Summary
Online groups of people who play otome games, a type of romance game popular with women, often face a lot of mean and hurtful behavior. The authors studied over 600,000 posts from two social platforms, Weibo and Reddit, to understand how common this bad behavior is and who it targets. They found that Weibo has much more toxicity than Reddit, and certain real-world fights can cause the problem to get worse very quickly. They also identified groups of users who seem to work together to attack game developers. This research helps us see how different online communities deal with harmful content and suggests ways to make these spaces better for everyone.
Otome gamesToxicityOnline communitiesWeiboRedditLanguage modelsContent moderationSocial platformsCoordination clustersManual annotation
Authors
Yage Zhang, Xinyue Shen, Yukun Jiang, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
Abstract
Otome games, a romance simulation genre primarily targeting female, have emerged as a major force in the global gaming market, attracting hundreds of millions of players and billions in revenue. Despite their popularity, otome game communities face pervasive online toxicity, which has been largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first large-scale measurement of toxicity in otome game communities across social platforms. We introduce OtomeSCAN, a framework for collecting, evaluating, and analyzing 620,045 posts from Weibo and Reddit spanning 18 months. To support robust analysis, we manually annotated a ground-truth dataset of 4,308 posts, identifying eight target groups such as players and game developers. We evaluate seven toxicity detectors on the dataset, including general-purpose models and our proposed LLM-based detectors, with our best model achieving F1-scores of 0.82 (Weibo) and 0.78 (Reddit). Our analysis reveals significant platform-based differences in toxicity: 22.20% of otome-related posts on Weibo are toxic, compared to 3.71% on Reddit. Besides, real-world events like in-community conflicts can rapidly escalate toxicity, with toxicity ratios increasing to 37.09% in just 72 hours during an external attack on Weibo. We also flag 191 potential-coordination clusters in otome game communities, 64.40% of which target game developers, with several accounts participating repeatedly across multiple clusters. We hope our work inspires further research on community-specific toxicity and contributes to building healthier online spaces for marginalized gaming communities.