Videogaming is a very popular activity and numerous technological devices are widely used in everyday life. Different studies have shown how players organize their gaming activities in physical presence or at a distance, how they interact to accomplish actions inside or out of the game. More recently and with regard to the social role of videogaming, non-players and their practices came into the focus: do (and if so how do) non-players participate in the gaming interaction? What does it mean to participate in a videogame session without actively playing,? Which role(s) non-players take on? How do player(s) and non-player(s) construct togetherness with or despite the screen?
Our paper focuses on a particular videogame situation involving player(s) and non-player(s): a couple is sitting on the sofa in the living room, side by side, one is playing an adventure game on a large screen, the other is playing/acting on a tablet. Both are not playing silently without noticing each other, but in contrast interact in an "open state of talk" (Goffman 1981) where they focus alternatively on their own (private) activity and on the activity of their partner. While the activity on the small tablet screen remains mostly private, the activity on the large TV screen more likely attracts attention. We therefore concentrate on this activity and the way the two participants construct togetherness with regard to the gaming activity on the TV screen.
For about 40 years, the concept of "active spectators" developed in media sciences, has highlighted the fact that people do something when they watch others. However, active spectators have mostly been studied in the context of media reception (theatre, cinema, television), in so-called unilateral communication. Only very few studies have dealt with a) other types of watching and b) with the interactional practices different parties use to display their activeness. Concerning videogaming, recent research has shown that players and non-players co-construct the participation framework jointly (Tekin & Reeves 2017), according to the affordances of the game and in conjunction with the construction of their relationship (Baldauf-Quilliatre & Colon de Carvajal 2021).
Building on these studies, our conversation analytic paper proposes a micro-analysis of the above-mentioned gaming-situation in order to show how the non-player engages in the player's gaming interaction. We analyze the temporal unfolding of engagement and disengagement during the whole game and the multimodal practices used by the participants to co-construct different levels of participation.
This paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of co-participants in technology-based interactions, especially with regard to the construction of participation frameworks, as well as to a fine description of spectatorship from an interactional point of view.
References :
Baldauf-Quilliatre, H., & Colón de Carvajal, I. (2021b). Spectating: How non-players participate in videogaming. Journal für Medienlinguistik, 4(2), 123-161. https://doi.org/10.21248/jfml.2021.33
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tekin, B. S., & Reeves, S. (2017). Ways of spectating: Unravelling spectator participation in Kinect play. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1558-1570. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025813
