Non-task-related joint activities in MMO games
Human interaction is fundamentally cooperative and is based on joint attention (Tomasello 2008; Tomasello 2009). Playing video games, especially those Massive multiplayer online (MMO) games, nowadays has become a mainstream leisure activity that enables physically remote players to interact with each other and accomplish collaborative goals in the virtual environment. Although studies have found negative effects of playing video games (Greitemeyer 2018; Greitemeyer & Mügge 2014), recent studies show that multiplayer collaborative video games facilitate pro-social behaviors and social interaction as they provide a "meeting place" for players from diverse backgrounds to experience sociality (Voida & Greenberg 2009). Moreover, researchers in ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) studies find that MMO games are socially organized ( Reeves, Greiffenhagen & Laurier 2017). However, many MMO games are designed in a way that players see through a first-person perspective, which provides restricted visual access to the space and other players' activities. Compared to face-to-face interaction in the real world, the virtual world inevitably reduces the interaction between players (Manninen and Kujanpaa 2005).
Given the challenges of social interaction in video games, this study explores: (1) how players perform collaboration in the virtual world with a "constrained set of possibilities afforded by the game" (Bennerstedt & Ivarsson 2010) through controlling the actions of their avatars, and (2) how do competent players (creatively) utilize the limited resources in the virtual world to achieve the type of collaboration that might not be possible in the real world.
Unlike Bennerstedt and Ivarsson's (2010) study that analyzes how players achieve shared missions or "quests" to progress within the game, the current study focuses on collaborative actions that are not relevant to core game tasks, but joint social activities that are performed "just for fun" (from interviews with a participant), such as playing music and taking group selfies.
Data used in this study is extracted from play sessions of an MMO game, Sea of Thieves, where players form a team and explore an open world via a pirate ship from a first-person perspective. The dataset includes five one-hour-long play sessions. Preliminary analysis shows that: (1) players actively engage in both spontaneous joint activities and coordinated joint activities, (2) actions taken by the avatars on the screen are controlled by players in a sequentially organized manner, and (3) players adopt verbal, vocal, and visual resources to complete the joint activities as they do in face-to-face interactions.
References
Bennerstedt, Ulrika & Jonas Ivarsson. 2010. Knowing the Way. Managing Epistemic Topologies in Virtual Game Worlds. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 19(2). 201–230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-010-9109-8
Reeves, Stuart, Christian Greiffenhagen & Eric Laurier. 2017. Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Play. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(2). 308–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12234
Voida, Amy & Saul Greenberg. 2009. Wii all play: the console game as a computational meeting place. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09), 1559–1568. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518940
