The Order Beneath the Hostility: A Qualitative Study of the Moral Economy of Competitive Online Play

Sammanfattning

Over 3.6 billion people play digital games, and the leading competitive games are free-to-play services whose revenue depends on player retention. Platforms have spent two decades trying to suppress hostile conduct between teammates and have not succeeded. Existing structural accounts explain why toxicity persists but cannot recover how community members themselves reason about it as legitimate; they read that reasoning as a cover story rather than as the substantive content of a moral order. This thesis asks: how do members of competitive online communities rationalize hostile conduct as normatively legitimate, and what does this reveal about the conditions under which platform governance fails to enter a community's moral order? An interpretivist, abductive design draws on twenty-two semi-structured interviews with active League of Legends ranked players. The framework synthesises Thompson's customs, Polanyi's commodity logic via Bolton and Laaser, and Sayer's lay morality into a three-layer moral economy adapted for symbolic-stakes, pseudonymous, transient communities. Players treat the skill rating as what earns them a voice in the match. They treat high skill as a licence to criticise teammates, and they apply that licence match by match by deciding who deserves blame. The community gives its highest standing to the high-skill player who holds the licence and chooses not to use it: the thesis names this figure apex restraint. Platform tools arrive in a community that already has rules for legitimate conduct, and players redirect each tool to their own ends. Women and players with origin-marked names carry the heaviest cost. Hostility is what the community's rules produce.