Analyzing Codes of Conduct for Online Safety in Video Games at Scale
Authors: Jiuming Jiang, Shidong Pan, Daniel W Woods et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 15047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online video games have become major online social spaces where users interact, compete, and create together.
Relevance
Read next because Analyzing Codes of Conduct for Online Safety in Video Games at Scale overlaps with clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: code, text, persona, rect, title, under, eval, source. Source: arxiv cs.CR (Cryptography and Security).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.15047v1 Announce Type: new 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 multiplayer titles on Steam. We found that CoCs are more available among popular, adult-oriented, and community-driven games, while most multiplayer games operate without CoCs despite regulatory and industry recommendations. Although over 80% of the games with CoCs available consistently address traditional security and safety violations, their governance approaches vary substantially across types of violations. A further asymmetry emerges in specificity. Compared with harms related to gameplay mechanics, the articulations of interpersonal harm and the underage player safety are often less specific, despite their relevance to many game communities. Together, these results inform the improvement of online safety governance and CoC enforcement practices, and building better safety infrastructure for the community of players and developers.