I chose the game League of Legends, a massive online battle area (MOBA) game which is fraught with toxicity between teammates. Often, all five players have to do well in order to ensure victory for the team, which sometimes results in an environment where anyone will verbally abuse their teammates. This story didn’t happen to me, but a couple days ago my friend was playing League of Legends and his team was losing. One player was frustrated and started using racial epithets. This situation was even worse than normal racially charged chat, because not only would he say a racist sentence, he was recording it to a macro and spamming the message to both teams. The ‘N’ word, as well as other slurs against Mexicans and Asians were used. All players on both teams reported the player, but there was not much that could be done when someone chooses to relentlessly spam abusive speech, and the situation was left basically unresolved.

While most prevalent on chat-linked games like those on Xbox live, discrimination can also appear in games where the race and gender of every player is unknown.  People’s racial hate percolates into these games, with anonymity acting as a catalyst to bring people’s hate out into the open.