In August 2020 we launched the Games and Online Harassment Hotline with the hope to provide a compassionate and culturally specific emotional support to people who make or play games. Since then, we’ve been supporting folks all across games on a wide swath of issues: in-game harassment, industry workplace environments, online harassment and threats, community conflicts and fallouts, and mental health struggles.

In this Impact Report, we partnered with The Representation Project to look at the anonymized data we collected over the first year of the Games Hotline’s operation. As a confidential hotline that prioritizes the safety and privacy of our texters, our data does not include any identifiable or personal information disclosed in the conversation. Rather, it captures the overarching themes that come up on the hotline.

Through the analysis of this data, we’re able to ask enlightening questions about the landscape of online harassment and mental health in games spaces. Are the people texting us being harassed more commonly for gender or race? What are game developers reaching out for most often? What types of online harassment did people reach out about the most frequently?

Read the 2021 Impact Report here.