Several intergovernmental organizations have expressed concerns regarding the management of conflicts, criminality, and regulation in the future cyberspace, the metaverse. Since the aim of the metaverse is to build a decentralized cyberspace, internal conflicts are thought to be managed by the community. Through a qualitative case study of Decentraland, this study investigates how the users manage internal conflicts in the metaverse.
Data consists of blogposts on the forum Decentraland Forum, collected through a strategic historical examination of every blogpost posed from May 2022 till May 2023. The blogposts consist of internal conflicts in the metaverse, the management of internal conflicts or proposals for conflict management in the metaverse Decentraland. Through an inductive thematic coding and document analysis, the blogposts are examined and interpreted with the aim to classify the conflict management forms of the metaverse.
Through the analysis, six types of conflict management are identified in relation to Donald Blacks (1990) theory of five elementary forms of conflict management, one thus being unique for this case. The study shows that the forms used to manage internal conflicts in the metaverse are; (1) social control through Voting Power, (2) conflict management through tools such as muting and blocking, (3) negotiation, (4) conflict management through democratic voting and guidelines, (5) deliberate and coerced tolerance, as well as (6) conflicts left for individual management.