Analyzing Codes of Conduct for Online Safety in Video Games at Scale

TL;DR

This study analyzes the prevalence, content, and variability of Codes of Conduct in online video games at scale, revealing gaps and inconsistencies in safety governance across popular titles.

Contribution

Introduces CONDUCTIFY, a scalable pipeline for identifying and analyzing game CoCs, and provides the first large-scale analysis of their content and coverage on Steam.

Findings

CoCs are more common in popular, adult-oriented, and community-driven games.

Over 80% of games with CoCs address safety violations, but approaches vary widely.

Articulations of interpersonal harm and underage safety are often less specific.

Abstract

Online video games have become major online social spaces where users interact, compete, and create together. These spaces, however, expose users to a wide spectrum of online harms, including harassment, discrimination, inappropriate content, privacy breach, cheating, and more. The shape and severity of such harms vary across game design, mechanics, and community context. To mitigate these harms, game companies issue Codes of Conduct (CoCs) that articulate online safety rules and direct players to safety resources. However, it remains unclear how prevalent CoCs are, what safety, security and privacy violations they govern, and whether they meet growing regulatory and industry expectations. We develop and leverage CONDUCTIFY, a pipeline for identifying and analyzing CoCs at scale. Applied to Steam, the largest PC game marketplace, it located the available CoCs for 350 of the 9,586 multiplayer titles on Steam. We found that CoCs are more available among popular, adult-oriented, and community-driven games, while most multiplayer games operate without CoCs despite regulatory and industry recommendations. Although over 80% of the games with CoCs available consistently address traditional security and safety violations, their governance approaches vary substantially across types of violations. A further asymmetry emerges in specificity. Compared with harms related to gameplay mechanics, the articulations of interpersonal harm and the underage player safety are often less specific, despite their relevance to many game communities. Together, these results inform the improvement of online safety governance and CoC enforcement practices, and building better safety infrastructure for the community of players and developers.