Workshop 9: Digital Ethnography

A Social World in Action

This week’s digital ethnography workshop gave me the chance to dive deep into the r/BaldursGate3 subreddit. The r/BaldursGate3 subreddit is a bustling online space where fans of the video game Baldur’s Gate III gather to share tips, discuss updates, and celebrate the game’s creativity. It’s hosted on Reddit, which makes it highly accessible—whether through a browser or the app. Over time, the group has grown from a small community of early-access enthusiasts to a massive hub with over 2.6 million members. Its evolution mirrors the lifecycle of the game itself, shifting from speculation and early gameplay to discussions about mods, strategies, and post-launch patches.

Exploring Community Dynamics and Structure

Through the workshop and discussions with my partner, I realized how structured yet fluid this social world is. The r/BaldursGate3 is organized into subcategories like Mods/Modding, Spoiler Threads, General Questions, and so on. These subgroups not only help members find relevant content but also create distinct spaces for focused interactions. For instance, spoiler tags are used as a form of communal etiquette, ensuring that discussions about plot twists or hidden endings don’t ruin the game for others. When my partner asked me about the SPOILER tag, I enjoyed explaining how it’s a tool to maintain respect and inclusivity—key values of the community.

This layered structure reflects the interconnected yet bounded nature of social worlds, as discussed by Pink et al. (2015). The subreddit’s members often blur boundaries between serious discussions (like gameplay strategies) and lighthearted banter (like the post comparing Astarion to Luigi). This fluidity is what makes the community so engaging.

Ethical Reflections

Our class discussion on ethics, particularly Tiidenberg’s (2018) emphasis on respecting participants’ privacy, made me think about my role as an observer. Although the subreddit is public, I felt a responsibility to treat its content with care. For example, while it’s easy to analyze memes or posts for their cultural significance, it’s also important to respect the intentions and boundaries of the people behind them.

Personally, as a gamer and a Reddit user, I now see how online communities like r/BaldursGate3 are more than just places for casual interaction; they’re living, breathing social worlds with their own rules, rituals, and shared meanings. The process of observing and reflecting on this community helped me better understand how digital ethnography works in practice.