We all know what trolls are, those mythical ugly dwarfs who dwell under a bridge preventing passersby from crossing. However, in the real world there exists a similar creature called the internet troll. We’ve all encountered these beings that love to harass and mess with the citizens of the interwebs in whatever way they could. The question is why? Why do these people decide to cause such havoc and negativity in this digital world? This question was explored during the second week of class where we analyzed the research article “Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context” by Christine Cook, Juliette Schaafsma, and Marjolijn Antheunis.
My first personal encounter with trolls was in middle school when I began playing the multiplayer online battle area (MOBA) game League of Legends. In League the objective of the game is to protect your base from the enemy team and at the same time destroy the enemy’s base in order to secure victory. However, one of my teammates decided it was a good idea to intentionally feed (give kills to) the enemy champion making the character unbelievably powerful. At that time, I didn’t know what trolling was and just thought my teammate was “dumb” for playing the game wrong and costing us the game. I was confused what my teammate’s motivation was for ruining the game for me and the rest of my team.
According to Cook et. al, “[trolling] can be generally split into three categories… attack, sensation seeking, and interaction seeking.” (3328) My teammate’s decision to feed falls into two of the three categories: attack and sensation seeking. Cook describes attack as anti-social and antagonistic which perfectly describes my teammate whose goal was to ruin the game of my team. At the same time, my teammate also was sensation seeking or trying to create drama and get a reaction from my team (3328). Although these things paint a picture of someone who possess components of the Dark Tetrad, not all trolling is bad. Let me explain.
After years of playing games I found myself delving into interaction seeking trolling with my friends in a game called Combat Arms. Combat Arms is a first person shooter game that my friends and I found to be extremely fun and a good way to blow off steam after school. We used to play custom matches splitting the friend group into two teams at war with each other. After a while, the game got stale and we began walking down the road of interaction seeking trolling. Since Combat Arms was a fairly old game, it was full of glitches and insane things you could do. One of these ridiculous things was jumping on a teammate who was squatting and completely immobilizing them as well as body blocking. This behavior can be seen as antagonistic but also helped enhance turn the game into something new.
Today trolling become ingrained in internet culture as an evil since trolling can lead to harassment and cyber bullying. Thankfully however, there are resources online that can help combat harassment such as the Center for Solutions and the Crash Override Network. Although evil, trolling can also (at times) enhance gameplay. For example, the game Dead by Daylight focuses on four survivors trying to escape from a killer by repairing generators and opening the gate out. The concept of the game is extremely simple and if played strictly with the objective in mind, it can get pretty boring. However, trolling has become ingrained in the culture of the game and has become an unwritten rule. Often times, players are seen taunting the killer to catch his attention or shining a flashlight in the killer’s face. All of these things are done for fun and to enhance the gameplay.
As Cook says “Trolling appears to breed trolling” (3331) and in order to combat this, we should all learn to be respectful and not overstep boundaries.
Center for Solutions to Online Violence: http://femtechnet.org/csov/
Crash Override Network: http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com/
DMS 448 Spring 2020 
Hi Jian,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog post about trolling and your personal experience with a troll while playing League of Legends. I have never been trolled but can imagine that it can teeter along the line of fun and games and being downright insulting. Trolling can take many forms, but in your case, it appears the player trolled you via gameplay. With that experience, did you desire to troll yourself? You referred to trolling alongside your friends in Combat Arms, but would you consider trolling a random player? In a society where everyone has become technologically dependent, I think that trolling will become a new ‘norm’ in regard to social media usage and virtual reality. Behind the screen, it is easier to engage in behaviors and conversations that one typically would not in reality.
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I really enjoyed your personal take on trolling and your idea of how it enhances gameplay. You mentioned that you used to troll your teammates while playing Combat Arms and that it enhanced your game play by turning the game into something new. However, have you ever trolled any strangers that you’ve played with in the past? I ask this because I feel as though trolling with friends may enhance game play but trolling people you may not know might be a different story. While trolling teammates or friends, they might understand that it’s all just a joke but people who don’t know you might not understand that.
I also wanted to touch on whether or not trolling really enhances gameplay or not. For the person doing the trolling, it may add a sense of humor or excitement to the game they are playing. However, for the person being trolled, their game experience was ruined by someone looking to get a reaction out of them. Whenever we troll online we usually only focus on what we can get out of it, whether it is a crazy reaction we were looking for or something else. We don’t usually think about how the person we are trolling might feel or be affected.
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For me personally, I usually play a solo game to avoid getting trolled by other users. I can’t really remember certain cases where people have trolled me per se. I only know of cases where I and my friends have trolled other people. An example would be in a game called Deceit where there are 6 people, with 2 being infected. The goal of the innocent is to figure out who is infected and either kill them or escape after 3 rounds. For the infected, it is to kill all innocent without being caught. I would team up with friends in a 5 person lobby, and we would sometimes kill the 1 random as we were all in a discord call. If I was in a full lobby of friends and in a call, we would throw the game sometimes as we didn’t care enough and just trolled with each other.
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