Background: My research identified that the issues within the Esports industry, specifically for female identifying gamers are mostly due to the increase in toxic online environments within mainstream gaming titles. The problems brought to light are the amount of toxic messages and what level of harassment people encounter on a day to day basis, With 71% of women experiencing discrimination and abuse while gaming and 36% of people dealing with it regularly. With people preferring to play under an alias or change their online identity to be gender neutral, keeping themselves muted and staying out of voice what’s which may be detrimental to a team based / multiplayer game or stop playing at all.
The Challenge: To creating something which will be easy to navigate and allow users to communicate with likeminded people. With a main function of a reporting tool which would allow the user to send a notification to the games developer to recognise player breaches of conduct.
My Solution: Hive is an app that is designed to run in the background of your PC to allow the user to fully report interactions in their entirety to game developers with the option to follow up their report, to allow the user to feel heard as they can see the clarity of what happens with their reports. As reporting in game doesn’t allow the user to send the full context and footage of the interaction. Also, to make sure that game developers are listening to their feedback as they wouldn’t want their titles to be at the top of the report tracker. As well as a hub to meet other like-minded people within a safe environment online to feel more comfortable to be themselves online, allowing everyone to have a good time whilst competitive gaming. The suggestion of creating an app like this was well received by my collaborator and focus groups as they feel that there is a lot more to be done about online toxicity within Esports and this allows the user to make their own communities better as there is no unified way to handle the bad actors, this needs to exist. Through the lack of anything similar in this sector, the concept was very well received by my research group.
