A new study on toxicity in gaming has found that 69 percent of gamers admit to smurfing, despite hating it when others smurf against them.
The uninitiated may be wondering what smurfing is, or perhaps are envisioning 69 percent of gamers daubing themselves in blue and replacing all their verbs with “smurf” for the duration of a gaming session. If that is what you are guessing, you are pretty smurfing far from the truth.
When you play an online game against other players, the game tries to match you to players of similar skill level, as game developers know it’s less fun for players if you are constantly being crushed by opponents far above your skill level. But people find ways around this – creating new accounts or borrowing them from other gamers – in order to play people of a lot lower skill level than their own.
In 1996, two players of Warcraft 2 became so notoriously good at the game that fellow gamers would back out of matches if they saw their usernames. In order to play the game they had purchased, they created second accounts named PapaSmurf and Smurfette, and continued to crush all their opponents under these new profiles. The term “smurfing” caught on from there, and is used to describe any player deliberately creating new accounts in order to play against players of lower skill levels.
Gamers report smurfing taking place a lot, with 97 percent of participants in the new study saying they believe they play against smurfs sometimes. The behavior is viewed as toxic by the gaming community, and yet 69 percent admitted to smurfing themselves at least sometimes, and 13 percent saying they do it frequently or almost always.
“Relative to smurfees, participants perceived smurfs as more likely to be toxic, to disengage from the game, and to enjoy the game,” the team from Ohio State University wrote in their study. “There were also pronounced self-other effects. Relative to themselves, participants thought that other gamers were more likely to be toxic, less likely to keep playing the game, and less likely to enjoy the game.”
At the end of the study, the team asked for feedback and found that gamers (recruited from Reddit) informed them of a number of reasons why they smurfed, ranging from wanting to play alongside friends of different skill levels, to wanting to crush a bunch of noobs. The team conducted a second study, asking players to evaluate these various reasons for smurfing, having been told that they were real reasons given by smurfs who had won the game they were smurfing in. They were also asked what level of punishment should be given to the smurf.
The team was expecting people to use a “motivated-blame perspective”, or to generally think that smurfing is wrong no matter the justification.
“This perspective says if something is wrong, it doesn’t matter your reason for doing it, it is always wrong,” lead author Charles Monge explained in a press release. “The idea is that it shouldn’t matter if you were just smurfing so you can play with your friends, you made me lose this game and now I am mad.”
However, the team found that gamers evaluated whether smurfing was wrong on individual basis, ranking some types of smurfing as more blameworthy than others and wanting harsher punishments for smurfs with less justifiable reasons for smurfing (e.g. wanting to crush less-skilled players).
A third study found that non-gamers had roughly the same socially regulated perspective, seeing nuance in smurfing behavior. While interesting in its own right – given the toxicity often associated with gaming – the team hopes that the findings could be applied elsewhere.
“Games may offer a really potent tool to test things that are not about games,” Monge added. “How we attribute blame in an online context may allow us to understand how people place blame more broadly.”
The study is published in New Media & Society.