players are in the game, excluding yourself.

3 - This is the slightly tricky bit: while playing, count how many players are flinging personal insults and making offensive remarks in chat. Common-sense applies here, someone saying "well, that round sucked" or "going around that corner was a stupid idea" doesn't count. Someone telling someone else they're "a fuckin shithead" and that they need to "get cancer and die ASAP" does.

4 - Write down the results for each match following this template:

Game: World of Tanks

Match 1
Players (excluding you): 29
Unpleasant players: 2

Match 2
Players (excluding you): 29
Unpleasant players: 1

Match 3
Players (excluding you): 29
Unpleasant players: 5

Match 4
Players (excluding you): 29
Unpleasant players: 0

Match 5
Players (excluding you): 29
Unpleasant players: 3

5 - Send me a PM with the results of your matches and the title "GOGUR". Make sure that your results are following the template and please don't post your results in the thread itself, because they will not be counted if you do. And I hope I don't have to tell you to be honest.

There we go, that's your part in this. You can contribute multiple times with the same or different games, as long as you send the matches in blocks of 5 for a single game.

Once the data starts flowing in, I'll tally everything into a public spreadsheet and periodically give you folks the total number of players, unpleasant players and the relevant percentages. No, this is not the kind of work that would get published in a peer-reviewed journal, what with taking self-reported data without any way to verify it. But it's still data, and it's data we can work with to finally have a decent estimate of just how many a-holes are among us. Maybe then we'll know what to do with them.

My inbox is ready for it, and I hope you folks are interested.