Understanding Sexual Harassment in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs): Crime Opportunity and Affordance Perspectives

With the popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in-game sexual harassment has drawn tremendous attention from game players, game developers, and governments. Because of its devastating impact on victims, researchers from various disciplines have advocated the importance of understanding sexual harassment in MMORPGs. While information systems (IS) researchers have begun to investigate user behaviors in MMORPGs, research on deviant behaviors in MMORPGs remains scarce in the IS literature. With the inherent focus on sociotechnical factors in the IS discipline, we believe it is crucial to consider both the social and technical elements of sexual harassment in MMORPGs. Thus, our research aims to integrate crime opportunity theory and affordance theory to explain how MMORPG affordances give rise to the evaluation of favorable MMORPG environmental conditions for in-game sexual harassment and the inclination to sexually harass others in the games. This research-in-progress paper proposes a research model and presents our research design for examining sexual harassment in MMORPGs.