A new study on gaming toxicity found that 69 percent of gamers admit to smurfing, despite hating it when others smurf against them.
The uninitiated might be wondering what smurfing is, or perhaps imagining that 69 percent of gamers will smear themselves blue and replace all their verbs with “smurfing” for the duration of a gaming session. If that’s what you’re guessing, you’re pretty far from the truth.
When you play an online game against other players, the game tries to match you up with players of a similar skill level, since game developers know that it’s less fun for players if you’re constantly getting trampled by opponents far above your skill level. But people find ways around this – creating new accounts or borrowing from other players – to play with people of much lower skill levels than their own.
In 1996, two Warcraft 2 players became so notoriously good at the game that other players would quit matches when they saw their usernames. In order to play the game they bought, they created other accounts called PapaSmurf and Smurfette and proceeded to destroy all their opponents under these new profiles. The term “smurfing” caught on from there and is used to describe any player who deliberately creates new accounts to play against players of lower skill levels.
Players report that smurfing happens frequently, and 97 percent of participants in a new study said they believe they sometimes play against smurfs. The gaming community views such behavior as toxic, yet 69 percent admitted to smurfing themselves at least sometimes, with 13 percent saying they do it often or almost always.
“Relative to smurfs, participants perceived smurfs as more likely to be toxic, disengage from play, and enjoy play,” the Ohio State University team wrote in their study. “There were also pronounced self-other effects. Relative to themselves, participants thought other players were more likely to be toxic, less likely to continue playing the game, and less likely to enjoy the game.”
At the end of the study, the team asked for feedback and found that players (recruited from Reddit) informed them of a variety of reasons for Smurfing, ranging from wanting to play with friends of different skill levels to wanting to break up a crowd of noobs. The team conducted a second study, asking players to rate these different reasons for smurfing, after being told that these were actual reasons given by smurfs who had won the game in which they smurfed. They were also asked what level of punishment the smurf should receive.
The team expected people to use a “motivated guilt perspective” or to generally think that smurfing is wrong regardless of the justification.
“This perspective says that if something is wrong, it doesn’t matter your reason for doing it, it’s always wrong,” explained lead author Charles Monge in a press release. “The idea is that it shouldn’t matter if you’re just smurfing so you can play with your friends, you made me lose this game and now I’m pissed.”
However, the team found that players judge whether smurfing is wrong on an individual basis, ranking some types of smurfing as more wrong than others and wanting harsher punishments for smurfs with less justified reasons for smurfing (eg, wanting to crush less skilled players).
A third study found that non-gamers have roughly the same socially regulated perspective, seeing nuances in Smurfing behavior. While interesting in its own right – given the toxicity often associated with gaming – the team hopes the findings could be applied elsewhere.
“Games can offer a really powerful tool for testing things that aren’t about games,” Monge added. “How we attribute blame in an online context can allow us to understand how people make accusations more broadly.”
The study was published in New Media & Society.