Combating Toxicity, Hate, and Harassment in Online Games: A Workshop at FDG 2023

Organizers

Julian Frommel is an Assistant Professor in Interaction \& Multimedia at Utrecht University. He is interested in designing and implementing interactive digital systems that provide safe, healthy, meaningful, and enjoyable experiences for users, including how to mitigate the negative effects of being targeted or exposed to toxicity and harassment in digital spaces.

Regan Mandryk is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming Technologies and Experiences and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. Her work focuses on how people use playful technologies for social and emotional wellbeing, and how toxicity thwarts the connection and recovery benefits provided by multiplayer games. 

Alessandro Canossa has been straddling between the game industry and academia for many years. He has been Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Associate Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and he’s now at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He was also Senior User Researcher and Data Scientist at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft studio,  He’s now involved with Modl.AI, a company providing AI services to the game industry, where he’s exploring how to triangulate data-driven insights with surveys and lab observations to advance the field of predictive analytics.

Bastian Kordyaka is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany. His work addresses various aspects related to toxicity, such as a better understanding of the roles of individual, social, and cultural correlates as well as technology design during the occurrence of the phenomenon. 

Yubo Kou is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. He is interested in understanding toxicity in its context, and particularly how it is intertwined with moderation design in online platforms such as social media and multiplayer games.

Rachel Kowert is a research psychologist and the Research Director for Take This. Her work is primarily focused on dark participation in games and, specifically, the role digital games play as assets of influence for extremist radicalization. 

Selen Turkay is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science at Queensland University of Technology. Her research examines design principles of games and immersive environments associated with wellbeing outcomes.  She aims to understand the antecedents of toxicity and  design systems to deal with and mitigate the negative consequences of toxicity to the players.