Analyzing Codes of Conduct for Online Safety in Video Games at Scale
Jiuming Jiang, Shidong Pan, Daniel W Woods, Jingjie Li

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…
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