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WTF?! Study Shows PC Gamers and Dota 2 Players Swear the Most

By breaking down the comments from 40,000 gamers, researchers discovered who has the the foulest mouths, which games keep it clean, and the most popular cuss-word of all.

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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How do you figure out which gamers are the most trash-mouthed a**holes of all? Ask the folks at OnlineGambling.com. The site usually helps people find the best online gambling sites and sports books, but it took a gamble on a scheme to figure out where all the cursing is happening in today's video games. (Because, obviously, there's a s**t-ton of it. Also, "hell" and "damn" don't count; it's not 1965.)

To do so, OnlineGambling went deep into gaming subreddits, 14 discussions in all, logging occurrences of English-language curse words across the most recent 100 posts, and came to some foul-mouthed conclusions.

Most important are the words themselves. You can see in the chart at top which word got used the most, followed by several variations on the f-word, with some tamer terminology such as "ass" and "crap" thrown in for good measure. Only one use of "arse" and "wank" apiece indicates not a lot of UK-English speakers are hitting the subreddits.

Perhaps more interesting is how many swears there were by gaming platform. Parents might want to know just what kind of company kids are keeping, depending on their preferred gaming method. It should shock no one that PC gamers are the foulest-mouthed—it's so easy to type your cussin'!

You'd think the wholesome Nintendo Switch games would indicate its users are clean-living and thus cleanest in the vocabulary. Wrong: Microsoft Xbox users averaged the fewest swears.


Chart: who is swearing the most?

Are you wondering which games attract the nice players who keep it clean? Diablo players had the fewest curses, at 25. The top swearing game was Dota 2; its players logged 184 instances of bad-word usage. The biggest surprise: Minecraft users let loose with 52 curses.

Related

One more interesting tidbit found in the search for bad language: The very nasty word that many consider the ultimate sear was found only once. Because every gamer has a mom. Who might be listening.

For the full rundown of the games and platforms researched, head over to The Complete Guide to Swearing by Online Gamers.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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