With the internet and an 'always on' culture also came a shift in computer games development and thus playstyle. Competitive gaming became a centre piece of videogame culture and as in any competitive setting arguing with your opponent (or teammate) can lead to insults pretty quickly. If anything, these situations may themselves be a whole FTA (face threatening act, Brown/Levinson 2013) that is seldomly resolved with face-saving strategies.
Additionally, in competitive multiplayer games we often have at least two (sometimes three in the case of streaming) different recipients, which also makes every encounter of FTAs a two-face interaction, with one being the one with speaker and addressee, while the other is one where the speaker metapragmatically addresses the audience (again, these can be two in cases where streamers take on the speaker role). This is why acts of insult and the like have to resolve three things here: the act of affective self-expression, the act of insulting the opponent itself as well as the entertainment function for the rest of the audience. All this happens against the background of a virtual world and avatars, only played by the humans that are insulted in the process. Very much in a sense of common ground (Clark 1996) and indexical ground (Hanks 1992) this virtual world and its characters become a resource for the individual speech acts.
While giving an overview of insulting practices in German as well as the indexical properties they can carry, our talk addresses insult as a social practice in competitive settings based on data taken from competitive online games and analysed with a CA (conversational analysis) approach focussing structures of semantic variation as well as – where applicable – statistical quantification. Unlike other approaches, e.g. Balogh/Veszelszki (2020), in this we analyse how the very act of aggression is produced verbally. We focus on the macro-classes of insults (gender, heritage, …) and how they are enacted. The data show that e.g. there is a referential mismatching between character features of the opponent (player or avatar) and the used slurs to insult depending on the level of frustration of the speaking player. On the other hand, acts of taunting and swearing are closely bound to a situation of superiority and therefore include much more verbal expression of dominance that can often be attributed to hypermasculinity.
Bibliograhpy:
Balogh, Andrea/Veszelszki, Ágnes (2020): Politeness and Insult in Computer Games – From a Pragmatic Point of View. In: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Communicatio 7, 68-91
Brown, Penelope/Levinson, Stephen C. (2013): Politeness. Some universals in language us-age. 23. print (Studies in interactional sociolinguistics 4), Cambridge u.a.: CUP.
Clark, Herbert H. (1996): Using language. Cambridge: CUP.
Hanks, William F. (1992): The indexical ground of deictic reference. In: Alessandro Duranti/Charles Goodwin (Hrsg.): Rethinking context. Language as an interactive phenomenon (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 11). Cambridge u.a.: CUP, 43-76.
Kramer, Birgit (2014): L2P n00b – The Pragmatics of Positioning in MMORPGs. Dissertation. University of Vienna: Vienna.
