No description available.

League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) and Valorant (Riot Games, 2020) are both team-based competitive multiplayer games that do not feature any form of story-based game mode, but both feature a large cast of fleshed-out playable characters, each with their own design, backstory, and set of abilities. This study focuses on comparing both games’ approaches to characterization to understand how they incorporate elements of characterization in theircharacter design. This was done with the hope of informing future developers of multiplayer hero games, as well as identifying similarities in their character design despite how different both games are. This study compared two sets of two characters, one from each game, which featured similarities with each other. These similarities served as this study’s starting point to analyze, and then compare both games’ approach to characterization. Many similarities were found between both games in their approach to characterization, despite their core gameplay differences. But it also found many differences, both gameplay-dependent, and dependent on other factors.

Background: Harassment is defined and labelled differently in different studies. In the context of video games it has been investigated multiple ways: diary studies, interviews, surveys and screen recordings. Methods: Video data through participating observation were conducted from the end of February 2024 to the beginning of April 2024. A total of 24 matches, with 219 participants, were recorded. The questions of how often harassment occurs, which of the five defined types of harassment occur, whether there are differences between game modes, what differences there are in terms of the reaction to harassment, and whether there are gender differences in terms of the victims, were investigated. Results: One third of the matches contained harassment. Offensive harassment occurred most frequently, with harassment occurring more frequently in competitive game mode and demonstrating a wider range of harassment. In most cases, harassment is focussed either on the player's own team or on the opposing team. The range of harassment within a team is also greater than when harassment is directed at the opposing team. In competitive game mode, harassment is mainly focussed on the own team. Conclusions: The results of the study support the findings of other studies. They also indicate that harassment in video games should be investigated with a larger number of influencing factors. In particular, the methodology used closes a research gap and could ensure a better insight into the different types of harassment without collecting the data through third parties and thus presumably causing bias.