Multiplayer social interaction has been a feature of digital games since the publication of Tennis for Two in 1958. But only recently, a growing body of research in multimodal interaction analysis has begun to study how gamers interact when they play together (e.g., Mondada 2013, Reeves et al. 2016, Baldauf-Quilliatre/Colón de Carvajal 2019, Tekin 2021). While we build on this body of research, we shift the focus from studying social interaction of players in front of the screen to analyzing embodied interaction in VR gaming environments in which the clear division between the real space of embodied interaction and the simulated game space is eliminated.
Our goal is to explore how players interact between real and virtual environments in co-located VR games and how they bring about joint attention towards objects in this overlaid world.
For our presentation, we focus on the multiplayer VR game Spacecraft – A New Way Home (Leisi 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yy2rv25p). Two things make this game especially interesting. First, the players, represented as avatars in the virtual space, are co-present in the same physical space. Second, instead of restricting the players to a small area (via a "guardian") the entire home of the players becomes the play area: it is 'transformed' into the interior of a spaceship, in which they can interact and move freely. This results in a spatial setting where virtual and real spaces are blended in rich ways through the following:
- when the players move through their flat, the proprioception of their movement matches the movement of their avatar through the virtual spacecraft;
- when the players interact with each other, they can hear and touch their partners' body, while the visual perception of their partners is mediated: they see them only as avatars;
- to beat the game, the players have to use the complete flat and work together by manipulating virtual objects, intensifying the necessity of joint attention
Using the method of fine-grained sequential analyses, we will show how the participants orient to this complex spatial setting both in their conversations and their use of other embodied resources (positioning of body, gestures, etc.). Our data consists of video recordings from several days of playtesting at the Zurich University of Arts.
Baldauf-Quilliatre, Heike/Colón de Carvajal, Isabel (2019): Encouragement in videogame interactions. Social Interaction 13, 2-3, 127–147
Mondada, Lorenza (2013): Coordinating mobile action in real time: The timely organisation of directives in video games. In: Haddington, Pentti/Mondada, Lorenza/Nevile, Maurice (eds): Interaction and Mobility. Berlin, 300–342
Reeves, Stuart/Greiffenhagen, Christian/Laurier, Eric (2016): Video gaming as practical accomplishment. Topics in Cognitive Science 9 (2), 308-342
Tekin, Burat (2021): Quasi-instructions: Orienting to the projectable trajectories of imminent bodily movements with instruction-like utterances. Journal of Pragmatics 186, 341-357
