The New Rules of Engagement: Social Media, Online Games, and the New Wave of Digital Conflict and Competition

Abstract

Rightfully celebrated for its unprecedented capacity to connect individuals on a variety of innovative platforms, the Internet has also emerged as a primary driver in shaping global conflict. People, ideas, and nation states clash and compete in ways never before seen: from Wikileaks and Edward Snowden to the hacker group Anonymous and international online corporate espionage, emerging challenges to the existing order are shocking given their potent mixture of new technologies and new ways to look at the world. None of these conflicts, however, are sui generis. All have evolved organically, budding from within the fertile system of rules, norms, and expectations that guides social interactions online, and, more specifically, from the ample channels of competition cultivated by social media networks and online gaming environments. By looking at social media’s mores of antagonistic behavior—from hacking to trolling—and by applying algorithmic analysis to empirically examine patterns of competition online, this essay will attempt to introduce a new theory of conflict in digital environment, one that is as applicable to corporations as it is to governments and individuals and that owes its logic and its organizing principles to earlier, and often ignored, codices forged everywhere from Facebook to the World of Warcraft.