Video games are not just an extremely popular leisure activity, but they have also become legitimate cultural assets and professionalized sports with their own economic market. In addition, cooperative game modes have created new opportunities for players to socialize, especially with online gaming, a type of digital social interaction where participants combine language with other modalities in the creation of new social practices that are used to play together while at a distance. These social practices have raised the interest of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic informed studies, which have started to describe gaming interactions by focusing on the organization of gameplay both in the virtual world and in the real world, and to account for players expertise as a situated accomplishment. However, the focus has often remained on either a single player perspective or on the real world/game world dichotomy. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how gamers negotiate their knowledge and expertise in interaction with one another, while cooperating in virtual environments. The study is positioned in the recent tradition of EMCA research on epistemics in interaction and it aims to contribute with an integration of orientations to both propositional (‘knowing that’) and procedural (‘knowing how’) knowledge as constituents of expertise, from a video-based, multimodal conversation analytic perspective. In CA, multimodality is conceived as the multiple resources that participants visibly orient to and mobilize in the moment-by-moment realization of interaction. In the context of online gaming, the resources available to participants are mediated by both the technology, through which players are able to (inter)act, and the video, which is the ‘porthole’ of the game world. The data under analysis include three hours of interactions in English and Italian between two teams of three distant gamers, who play as trios in the popular battle royale game Fortnite on computers and home console. The multiplicity of perspectives and the asymmetries of visual access that gamers may experience online raised an important methodological issue for data collection. For this reason, data were collected capturing each player’s screen, along with the recording of the vocal chat. The video recordings have been synchronized so as to have access to multiple perspectives in simultaneity and then manually transcribed and annotated according to multimodal CA conventions. The analysis focuses on three main points related to gamers expertise. The first point has to do with the orientation to knowing that and knowing how in interaction and it highlights how gamers display and mutually recognize superior epistemic rights over propositional content to one another when making decisions together. At the same time, players still display competence in the procedures and mechanics related to the game which result in socially organized, accountable practices. The second analytic point describes how one such practice, marking i.e. the user-controlled triggering of a graphic cue on each player’s screen, allows for efficient interaction through the game interface. The analysis shed light on how marking is not only used for deictic purposes, but it is understood as part of a multimodal gestalt that can perform collaborative gaming actions like offering or alerting. The third analytic aspect considers players knowledge of the language of gaming and describes the endogenous co-construction and negotiation of jargon as an indication of the recognizability of language resources (e.g. neologisms, translanguaging) as part of players’ common ground and competence of ‘doing being a gamer’.
I videogiochi non sono solamente un’attività di intrattenimento di grande popolarità, ma negli ultimi anni hanno visto espandere il proprio mercato e sono stati riconosciuti come beni culturali e sport professionistici. Inoltre, le modalità di gioco cooperativo hanno creato nuove opportunità di socializzazione, in particolare nel gaming online, un tipo di interazione sociale digitale in cui i partecipanti giocano insieme mentre fisicamente distanti grazie a pratiche sociali che combinano lingua e altre modalità. Queste pratiche sociali sono diventate oggetto di ricerca in ambito etnometodologico e di analisi della conversazione con l’obiettivo di studiare il gaming come interazione, investigandone l’organizzazione sia nel mondo virtuale che in quello reale, e descrivendo l’expertise dei giocatori nel mettere in pratica le proprie competenze. Tuttavia, questi studi si sono focalizzati perlopiù sulla prospettiva di un singolo giocatore o sulla dicotomia mondo reale/mondo virtuale. Lo scopo di questa tesi è quello di analizzare come i giocatori negozino le proprie competenze e conoscenze in interazione, mentre cooperano in ambienti virtuali. Lo studio si posiziona all’interno del filone di ricerca dell’analisi della conversazione incentrato sulla negoziazione di autorità epistemica, contribuendo con un’analisi che include sia l’orientamento al sapere che al saper fare come costituenti dell’expertise, assumendo una prospettiva interazionista e multimodale. Con multimodalità si intende l’insieme di risorse a cui i partecipanti si orientano e mettono in atto nel qui-e-ora dell’interazione. Nel contesto del gaming online, queste risorse sono mediate sia dalla tecnologia, attraverso la quale i partecipanti sono in grado di interagire, sia il video, che è il punto di accesso al mondo di gioco. Il corpus di dati analizzato include tre ore di interazioni in italiano e in inglese di squadre di tre membri che giocano a distanza al famoso gioco battle royale Fortnite. Alla luce della molteplicità di prospettive e della possibile asimmetria visiva che i giocatori possono riscontrare online, i dati sono stati raccolti registrando lo schermo di ognuno dei tre giocatori, oltre che la chat vocale. Le registrazioni sono state sincronizzate in modo da poter accedere simultaneamente alla prospettiva di ogni partecipante e sono poi state trascritte e annotate secondo le convenzioni dell’analisi della conversazione multimodale. L'analisi si concentra su tre punti principali legati all’expertise dei giocatori. Il primo punto riguarda l’orientamento a ciò che i giocatori sanno e sanno fare nell’interazione, e come questo orientamento sia negoziato nella presa di decisioni condivise durante il gioco, riconoscendo le maggiori o minori competenze agli altri partecipanti. Allo stesso tempo, si considera come i giocatori dimostrino competenza nelle procedure e nelle meccaniche di gioco e come questa competenza sia alla base di pratiche sociali condivise. Il secondo punto di analisi si concentra su una di queste pratiche di gioco, ovvero l’uso da parte dei partecipanti di marker grafici per evidenziare elementi sullo schermo di ogni giocatore. L’analisi dimostra come l’uso di tali marker non svolga solo una funzione deittica, ma sia parte di un pacchetto multimodale che viene sfruttato per compiere azioni collaborative (es. offrire o allertare). Il terzo punto riguarda la conoscenza linguistica del gergo di gioco e ne descrive la negoziazione endogena all’interazione come parte della competenza e dell’expertise dei giocatori, focalizzandosi su fenomeni come uso di neologismi e translanguaging.
L’Expertise nei Videogiochi Cooperativi Online: Autorità Epistemica, Multimodalità e Lingua in Gioco / Federico Corradini , 2023 May 18. 35. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2021/2022.
L’Expertise nei Videogiochi Cooperativi Online: Autorità Epistemica, Multimodalità e Lingua in Gioco
CORRADINI, FEDERICO
2023
Abstract
Video games are not just an extremely popular leisure activity, but they have also become legitimate cultural assets and professionalized sports with their own economic market. In addition, cooperative game modes have created new opportunities for players to socialize, especially with online gaming, a type of digital social interaction where participants combine language with other modalities in the creation of new social practices that are used to play together while at a distance. These social practices have raised the interest of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic informed studies, which have started to describe gaming interactions by focusing on the organization of gameplay both in the virtual world and in the real world, and to account for players expertise as a situated accomplishment. However, the focus has often remained on either a single player perspective or on the real world/game world dichotomy. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how gamers negotiate their knowledge and expertise in interaction with one another, while cooperating in virtual environments. The study is positioned in the recent tradition of EMCA research on epistemics in interaction and it aims to contribute with an integration of orientations to both propositional (‘knowing that’) and procedural (‘knowing how’) knowledge as constituents of expertise, from a video-based, multimodal conversation analytic perspective. In CA, multimodality is conceived as the multiple resources that participants visibly orient to and mobilize in the moment-by-moment realization of interaction. In the context of online gaming, the resources available to participants are mediated by both the technology, through which players are able to (inter)act, and the video, which is the ‘porthole’ of the game world. The data under analysis include three hours of interactions in English and Italian between two teams of three distant gamers, who play as trios in the popular battle royale game Fortnite on computers and home console. The multiplicity of perspectives and the asymmetries of visual access that gamers may experience online raised an important methodological issue for data collection. For this reason, data were collected capturing each player’s screen, along with the recording of the vocal chat. The video recordings have been synchronized so as to have access to multiple perspectives in simultaneity and then manually transcribed and annotated according to multimodal CA conventions. The analysis focuses on three main points related to gamers expertise. The first point has to do with the orientation to knowing that and knowing how in interaction and it highlights how gamers display and mutually recognize superior epistemic rights over propositional content to one another when making decisions together. At the same time, players still display competence in the procedures and mechanics related to the game which result in socially organized, accountable practices. The second analytic point describes how one such practice, marking i.e. the user-controlled triggering of a graphic cue on each player’s screen, allows for efficient interaction through the game interface. The analysis shed light on how marking is not only used for deictic purposes, but it is understood as part of a multimodal gestalt that can perform collaborative gaming actions like offering or alerting. The third analytic aspect considers players knowledge of the language of gaming and describes the endogenous co-construction and negotiation of jargon as an indication of the recognizability of language resources (e.g. neologisms, translanguaging) as part of players’ common ground and competence of ‘doing being a gamer’.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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Corradini_Tesi_Esse3.pdf
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