The focus of this paper lies in the examination of interactions between participants playing a multiplayer game in Virtual Reality. Shared videogame play is a complex type of joint activity which requires players to establish and coordinate a common course of action in accordance with the mobile spatial configurations of the game and with the specific goals that need to be achieved for successful play (Mondada 2013, Keating/Sunakawa 2010). VR technology brings the mechanics as well as the spatial dimension of the gameplay away from the constraints of a console screen and into an immersive setting. Participants find themselves in a digital environment which they experience from their first-person perspective (Keating 2017). The immersive quality of the experience means they are able to use the movements of their own bodies to explore their surroundings, manipulate objects, and interact with other participants.
Playing a collaborative game in a multi-player setting presupposes the managing of the fast-paced temporality of the ongoing activity in relation to the spatial surroundings of the game as well as being able to effectively communicate with teammates in order to organise play activity and reach shared goals (Mondada 2013). To ensure smooth play, participants need to organise their action in such a way that it is visually accessible for the other player. Verbal cues such as response cries, imperatives and deictic expressions are used to mobilise the attention of the interaction partner and ensure mutual orientation on the same phenomenon. The potential for embodied action (Goodwin 2000) that originates from the reproduction of the participants' body movement onto the VR avatar makes furthermore the study of multimodal conduct in VR particularly compelling. This contribution revolves around the way embodied displays such as body arrangement and gestures are combined with verbal means to determine a shared course of action and manage joint activity during play. Particular attention will be given to the role of the VR avatar as a proxy for the participants' bodily conduct in interaction.
The study is carried out on the basis of recordings of gaming sessions at two VR Arcades in Germany. Participants were recruited on the premises and filmed with a set-up that allowed to monitor both player activity in the VR environment as well as the participants' bodily conduct in the real world. Both players' first-person perspective in VR was captured directly from the computer feed generated by the VR headsets. A multimodal CA approach was adopted for the transcription and analysis of the data. The study aims at showing how data gathered in a technologically mediated environment such as a VR world can be analysed with the tools of Conversation Analysis, and how in this way we can provide an account of participants' use of VR technology in interaction.
