In the article “Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context”, it gives an attempt to quantify trolling and trolls in an online environment. The way this study went about was through interviewing people who have trolling experience online. Even though the sample size was pretty small (around 23 people) and the results might be not representing all the potential factors. This study provided some insight into the spectrum of trolls from friendly banter to full on harassment that could even leak into one’s actual life. 

The whole idea of trolling can be vague, to a degree, but the study tries to give a sound explanation for trolling. It goes through the whether an interaction would be considered trolling, the motivation for the action, and the result of said action to help determine their definition of trolling. Through my personal experience, I like to think I’ve seen a good chunk of the spectrum of trolling: being a bystander, being the one targeted by the troll, or the one doing the trolling. The only time I can recall I was the one trolling would be friendly banter I would have with my friends, nothing ever got too serious in the scenario. I can recall numerous times where I’m the bystander in the troll where both I’ve known all parties involved and others where I know no one. An example would be when I was playing counter strike global offensive (CSGO, note: this is a very competitive game where the majority of the players like to take it very seriously) and I would join a game with a bunch of randoms, and someone was trying to be all funny, cracking a few jokes, trying to make everyone laugh, one of the guys on the team wasn’t having it. At first he was calm about it (we were losing a bit) and he just wanted everyone to focus up a little more to try to make a comeback. The guy cracking jokes didn’t take this well at all, he escalated his commentary very quickly, from making jokes to now cursing at him, calling him a wide variety of hurtful names. The guy getting berated then was fighting back and at this point the game was getting very toxic to the point where everyone wasn’t having a good time. That may seem like an isolated situation but in this game’s community behavior like this was commonplace. I’m numb to most of this but to the outside world this game can look very intimidating. 

The results of the piece categorized a few forms of trolling from the data they collected. They made a list of types of trolling actions while providing their explanation of the said action. Some examples would be verbal abuse, trash talking, flaming, etc. Those are the actions alone which can’t be the baseline for the parameters of trolling now the motivation and desired result of the troller needs to be taken into account too. For the most part people with ill intentions are trolling to single someone out, sometype of amusing reaction, or in retaliation an attack. Overall the piece is very well detailed on how they want to define trolling in the online community and even though the results didn’t cover all the bases of internet culture, it did a pretty good attempt at it.