Emergent Governance From Polycentric Order in Virtual Reality Social Spaces

This chapter examines the process by which human interactions give shape to social order in VRChat, a multiuser virtual reality (VR) platform. It relies on literature and case study analysis to show how polycentric governance solutions arise to solve collective action problems such as harassment in virtual reality social spaces. Game developers and end users coproduce informal and formal rules to govern behaviour in a polycentric order wherein venue-specific rulesets compete. This chapter finds that VR social spaces that empower users to self-moderate and coproduce the rules by which they are governed lead to more robust, self-sustaining communities. Furthermore, the extension of Elinor Ostrom’s work to virtual communities suggests that user-specified governance (that is, rulesets that are created by and tailored to users in the community), in contrast to platform-imposed governance, is critical to sustaining cooperation in VR social spaces.

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