As the studio behind League of Legends, a competitive MOBA with an average of 8 million concurrent players a day, Riot has battled in-game harassment, trolling, sexism and racism for more than 10 years. Over this time, League of Legends has earned a reputation as an explosively popular multiplayer game, and also as a hotbed of offensive language and negative behavior.

In 2012, the studio launched a Player Behavior team whose sole focus was to use psychology tools to curb game-ruining experiences. The group rolled out items like the Honor system, which allows players to reward their teammates for positive behavior post-game.

When the Honor system first went live, Riot was still using the word "toxic." In 2020, Riot is evolving the Player Behavior team and launching a new practice called Player Dynamics, which will study and develop communication tools for all of the studio's coming titles, not only League of Legends.

"We've started trying to break down 'toxicity' by looking at it as 'disruptive behavior' because it gets us asking better questions," Hart said. "What's the intended experience and what are players' expectations? Now what's disruptive to these expectations? What are the root causes? If the root cause is mismatched expectations, for instance, we need to look at what can we do differently in design to help align expectations."

The Player Dynamics team includes Hart and adviser Dr. Kimberly Voll, co-founder of Fair Play Alliance, an industry-wide initiative to encourage healthy communication in video games. Dr. Voll was involved in the Player Behavior group as well, and the new team will build on the research done there, drawing from cognitive science, anthropology and sociology.

Player Dynamics won't necessarily focus on building concrete tools like voice chat or text commands in Riot's games -- instead, the group will study player interaction and infuse the studio's new games with anti-trolling tricks from the get-go.

So, no, this doesn't mean League of Legends is getting full-team voice chat.

"Poor communication is a common source of friction between people; this is only compounded by online spaces which lack the feedback of a real human presence," Hart said. "Throw competition into the mix and that friction can get worse. We need to learn to do better, but don't think full-team voice chat is necessarily the answer. This is more about identifying what we need socially as humans interacting in an online setting than any particular feature."