This week the government has a new topic of interest in the world of technology: what Americans talk about when online gaming.
The federal government has also spent taxpayer money studying video games for gay men, hookup apps and buying kids PDA’s to help them stop smoking weed.
In the latest slew of taxpayer-funded grants, the federal government allocated $29,403 to study “toxic rhetoric” between online video gamers, Elizabeth Harrington at The Washington Free Beacon reports.
The project is titled, “Notoriously Toxic: Understanding the Language and Costs of Hate and Harassment in Online Games.”
The government money will go to the Georgia State University Research Foundation so it can study online communications players normally use to coordinate strategy in online games, usually through headsets worn during gameplay.
The NEH describes the study as, “A cross-disciplinary workshop and follow-up activities to develop a set of essays and a metadata schema to understand and describe toxic rhetoric in online spaces, with an emphasis on large-scale multiplayer computer games.”
The grant came as part of $22.8 million in new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The new funds, announced Monday, will fund 232 humanities projects. Luckily, what gamers chat about when killing zombies or besieging the castle won’t be left out.
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