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20230720T131520230720T1615Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguisticsHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
Coordinating play in a shared Virtual Reality environment
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 14:15:00 UTC
The focus of this paper lies in the examination of interactions between participants playing a multiplayer game in Virtual Reality. Shared videogame play is a complex type of joint activity which requires players to establish and coordinate a common course of action in accordance with the mobile spatial configurations of the game and with the specific goals that need to be achieved for successful play (Mondada 2013, Keating/Sunakawa 2010). VR technology brings the mechanics as well as the spatial dimension of the gameplay away from the constraints of a console screen and into an immersive setting. Participants find themselves in a digital environment which they experience from their first-person perspective (Keating 2017). The immersive quality of the experience means they are able to use the movements of their own bodies to explore their surroundings, manipulate objects, and interact with other participants. Playing a collaborative game in a multi-player setting presupposes the managing of the fast-paced temporality of the ongoing activity in relation to the spatial surroundings of the game as well as being able to effectively communicate with teammates in order to organise play activity and reach shared goals (Mondada 2013). To ensure smooth play, participants need to organise their action in such a way that it is visually accessible for the other player. Verbal cues such as response cries, imperatives and deictic expressions are used to mobilise the attention of the interaction partner and ensure mutual orientation on the same phenomenon. The potential for embodied action (Goodwin 2000) that originates from the reproduction of the participants' body movement onto the VR avatar makes furthermore the study of multimodal conduct in VR particularly compelling. This contribution revolves around the way embodied displays such as body arrangement and gestures are combined with verbal means to determine a shared course of action and manage joint activity during play. Particular attention will be given to the role of the VR avatar as a proxy for the participants' bodily conduct in interaction. The study is carried out on the basis of recordings of gaming sessions at two VR Arcades in Germany. Participants were recruited on the premises and filmed with a set-up that allowed to monitor both player activity in the VR environment as well as the participants' bodily conduct in the real world. Both players' first-person perspective in VR was captured directly from the computer feed generated by the VR headsets. A multimodal CA approach was adopted for the transcription and analysis of the data. The study aims at showing how data gathered in a technologically mediated environment such as a VR world can be analysed with the tools of Conversation Analysis, and how in this way we can provide an account of participants' use of VR technology in interaction.
Spacecraft Interactions in Your Flat: The Embodied Construction of Interactional Space and Joint Attention in Virtual Environments
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 14:15:00 UTC
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
Toxic speech acts in gaming – pragmatic differences between virtual reality and traditional game environments
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 14:15:00 UTC
In this explorative study, the pragmatic differences between players in Virtual Reality and players in the normal gaming space are to be explored. The hypothesis is that VR spaces are less toxic than traditional or 'flat' spaces, which can be linguistically proven by analyzing speech acts (see Austin 1962), performed by the players. Before that can be done, first the concept of toxicity must be explained. "[T]oxicity damages all it touches" (Tirrell 2017: 14) and the available research indicates that it is part of the online gaming community. Even if there are aspirations for a less toxic environment, like the "Fair Play Alliance coalition" (Beres et al. 2021: 1), it is clear, that the problem is persistent. While it is hard to pinpoint exactly, what toxicity means, it broadly includes
"abusive communications directed towards other players, and disruptive gameplay behaviors that violate the rules and social norms of the game" (Beres et al. 2021: 1).
Toxicity in this sense is not a one-time occurrence that immediately hurts a person. Toxic speech acts rather inflict damage over time and create a more toxic environment. In this regard, one must look at the "Epidemiology of Discursive Harm" (Tirrell 2017: 139) and not only the immediate reaction. "Moral disengagement" (Beres 2021: 3) is key regarding toxic behavior and studies show that many players can disconnect easily when in a game. In Virtual Reality, however, the disengagement is difficult because of the immersion. Toxic speech acts are harder to accomplish face-to-face or headset-to-headset. Even things like physical threats are taken more seriously in a VR environment. "[VR groping] is harassment and assault, but it's assault of a virtual body rather than a physical body" (Sparrow et al. 2019: 450). To elaborate this, the study will consist of various media to show the difference in toxic speech acts. First, there will be a corpus of videos to compare toxicity in VR to flat gaming. This corpus will consist of YouTube and Twitch videos uploaded by the users. Secondly, we will play some of the most played VR-Titles (Pavlov VR; Contractors) and study the toxicity firsthand. The hypothesis is, that it is easier for the players to morally disengage in a flat game than in VR. With the linguistic tools and a conversational analysis, we hope to illuminate this phenomenon.
References Austin, John (1962): How to do things with words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beres, Nicole et al. (2021): Don't You Know That You're Toxic: Normalization of Toxicity in Online Gaming. In: CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-15. Sparrow, Lucy et al. (2019): Apathetic Villagers and the Trolls Who Love Them: Player Amorality in Online Multiplayer Games. In: OZCHI'19: Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 447–451. Tirrell, Lynne (2017): Toxic Speech. Toward an Epidemiology of Discursive Harm. In: Philosophical Topics 45 (2), 139–162.
Presenters Andreas Osterroth Academic Associate, RPTU (Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau)
On Cooling the Troll Out: Some Aspects of Disturbing Digital Encounters in Video Games Live Streaming
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/20 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/20 14:15:00 UTC
A micro analysis of digital discourse, this proposal addresses trolling situations in the context of online video game live streaming sessions. Our paper studies the activities of people who experience live streaming trolling and offers a description of the strategies and skills deployed to deal with it. We refer to a pragmatist sociology, aware of the way in which different categories of participants can experience video games, the latter being understood in this perspective as "practical accomplishments" (Reeves, Greiffenhagen & Laurier 2017). Using ethnomethodological and conversation analysis (EMCA) methods, we consider live streaming video game sessions as texts that can be analyzed with digital discourse approaches. First, we describe sequences of two Swiss streamers broadcasting their game sessions on Twitch, confronted with trolling situations crystallized around gender and ethnicity issues. The first streamer stopped her activity following repeated harassment. The second considered stopping his broadcasts following regular racist attacks, but finally maintained his activity. We then analyze the reactions of these streamers and describe the "situational properties" (Goffman 1963) of video game live streaming, so as to emphasize that the audience interaction participates and contributes to the unfolding of such live streams (Perret 2021). We also discuss the "relational skills" (Jammet 2019) deployed by streamers that try either to cool participants who use trolling techniques or to socially degrade them, assuming that playing a game and trolling during it are "practical accomplishments" that fully contributes to the accountability of the interaction. References: Goffman, E. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on Social Organizations of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press. Jammet, T. 2019. Calmer le râleur. Contribution à l'étude de la relation client sur le Web 2.0. Terrains & travaux 34, 137‑61. Perret, M. 2021. Expériences d'un problème public: de l'interdiction des jeux vidéo violents à la réglementation des contenus. Social sciences Thesis. Lausanne: University of Lausanne. Reeves, S., Greiffenhagen, C., & Laurier, E. 2017. Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Play, Topics in Cognitive Science 9(2), 308‑42.
Presenters Michael Perret Associate Professor, University Of Applied Sciences Of Western SwitzerlandThomas Jammet Research Associate, University Of Applied Sciences And Arts Of Western Switzerland (HES-SO) Co-authors
Andreas Osterroth
Michael Perret
Thomas Jammet
