Informace o publikaci
Conflict Moderation in Virtual Worlds: Questions of Transparency, Proportionality, and Accountability
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Citace | |
| Popis | This paper examines video game environments as spaces of legal and normative conflict, where community rules, player behaviour, and formal regulation collide. Focusing on the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the paper explores how emerging legal obligations around content moderation play out in multiplayer games, where speech and conduct often blur the lines between role-play, provocation, and harm. The DSA establishes responsibilities for platforms to remove illegal content and to justify these interventions through procedural safeguards, such as Article 17’s duty to provide clear statements of reasons. In game spaces, however, moderation decisions often arise in fast-moving, high-conflict contexts and are typically enforced through automated systems or informal admin actions or are not executed at all, thus opening up space for the dissemination of malicious content to the public and often to minors. These practices or inactions raise questions about transparency, proportionality, and accountability. Using insights from legal theory, game ethics, and critical legal studies, the paper investigates how conflicts within digital play spaces are governed through overlapping systems of authority. It explores the extent to which DSA principles are internalised, resisted, or reinterpreted by platform operators and player communities. In doing so, the paper highlights how legal regulation interacts with in-game norms, codes of conduct, and emergent hierarchies of power. The paper argues that video games constitute often underregulated hybrid legal areas, shaped by conflict, improvisation, and soft rule-making. These reveal the limits of applying formal legal categories to fluid, player-driven environments. Rather than neutralising conflict, content moderation in games often becomes a site where competing visions of law, fairness, and identity are contested. The paper concludes by proposing a model of conflict-aware proportionality, one that recognises the performative, dynamic, and plural nature of legal order in virtual spaces. |