Too Legit to Rage Quit: Do Social Ties Impact Staying Power in eSports?

Abstract

Sim racing, a sub-genre of eSports, is an online motorsports simulation where participants from around the world use specialized hardware to compete virtually in racing vehicles around a track. While most competitors complete the races they start, some opt to disconnect following a frustrating racing event. This is considered a "rage quit" in modern gamer slang. This research aims to identify the social factors associated with a rage quit through a binary logistic regression model populated with a unique dataset from iRacing, a major online sim racing platform, consisting of over 19,000 races over 4 racing seasons (12 months) in 2018, 300,000 individual race results, and 16,000 unique drivers. The findings suggest that social factors of past experience with competitors, racing with competitors in one's own region, and presence of other rage quitters all influence a driver's decision to rage quit.