A recent study published in Communication Research suggests that online video game players decide a behavior is trolling based on the context surrounding the action, which in turn fuels their desire to strike back. The findings indicate that minor details in a game environment, such as earning points or the general toxicity of the community, shape how players interpret ambiguous actions and whether they retaliate with their own harassment.

Trolling is a persistent issue in online video game communities. Trolls intentionally aim to frustrate, anger, and harm the well-being of other players. However, identifying trolls can be remarkably difficult because they frequently operate within the rules of the game. They exploit loopholes and repurpose normal game mechanics for malicious intent.

Past research indicates that only a small fraction of gamers consistently initiate harassment. Yet, toxic behavior remains widespread. This discrepancy suggests that much of the trolling seen online is actually a chain reaction.

Being a victim of harassment is the most commonly cited reason for a player to engage in the behavior themselves. When gamers retaliate, they often direct their aggression at the original instigator and carry it into future matches with new people. Over time, this contagious hostility becomes woven into the community’s culture.

To understand how this chain reaction starts, scientists look at how people explain the motives of others. According to attribution theories, humans constantly try to reconstruct the reasoning behind someone else’s actions. If a player perceives an in-game behavior as purposefully harmful, they feel a stronger need to retaliate. This retaliation often creates a spiral of reciprocal harassment.

“The study’s motivation is the unchecked spread of trolling in online communities,” said John A. Velez, an associate professor in the Communication Science Unit at The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. “The main point was to show that players can easily see trolling, even when it’s not there. And that simply thinking they saw trolling is enough for a nice player to spread trolling to others.”

When motivations are not explicitly stated, people rely on environmental clues to guess what another person is thinking. The researchers wanted to identify the specific clues that make gamers interpret an action as trolling.

“I would highlight that it doesn’t matter what a player actually intended when choosing a game behavior; what matters is the interpretation of that behavior by others,” Velez said. “As long as someone thinks they saw trolling, then there is a chance that perception will trigger more trolling in others and spread it over a community.”

To test this, the authors focused on three potential variables. The first was whether the video game rewarded the behavior with points, acting as an external excuse. The second was whether the action targeted a teammate or an opponent. The third was whether the community had a reputation for toxic behavior.

The authors recruited 290 adults from the United States who regularly play video games. The participants were presented with a cover story. They were told they were evaluating real player conduct to help administrators maintain a healthy gaming community.

Participants first read a fictitious code of conduct. They then watched prerecorded, staged gameplay from the popular team-based shooter game *Overwatch*.

Creating a controlled, realistic game environment for an experiment requires extensive preparation. “It took years to complete this study, and my co-authors and I worked really hard to make the gameplay footage; they deserve a lot of credit,” Velez noted.

In the three-minute video, a player controlling a character named Reinhardt engaged in a digital dance, known as an emote, over the body of a recently defeated character. Voice chat and text communication were disabled, meaning the emote was the only way the characters interacted.

The researchers accounted for several variables to ensure accurate results. They measured participants’ prior experience with *Overwatch*. They also recorded the participants’ self-reported history of engaging in toxic behavior and how often they felt targeted by harassment during their own gaming sessions. Controlling for these factors did not alter the pattern of the findings.

The study randomly assigned participants to experience different versions of the video to test the three environmental clues. For the behavioral reward clue, some participants saw text pop up on the screen indicating that the player earned ten points for performing the dance. Other participants watched the exact same dance but saw no points awarded.

For the second clue, the researchers manipulated the group membership of the targeted character. Half of the participants watched the player dance over a defeated opponent. The other half watched the player dance over a fallen teammate.

For the third clue, participants read a fabricated internal report about the gaming community’s norms before watching the video. Half were told that trolling was incredibly common and expected in this group. The other half read that players rarely expected to see toxic behaviors in the community.

After watching the footage, participants rated how they perceived the player’s intentions using a seven-point scale. The data provides evidence that all three clues independently influenced how people interpreted the dance.

When the game awarded no points for the dance, participants rated the behavior as more malicious. On the seven-point scale, perceived trolling scored an average of 4.69 without points, compared to 4.03 when points were awarded. The lack of a point reward seemed to eliminate a game-based excuse for the action, leading observers to assume a hostile intent.

The target of the action also altered interpretations. Dancing over a teammate led to higher perceptions of trolling, averaging 4.60, compared to a score of 4.12 for dancing over an opponent. Players generally expect positive interactions with teammates, so violating that expectation tends to signal malicious intent.

The community’s reputation played a similar role in shaping perceptions. Being told the community was generally toxic increased the perception of trolling to an average of 4.63. In comparison, being told the community was polite resulted in a lower average score of 4.08.

Interestingly, these three environmental clues did not change how the others functioned, but rather piled on top of one another. In statistical terms, the clues were additive rather than interactive.

“The main thing that surprised me was that the effects were additive and not interactive,” Velez said. “Meaning that each sign/auxiliary cue implied trolling separately but that the effect got stronger the more signs/auxiliary cues were included in the observation.”

Researchers initially suspected that one clue might alter the meaning of another. “I originally thought that the signs might change meaning depending on the presence/absence of other signs, but that wasn’t the case,” Velez explained. “It just takes one sign for someone to infer trolling but I would argue there are likely multiple signs in every social interaction and the addition on each sign makes it more likely to see trolling.”

The researchers then analyzed how these interpretations affected the participants’ desire to engage in vigilantism. Participants answered questions about how likely they would be to harass the offending player if they were actually in the game. The options included insulting their intelligence, using slurs, wishing them harm, or intentionally frustrating their gameplay.

The statistical models suggest an indirect chain of events. When environmental clues made the dance look like a malicious act, participants reported a stronger urge to retaliate with their own toxic behaviors. The perception of trolling served as a psychological bridge between the ambiguous action and the desire to strike back.

“The study shows how quickly people make judgments about trolling in a few observations of a player,” Velez noted. “But these types of situations occur frequently in online gameplay and more importantly, each instance can spread trolling to a few more people and then even more people and so on.”

This cycle of misinterpretation and retaliation helps explain why gaming environments can quickly devolve into hostility. “It only takes one misinterpretation to start a cascade of trolling behaviors,” Velez added. “And in the end, the results suggest that the majority of trolling we see online could be troll vigilantes mistakenly trolling other vigilantes. While we can’t stop some people from trolling, we can clear up these misunderstandings that lead to the spread of trolling.”

These findings offer a fresh perspective on how everyday players experience and react to ambiguous situations. “They should take away that online gameplay can be extremely chaotic and that it is very easy to make mistakes in the midst of this chaos when deciding if a player is being a troll or not,” Velez said.

Players can use this knowledge to reflect on their own habits. “So try to avoid using the signs of trolling I identify in the paper (i.e., auxiliary cues) as quick mental shortcuts for making snap judgments about others,” Velez advised. “But also be aware of how easy it is for other players to perceive your own behaviors as trolling, even when you are not trying to be one.”

The authors suggest that developers could use this information to disrupt the cycle of trolling. If minor, harmless behaviors are given small in-game rewards, targets might be less likely to perceive them as malicious. Additionally, training community moderators to recognize the specific clues that trigger retaliation could help defuse conflicts before they spread.

“The long-term goal is to implement practical steps to stop the spread of trolling through this process,” Velez said. “The paper offers some recommendations but with this approach towards trolling, game developers can devise many interventions tailored to their games and communities.”

A primary limitation of the study is its reliance on prerecorded, staged gameplay. Participants passively observed the video rather than actively playing the game themselves. The cognitive load and emotional highs of active gameplay might alter how players process environmental clues in real-time. The findings might overestimate how deeply players analyze the intentions of others during fast-paced matches.

The experimental setup intentionally excluded voice and text chat to keep the behavior ambiguous. In real gaming environments, players frequently communicate their intentions directly. The presence of verbal communication could easily override the subtle environmental clues examined in this research.

Future research could explore how these interpretations work in other digital spaces. Virtual reality environments and the Metaverse rely heavily on non-verbal actions that could be misinterpreted by users. Scientists also plan to investigate how live streaming shapes gaming norms, as passive viewers might adopt toxic expectations simply by watching others play.

The study, “Trolling is in the Eye of the Beholder: An Attributional Approach to Predicting Perceptions of Trolling and Vigilantism in Online Games,” was authored by John A. Velez, Ines Hyunju Yu, Xan Smith, Sung Hyun Lee, Seung Woo Chae, and Yuxian Lin.

Male mice that recover from a severe COVID-19-like infection can pass anxiety-like traits to their offspring by altering the RNA molecules inside their sperm. These findings suggest that a paternal viral infection prior to conception might alter the developmental trajectory of the next generation. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Biologists once thought that parents only passed down genetic information through the fixed sequence of DNA in their sperm and egg cells. Researchers now recognize that environmental factors, such as stress or diet, can alter traits in offspring without changing the underlying DNA code. This process is known as epigenetic inheritance. One major pathway for epigenetic inheritance involves small noncoding RNAs, which are tiny molecular messengers that control how and when other genes turn on or off without building proteins themselves.

Past experiments have shown that exposing male mice to bacterial or parasitic infections alters the small noncoding RNAs in their sperm. This internal shift can alter the brain development and behavior of their future offspring. A team of scientists led by Elizabeth Kleeman and Anthony Hannan at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health wanted to know if a respiratory virus could produce similar intergenerational outcomes. They chose to study SARS-CoV-2 because hundreds of millions of people have contracted the virus globally since the start of the pandemic.

The researchers utilized a small study design relying on an established mouse model of SARS-CoV-2. They infected adult male mice with the virus and gave a control group a harmless mock infection. The infected animals experienced moderate to severe illness, marked by a temporary drop in body weight. Four weeks later, after the mice had fully cleared the virus, the researchers mated both groups with healthy female mice that had never encountered the pathogen.

When the offspring of these pairings reached adulthood, the researchers evaluated their behavior. They placed the mice in an enclosure featuring a brightly lit area and a concealed dark zone. Mice naturally prefer dark spaces, and spending less time in the light indicates higher levels of anxiety. The offspring of the fathers infected with SARS-CoV-2 spent much less time exploring the bright zone compared to the uninfected control group.

The male offspring in this group also hesitated much longer before entering the lit area at all. The researchers observed comparable results in an open field test, where the offspring of infected fathers avoided the exposed center of the testing arena. The researchers also subjected the mice to tests evaluating memory, sociability, and depression. The offspring of the infected fathers showed no differences in their ability to recognize novel objects or interact with unfamiliar mice, indicating that the primary behavioral shift centered on anxiety.

The scientists also examined the offspring’s brains, focusing on the hippocampus, a region involved in emotional regulation. They discovered altered gene expression profiles in the offspring of the infected mice. These alterations were particularly pronounced in the female offspring, who showed reduced activity in several genes linked to stress responses. Similar gene reductions frequently appear in rodent models of chronic stress.

To find out if these behavioral changes persisted across multiple generations, the team conducted a second breeding experiment. They took the male offspring from the first generation and mated them with a new group of healthy females. The resulting grand-offspring exhibited some early developmental differences, including slightly altered body weights. As these grand-offspring matured, they did not display the elevated anxiety traits seen in their parents, suggesting the behavioral effect faded after one generation.

The researchers then sought to uncover the biological mechanism driving the anxiety-like traits in the first generation. They collected sperm from the original groups of infected and healthy male mice four weeks after their initial exposure. An analysis of the sperm revealed modified levels of multiple small noncoding RNAs in the animals that had contracted SARS-CoV-2. Some clusters of these regulatory molecules were less abundant, while a few specific types were highly elevated.

Specifically, the researchers identified drops in the expression of PIWI-interacting RNAs, which are specialized molecules that protect the genome from mutations during sperm development. They also found elevated levels of certain microRNAs, which are known to influence early embryonic growth. To confirm that these specific RNA molecules caused the behavioral changes, the team designed a microinjection experiment. They extracted the small RNA cargo from the sperm of both the infected and the uninfected control mice.

Using microscopic needles, the researchers injected this extracted RNA directly into healthy, fertilized mouse eggs. They implanted these embryos into surrogate female mice and allowed the resulting offspring to grow into adulthood. The adult mice that developed from the eggs injected with the infected sperm RNA exhibited traits mimicking the naturally conceived offspring. In the light and dark box test, the male mice from this group showed heightened hesitation before entering the brightly lit zone.

While not every behavioral difference transferred perfectly, the presence of anxiety-like symptoms confirmed that the sperm RNA played a direct role in shaping the offspring’s brain development. The isolated molecular cargo was enough to recreate portions of the intergenerational effect. A few important caveats accompany these results. The study relied entirely on animal models, and biological responses in mice do not perfectly mirror human health outcomes.

The viral infection caused notable weight loss in the adult male mice, which presents a confounding variable. Severe metabolic stress and sudden weight loss can independently trigger epigenetic changes in sperm. It is difficult to separate the effects of the virus itself from the physical toll of a severe illness. Additionally, studying a dangerous pathogen required the researchers to conduct their behavioral assessments inside a highly restricted biosafety facility. Space limitations in this environment prevented the use of larger behavioral testing arenas.

The researchers noted that tracking human outcomes takes decades, making animal models a necessary starting point. Future studies will need to determine whether milder infections, antiviral treatments, or prior vaccinations modify the RNA content in sperm. Resolving these questions will help clarify if the global spread of SARS-CoV-2 might subtly influence the mental health of children conceived in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The study, “Paternal SARS-CoV-2 infection impacts sperm small noncoding RNAs and increases anxiety in offspring in a sex-dependent manner,” was authored by Elizabeth A. Kleeman, Carolina Gubert, Sonali N. Reisinger, Kathryn C. Davidson, Da Lu, Merle Dayton, Liana Mackiewicz, Bethany A. Masson, Pranav Adithya, Alexandra L. Garnham, Gemma Stathatos, Moira K. O’Bryan, Rikeish R. Muralitharan, Francine Z. Marques, Shanshan Li, Huan Liao, Shae McLaughlin, Emmet T. Keough, Michelle Y. Wheeler, Pamudika Kiridena, Marcel Doerflinger, Marc Pellegrini, and Anthony J. Hannan.