Soziale Aneignung in offenen digitalen Spielräumen

Abstract

This article examines how social order emerges in open digital game spaces when technical systems enable and structure a wide range of actions without fully determining their specific social meaning. Using Grand Theft Auto Online (GTA Online) as a case study, it argues that communal order emerges neither from formal game rules alone nor exclusively from platform governance. Rather, it develops through processes of social appropriation. The term refers to collective practices through which players socially structure a technically and institutionally framed space of possibilities by establishing shared meanings, expectations, roles, rituals, and rules. Methodologically, the article combines a qualitative-conceptual system analysis of GTA Online with an analysis of publicly accessible platform and community documents as well as the author’s previous research. It reconstructs exemplary cases including informal communities of practice such as car meets and photography groups, more enduring group structures such as crews, and institutionalized roleplay servers. These cases are not understood as necessary stages of development, but as ideal-typical positions along a continuum of increasing social consolidation. The analysis shows that actions must first be socially perceived, attributed, interpreted, and evaluated before repeated practices can give rise to situational expectations and, ultimately, communal norms. The effects of these norms remain ambivalent: they can foster reliability, cooperation, and belonging, but can also stabilize exclusion, hierarchies, and conflict. The article’s theoretical contribution lies in refining social appropriation as an analytical category for describing the transition from technical openness to ommunal order.