This paper explores the sequential trajectories of accounting practices for the failures faced in video game playing activities players and spectators jointly engage in. It attends to how the accounts for the failures recharacterize what happened in the game and for which specific reasons. Highlighting the accountable and assessable nature of the negative game outcomes, or failures, this paper shows that these kinds of outcomes occasion a search for the responsible parties for such troubles, through which the game events are reconstructed (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Robinson, 2016). The data comes from a corpus of video recordings of video game playing activities using Kinect, which necessitates the players to produce the game moves with their entire bodies in particular ways to be recognised by the machine. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992), this study looks into how players and other participants (such as spectators) produce and negotiate the social and moral order of their situated game playing activities (Goodwin, 2006; Jayyusi, 1984; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig, 2011). The participants in the data speak Turkish.
This study elucidates the interactional practices through which the participants account for the failures in video gaming interactions. These practices include but are not restricted to accepting the responsibility for the negative game results, claiming to be doing the game movements in acceptable ways, soliciting explicit accounts for why the machine is not recognizing the player movements, displaying confusion over these particular game results. The responses from spectators may agree with the positions exhibited by the players or they may provide further accounts, respecifying and recategorizing what happened in the game and why. The accounts provided by spectators usually put the blame on players, associating the failures with the ways in which they produce their bodily movements, with their timing, and with their acceptability by the machine.
The interactional work of accounting for the failures in video gaming interactions is specifically manifested and negotiated by the linguistic formulations of agency (Pomerantz, 1978; Watson, 1978). The ways in which participants form their accounts, such the use of pronouns, the choice of actions or process verbs, the positive or negative constructions, etc., describe what happened in the video games in specific ways, thereby assigning agency and attributing responsibility for the failures in particular ways.
This paper describes the interactional organisation of accounts for the failures in video games and how these accounts recharacterize what happened in the video games. It also discusses the link between the work of accounting for the failures and the work of attributing responsibility for them. Based on this discussion, this paper argues that social and moral order are inseparably intertwined.
