This paper focuses on the interactions between players of the traitor video game Among Us, in which players are either crewmates or imposters. Crewmates' win condition is to execute all the imposters or to complete their individual tasks before imposters kill them. Imposters must kill the crewmates as fast as possible without getting caught. At the end of timed discussions during which players collectively investigate, one avatar is executed.
Discussion times give rise to narrative speech, players truthfully or falsely describing their actions and movements and those of others. It also gives rise to argumentative speech, players accusing each other, defending themselves and vouching for others.
Despite the interest of a number of studies in linguistics and sociology on collaboration in online videogames, traitor videogames, which feature a mix between collaboration and deception, have been little studied, existing studies being mainly used in pedagogical approach (Agaesse, 2013 ; Stanfill et al., 2021 ; Sackett & Amorosso, 2022).
This paper seeks to analyze player interactions during discussion times. More specifically, it aims at:
- describing the different narrative and argumentative strategies used by crewmates and imposters;
- quantifying those strategies to identify which of them are most used and if they differ depending on the player;
- connecting those strategies with specific verbal and para-verbal linguistic markers;
- measuring the efficiency of those strategies based on the analysis of the following interactions.
For our analysis, we will use concepts developed in Discourse analysis as well as the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations, with a focus on the notions of intersubjectivity and adjusment (see, for instance, Culioli, 1990 and Ranger, 2012).
We will use a corpus of 150 games of Among Us played by French streamers. In order to conduct prosodic analyses, our corpus will be aligned with the audio in software Praat [1].
[1] See: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Cited works:
Agaesse, J. (2013). "L'utilisation des jeux de société dans les classes de français". The Journal of Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, 17, 155-166.
Culioli, A. (1990). Pour une linguistique de l'énonciation, Opérations et représentations. Collection L'Homme dans la langue, tome 1, Ophrys, Paris
Ranger, G. (2012). "Adjustments and Readjustments: Operations and Markers", Epilogos, 3, L'ajustement dans la TOE d'Antoine Culioli, Publications Electroniques de l'ERIAC, 2012. URL: shorturl.at/adis5
Sackett, E., & Amoroso, L. M. (2022). "A Little "Edutainment" Goes a Long Way: Leveraging Among Us®, a Popular Multiplayer Game, to Teach Persuasion Virtually". Management Teaching Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23792981221104197
Stanfill, M., et al. (2021). "Orange is Sus: Among Us and Political Play". FDG '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3472538.3472562
