Analyzing Codes of Conduct for Online Safety in Video Games at Scale

2026-05-14

AI Summary

Online multiplayer games are frequently plagued by cyber harms such as harassment, discrimination, and privacy violations, yet the extent and effectiveness of platform codes of conduct (CoCs) in addressing these issues remain unclear. This study introduces CONDUCTIFY, a novel analytical framework that systematically identifies and structurally evaluates CoCs across 9,586 multiplayer games on Steam, leveraging automated web scraping, text classification, and content coding techniques. The analysis reveals that only 350 games provide an explicit CoC, predominantly among popular, mature-audience, and community-driven titles. While over 80% of these CoCs address conventional safety concerns, they exhibit significant vagueness regarding interpersonal harm and protections for minors, exposing asymmetries in rule formulation and critical governance gaps.

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.

Problem

• Codes of Conduct
• online safety
• video games
• online harms
• safety governance

Innovation

• CONDUCTIFY
• Code of Conduct
• online safety
• video game governance
• large-scale analysis