Ban Hammer: Rhetorics of Community Management in the Computer Game Industry

Abstract

This dissertation, "Ban Hammer: Rhetorics of Community Management in the Computer Game Industry," argues that community management, as an emerging corporate discipline, manages community discourse to produce particular subject-consumer attitudes and behaviors. Employing a multi-perspectival, suspensionist methodology, this dissertation analyzes the discursive practices of community managers working in the computer game industry, along with the communities themselves, to discover how computer game communities and computer game development organizations employ a wide variety of rhetorical strategies as they attempt to exert power over one another. Drawing from a wide range of sources in the study of rhetoric, community management, fan studies, computer game development, psychoanalysis, new media studies, and professional communication, this project argues that community manager's inhabit a unique discursive space, one characterized by unresolved and unresolvable discursive tension, and that the work of community managers has an ever increasing importance to both the computer game development cycle and the production of fan communities.