Online video games have become major online social spaces where users interact, compete, and create together. These spaces, however, expose users to a wide spectrum of online harms, including harassment, discrimination, inappropriate content, privacy breach, cheating, and more. The shape and severity of such harms vary across game design, mechanics, and community context. To mitigate these harms, game companies issue Codes of Conduct (CoCs) that articulate online safety rules and direct players to safety resources. However, it remains unclear how prevalent CoCs are, what safety, security and privacy violations they govern, and whether they meet growing regulatory and industry expectations. We develop and leverage CONDUCTIFY, a pipeline for identifying and analyzing CoCs at scale. Applied to Steam, the largest PC game marketplace, it located the available CoCs for 350 of the 9,586 multiplayer titles on Steam. We found that CoCs are more available among popular, adult-oriented, and community-driven games, while most multiplayer games operate without CoCs despite regulatory and industry recommendations. Although over 80% of the games with CoCs available consistently address traditional security and safety violations, their governance approaches vary substantially across types of violations. A further asymmetry emerges in specificity. Compared with harms related to gameplay mechanics, the articulations of interpersonal harm and the underage player safety are often less specific, despite their relevance to many game communities. Together, these results inform the improvement of online safety governance and CoC enforcement practices, and building better safety infrastructure for the community of players and developers.

翻译：在线视频游戏已成为用户互动、竞争和共同创作的主要在线社交空间。然而，这些空间使用户面临广泛的网络伤害，包括骚扰、歧视、不当内容、隐私泄露、作弊等。此类伤害的形式和严重程度因游戏设计、机制和社区背景而异。为减轻这些伤害，游戏公司发布《行为准则》（CoCs），阐述网络安全规则并引导玩家获取安全资源。然而，目前尚不清楚《行为准则》的普及程度、它们所管辖的安全、安保与隐私违规行为，以及它们是否满足日益增长的监管和行业期望。我们开发并利用CONDUCTIFY——一个可大规模识别和分析《行为准则》的流水线。将其应用于最大的PC游戏市场Steam，在Steam上的9,586款多人游戏中，它定位了其中350款游戏的可用《行为准则》。我们发现，《行为准则》在热门、成人向及社区驱动的游戏中更为普及，而大多数多人游戏尽管有监管和行业建议，却未配备《行为准则》。尽管超过80%拥有《行为准则》的游戏一致地处理传统安保与安全违规行为，但其治理方法在不同违规类型间差异显著。进一步在具体性上出现不对称。与游戏玩法机制相关的伤害相比，对人际伤害和未成年人玩家安全的表述往往不够具体，尽管它们与许多游戏社区密切相关。这些结果共同为改进网络安全治理和《行为准则》执行实践，以及为玩家和开发者社区构建更好的安全基础设施提供了参考。