On Online Harassment in Gaming Spaces

content warning: death by suicide, harassment, violence

I’m no stranger to online harassment. It’s, sadly, part of being an online public figure. I chose to go into online publishing and I’ve dealt with the dark side of it for years. From having a website create an entire message board section to harass me to having my PayPal account drained by hackers, I’ve seen it all.

I bring this up because I had a bad day on stream yesterday. The Twitch community has been perfectly fine (so far) since I’ve returned. The worst I get is some backseat gamers or bots promoting TOS-breaking software packages to grow quickly on the platform. No, the issue was with the game I was playing.

You will rarely see me play survivor in Dead by Daylight on stream. I have had some truly awful experiences with harassment in that game, in both in-game chat and connected services like being able to access Steam profiles. People take the game way too seriously for what it is and will say incredibly harsh, disrespectful, and even dangerous things over a spooky party game. I tend to attract more of that response when I play survivor because I solo queue and am incapable of reading the minds of teammates who are likely communicating with each other over Discord or a similar service. If the game does not go well, I’m prepared to be treated like I’m the worst person in the world for “ruining” their experience.

Yesterday, within the first 30 minutes of my killer stream, I had a very angry player tell me to “k y s.” If you aren’t familiar with the abbreviation, it’s an attempt to circumvent harassment policies on websites while still telling someone they should die by suicide. They kept going beyond that, but I was already done. It immediately put me into a bad mental place and impacted how I performed onstream.

Let’s be clear here. I am not in any danger of harming myself at this point. However, I was in my childhood. For whatever reason, I have always been a magnet for this kind of abusive behavior in person and online. An angry gamer in chat is nothing compared to the actual abuse and violence I’ve faced that has led to a life-changing diagnosis of PTSD. The daily microaggressions don’t help, but they’re rain drops in an ocean of trauma.

When you choose to essentially threaten someone with violence online, you don’t know who you’re actually talking to. That angry survivor in my game could’ve been the person to actually convince someone to follow that advice. Instead, they attacked a disabled content creator trying to provide entertaining content to a live audience. I can handle it; that doesn’t mean I or anyone else should have to handle it.

The good news about this is, for all its flaws, Dead by Daylight actually takes this kind of harassment very seriously. You should go the extra step and fill out a support ticket on their website so you can provide a screenshot or video recording of the interaction if you can. They receive so many irrelevant reports for game mechanics people don’t like that actual abusive behavior can get lost. It’s going to take a few days, but I know from past experience that particular gamer is going to face consequences for their actions. I doubt this is the first time they behaved that way, but with any luck it will be their last.

There are three takeaways here on the same theme.

First, do not be the kind of person who threatens violence or encourages harm because you’re mad at the game. You really do not want to face criminal charges if your victim does act on your cruelty. Just because it’s online does not mean that what you say or do to a person isn’t real; it’s real to them.

Second, if you are that people who receives the threat, do what you need to do to feel safe. Your life is more valuable than someone’s rage over a video game. There are people who really think that anything said or done online doesn’t actually impact people in real life. I know that you know the pain these online interactions can cause. Your feelings are valid and you deserve to be treated better than you are online.

Third, if anything is causing you to feel like you might pose a danger to yourself, please reach out for help. Talk to someone you trust. Contact your therapist or psychologist. Reach out to an organization like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-8255). You deserve to live and be happy, and no amount of hatred stemming from the Internet could ever change your worth as a human being.