This work examines how video gamers relate to each other while engaging in “ludic war” in a commercial LAN gaming center.This is an ambitious study for several reasons. First, this work presents the findings of an ethnographic study that investigates the elusive and liminal activity of video gameplay. “Play” is not only an ambiguous concept generally, as Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) ably demonstrates, but play in this case transcends experiential worlds; or, as T.L.Taylor (2006) frames the issue of online video gameplay, gamers play “between worlds”: between the physical and the mediated, between the factual and the fictional. Second, this study coins the concept of “ludic war,” and attempts to locate its social articulation in a dynamic, commercial play space that supports a variety of video games powered by different technologies.A third, but by no means final, challenge, is that the fieldwork demands that I become a participant observer in this collaborative and competitive space to report on the expressions found in its on-and offline worlds.This ethnography accordingly mixes participant observation with informal interviews to author as complete a picture as possible given the space’s changing populations, the range of video games played, and players’ communications that flow between the single, material gaming center and the multiple, virtual worlds it facilitates.