In online cooperative video games, players are often required to coordinate their actions in a context of visual asymmetry by relying on talk and semiotic resources available on the game interface, which come to constitute accountable practices of gameplay (Reeves at al. 2017).
In this presentation, I will focus on the practice of marking digital objects in cooperative battle royale video games (e.g. Fortnite). In these games, players start each match without weapons or items, and one of the main tasks to play the game effectively is to build up an inventory that allows to survive as much as possible. To do so, players 'loot' the virtual environment of the game and collaborate in locating objects in space and making them available to co-players with the use of talk and graphic 'markers'.
Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, it will be argued that this type of marking actions is understood by co-players not only as oriented to 'showing' the object (Rosenbaun and Licoppe, 2017), but also as a way of offering it and making it relevant to the strategic organization of gameplay. In particular, I will consider the coupling of marking and verbal formulations, while focusing on the epistemic (Heritage 2012) and benefactive (Clayman and Heritage 2014) status and stances taken up by the participants. More in general, these sequences display how gamers' competent expertise (Sudnow 1983, Reeves et al. 2009) is performed while orienting to collaboration and team play.
The corpus comprises three hours of online interactions in English and Italian between three distant players teaming up on Fortnite. The data include the synchronized recordings of each player's screen and voice chat.
References:
Clayman S., Heritage J. (2014). "Benefactors and beneficiaries. Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests". In: Drew P., Couper-Kuhlen E. (eds.) Requesting in Social Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 55–86.
Heritage J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1-29.
Reeves S., Brown B., Laurier E. (2009). Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise. Games and Culture 4: 205-227.
Reeves S., Greiffenhagen C., Laurier E. (2017). Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment.
Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Play. Topics in Cognitive Science 9: 308-342.
Rosenbaun L., Licoppe C. (2017). Showing 'digital' objects in web-based video chats as collaborative achievement. Journal of Pragmatics 27 (3): 419–446.
Sudnow D. (1983). Pilgrim in the Microworld. Chicago: Warner Books.
