Poisoned Play: Toxicity in Online Gaming Discourse - Paperback

by Patricia Bau (Editor), Tamara Bodden (Editor), Christina Liemann (Editor)

Gaming communities are often accused of toxicity in public discourse. Toxic behaviour can be found in semiotic practices in games, like tea bagging, looting, and grieving, communication in (voice) chat, on platforms, like Twitch and Discord, or in discourses about games via social networks. Gaming is no longer a niche phenomenon so understanding toxic practices is key for educating about and countering them. With interdisciplinary approaches like discourse analysis, surveys, and multimodal investigations, the contributors address phenomena such as sexist male online spaces, alt-right movements using gaming discourses as vehicles for ideologies or toxic work practices in game development.

Author Biography

Patricia Bau, born in 2000, works as a research associate at the Department of German Studies at Universität Koblenz. Her doctoral thesis deals with strategies of tabooing and detabooing in discourses on menopause and midlife crisis. Her research focuses on discourse linguistics, linguistic taboo research, online communication and gender studies.

Tamara Bodden is a junior professor in the Department of German Studies at Universität Koblenz. After her doctorate in discourse linguistics at Universität Kassel in 2022 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver receiving the Feodor Lynen scholarship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. Her research areas include online toxicity, discourse linguistics, AI & gender as well as art communication.

Christina Liemann, born in 1996, works as a visiting researcher at the Waseda University in Tokyo. She wrote her linguistic doctoral thesis on communicative strategies of right-wing influencers at Universität Kassel. Her research is focused on political language, discourse analysis, digital and multimodal communication as well as gender studies.