Virtualizing Violence: Playing with Power in Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs)

Abstract

Gamer-play culture demands the attention of sociocultural anthropologists. Over the course of 2020, I conducted a virtual ethnography of Rust, a multiplayer online survival game developed by Facepunch Studios, to explore how online gamers play with ideologies and infrastructures of race, gender, and empire. Chapter One introduces readers to Rust as a sophisticated virtual world ripe for anthropological investigation. Chapter Two explores how Rust’s hostile economic ecosystem incentivizes positive and negative behaviors like cooperation and compulsion. Chapter Three problematizes in-game violence’s origins from institutionalized, interlocking forms of oppression – particularly the legacy of anti-Black chattel slavery. Chapter Four concludes this thesis and poses new avenues of study. Ultimately, I argue to conceptualize of virtualized violence as an incredibly real, meaningful, and patterned social system that privileges some gamers and marginalizes others.