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Palgrave Macmillan

Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Kevin Veale

    1. School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

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  • Argues that online communities focused on harassment and abuse function as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) where the collective goal is to ruin the lives of those they target

  • Seeks to engage with topical issues regarding how digital and cultural infrastructures shape political movements across the globe

  • Illustrates that tools for mitigating and preventing online harassment are possible and affordable

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: The Breadth of Harassment Culture and Contextualising Gamergate

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 1-33

  3. Networked Publics of Abuse

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 35-47

  4. Exploring the Overlap Between Hatemobs and ARGs

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 49-85

  5. Gaming the Rules

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 87-106

  6. Problematic Tools and Platform Complicity

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 107-128

  7. Reshaping the Landscape

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 129-145

  8. Conclusion: The Christchurch Call to Action Summit and What Follows

    • Kevin Veale
    Pages 147-163

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 165-168
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Keywords

About this book

This book argues that online harassment communities function as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) where the collective goal is to ruin peoples’ lives.  Framing these communities like ARGs highlights ways to limit their impact in the future, partly through offering people better ways to control their own safety online.

The comparison also underlines the complicity of social networks in online harassment, since the communities use their designs as tools.  Social networks know this, and need to work on minimizing the problem, or acknowledge that they are profiting through promoting abuse. 

Reviews

"This book is a fresh and original take on the topic of online hate and harassment. Veale provides an insightful and comprehensive account of the major developments and milestones in the history of online harassment campaigns, explaining their complex dynamics, both at the level of personal interaction and platform complicity. This book is a timely contribution to a steadily growing body of work that seeks to reconceptualise online hate as terrorism, and - most importantly - to find solutions to this problem."


- Dr. Debbie Ging, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Dublin City University, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kevin Veale

About the author

Kevin Veale is a Lecturer in Media Studies for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University in Aotearoa-New Zealand.  His work focuses on storytelling across media forms, and exploring the ways that different forms of mediation shape the affective experiences of the stories they mediate.

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