In the poll above: it should say "kennen ur a r-tard" and then "sorry for being such a r-tard, lol".

Here's the original thread:

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=2934959

The initial results are attached here as a PDF.

Wow, Reds! I'm still on my weekend adventure, but I wanted to thank you for responding and reply to your comments.

I do have data on which responses are from the LoL forums versus which are from Reddit; later on, I'd like to see if I can identify any significant relationships between "poll origin" and responses. I certainly would not presume to claim that this survey measures the LoL community's views with great accuracy: not only did I throw it together rather quickly, but there's surely a selection bias at work here. That said, on the language issue, I mostly interact with forumgoers, so knowing what the forum/Reddit crowds think is interesting to me.

And yes, one thing I plan to do when I do a proper analysis is go through and delete duplicate results or the most obvious troll responses.

(on the "are you rethinking your use of any of these words" question)
As a rough measure, if you look at these response rates as fractions of the "which words do you use" response sets, it seems like for each word roughly a quarter of that word's users are reconsidering their use. That's a very rough measure, of course; I might go back and (e.g.) only count "rethinking 'r-tard'" responses from people who said they sometimes use 'r-tard'. Then again, perhaps they're rethinking it and not currently using it.

Anyway, I was quite pleased to see that so many respondents are apparently willing to rethink their use of language.

Perhaps, although I think my poor question-phrasing has me in a dilemma here: perhaps someone said "none of these" because they're currently rethinking all of them. The literal wording of the question would exclude these, but I can easily imagine someone zeroing in on the "rethinking" part and neglecting the "currently use" phrase. I'll check later and see how often this sort of combination arose.

Definitely so! That would be a part of a proper pre-analysis data-cleaning ... which I unfortunately haven't been able to get to yet.

This is where I'm glad I left open some text fields and also had forum/reddit threads going. I noticed that some respondents objected to the acceptable/unacceptable phrasing as too context-independent, and felt that neither answer choice really expressed their views. (The poll I posted on this thread aimed to address this by providing concrete use-examples.) I expected some problems from the absolute phrasing, and I considered some middle-ground options, but in surveys I sometimes like to put in a few extremely simple, often binary, questions.



Full disclosure: I autopunish for n-gger and f-ggot, in all but the most contrived situations (e.g. "stop calling him a f-ggot"). IMO, neither of these words has a place in the gamer slang lexicon. (I do respect that Riot wants to avoid giving out a comprehensive Tribunal rulebook, so I won't ask for approval of this practice from you.) But yes, Tribunal is great, in part because it's flexible. Relatedly, it's harder to get around than a computer program that only understands a set of 20 "bad words".


Yep! I should have phrased it differently ... something like "I do not autopunish for any of these words, but I autopunish for other words."

I feel odd assuming a priori that there aren't any people responding who have alternate gender identities, but yeah, the proportion here seems higher than what I'd expect the population average to be (although worth a check), and a large number of these were obvious troll responses that put SUCK MY DICK or whatever in the text fields.


Absolutely. I plan to run some analyses on that later.

Sounds interesting! What sorts of things might you ask in a language poll?

Are you referring to the poll in this thread itself? If I do another Google survey, I might include more concrete example questions. (I'd also really like to add some questions about whether or not a given respondent has been punished by Tribunal yet, and then give them an open-ended prompt to explain what they got punished for and how they've reacted to it.) The advantage of concrete questions, like the ones in this thread poll, is that they get around some of the "well...it depends, I dunno" reaction that people seem to get an extra dose of when they're somewhat uncomfortable with their likely answers.

Haha, thanks! I again appreciate you publicizing the no-spiders mod on your Twitter account.

I don't have much of a psych background beyond AP Psych in high school, but I did major in the social sciences in college, so I have some rudimentary survey/statistical competence which I've found quite handy. I do find psychology a very interesting field with a lot to say of relevance to fields I've spent more time studying, such as political science, economics, and law. Like with political science in particular, my hunch is that doing good psych work is tricky because you have to think very hard about how you operationalize concepts, and how you're willing to trade accuracy for simplicity (because "a theory that explains everything explains nothing", in the sense that it doesn't make the world any easier to understand).

Someone tell me it's safe.

This poll is really disappointing, but thanks for compiling the data.

EDIT: Add an "All of the above," option to the poll?

You're welcome.

Would you mind explaining in what way you found the survey disappointing? (Since you posted before I'd posted the forum poll up, I assume you're referring to the Google poll.)

I thought this was actually pretty interesting, and it's obvious you put a lot of work into it!

I was shocked (shouldn't have been) by how many more teenagers were polled than not. It would be interesting to see how each age group feels as well. I like to think people closer to my age don't think it's okay to use those words. Hopefully? Please?

Wow... that's pretty scary.

The PDF is safe, but it may cause you to lose faith in humanity. Effects may wear off between about five minutes and never.

It wasn't the poll itself, but the results, especially with people voting that "Rape," is acceptable.

I found that one to be pretty heartless, even by the internet's standards. That first text clip that CupcakeTrap had pretty much summed up everything I feel about the word.

Yeah, I posted a thread arguing that people should reconsider the casual use of "rape", and it got downvote-closed in minutes.

That said, I prefer to think of this poll as merely showing the current state of the community.

On "rape", for example: 29% said they used the word, but about a quarter of those people said they were also having second thoughts about it.

I felt that response was very well-put.

Sorta sad. Can't believe some people think that they're entitled to making others feel bad.