League of Game Community and Company Governance

• In Event: The Messy Intersection of Games and Governance, Both Within and Surrounding Games (High-Density)

Abstract

My work concerns disruptive behavior and governance in League of Legends, a popular multiplayer online battle arena game. This talk will discuss player participation in dealing with disruptive behavior like harassment, griefing, and bullying. Governance is expected to effectively regulate such behavior, but it also mediates the relationship between community and game company. Community involvement in governance is a common approach, where players are invited to carry out some work, like monitoring, reporting, and even punishing disruptive players. Such approach contains many issues such as trust, legitimacy, norms, player culture, player experience, and design. I will use my ethnographic study of governance in League of Legends to discuss the relationships between player community, governance, and game company.

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Yubo Kou is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 2016. His research interests lie in human-computer interaction and game user research. As a longtime gamer and a researcher, he has conducted an ethnographic study of League of Legends since 2011, investigating a variety of interconnected topics such as disruptive behavior, governance, in-game collaboration, learning, player culture, and identity. His work on governance in League of Legends examined socio-technical approaches to online disruptive behavior, as well as how these approaches impact community norms and corporate values.

Author

• Yubo Kou, Purdue U