

In exploring these occurrences and utilizing theoretical explanations within World of Warcraft contexts, this research contributes to disciplinary understandings and discussions addressing conflict, leadership, and power, and to methodological techniques utilized in virtual world study.

Players become leaders by legitimizing power in contextually unique ways, and competing imaginaries generate conflicts that are interpreted through game-specific subjectivities. Player versus player events add additional restrictions and create fluid situations where players continually negotiate fluctuating social tensions while event-dependent dispersions of power fluctuate between groups and individuals.
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Players’ geographical location impacts access to infrastructure while hardware and software constrain in-game action in fundamental and inescapable ways. My findings reveal layered and dynamic patterns of sociotechnical conflict. By utilizing ethnographic methods in World of Warcraft’s player versus player events, I examine resources, relationships, and tools that underpin player actions and understandings. Yet many interactions occur at nodes of dynamic conflict where agentic players navigate intersections of power, which are unaddressed in the scholarly corpus. Most anthropological research within this area has centered around player self-identification, gender construction, and gaming communities. As a result of technological advancement and exponential increases in global access, cross-disciplinary research has recently turned to digital online video games.
