A System to Reduce Discomfort of Taunted Player in Multiplayer Online Games

In recent years, online games have become widespread, however online games’ taunting is one of the problems to be solved. In this study, we define taunting as a non-verbal redundant operation which makes fun of other players. According to our preliminary survey, it was found that 25 out of 26 college students had experienced to be taunted by opponents of multiplayer online games. Taunted players feel discomfort and cannot keep motivation to play with the taunting players. The purpose of this study is to reduce discomfort of taunted players. In our proposed system, user’s PC detects automatically opponent’s taunting by image processing in a multiplayer game. When the system detects opponent’s taunting, the message mentioned above is shown to taunted user by notifications banner. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the proposed system. There were seven participants. Experimental results showed that our proposed system did not reduce discomfort of taunted players. The major reason was that our experimental design was not appropriate i.e. the experimenter, who was taunting, kept taunting after received warning message to increase the number of appearances of notification banner. However, in this situation, participants could not trust the proposed system.