To ensure smooth communication and collaboration, here are some troubleshooting tips to address common issues:
Check Internet Connection: Verify that you have a stable and reliable internet connection. Use a wired connection when possible, as it tends to be more stable than Wi-Fi. If using Wi-Fi, make sure you have a strong signal.
Update the Browser or App: Ensure that you are using the latest version of the web browser. Developers frequently release updates to address bugs and improve performance.
Clear Browser Cache: Sometimes, cached data can cause conflicts or issues. Clear the browser cache and cookies before joining the meeting.
Test Audio and Video: Before the meeting, check your microphone and camera to ensure they are working correctly. If you are a speaker, you can click on "Start Practice Session" button test to ensure audio and video devices are functioning.
Close Other Applications: Running multiple applications in the background can consume system resources and lead to performance issues. Close unnecessary apps to free up resources for the Dryfta meeting platform.
Restart Your Device: If you encounter persistent issues, try restarting your computer or mobile device. This can help resolve various software-related problems.
Use Supported Browsers: Ensure you are using a browser supported by the meeting platform. Recommended browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave.
Allow Necessary Permissions: Make sure the Dryfta meeting platform has the required permissions to access your microphone, camera, and other necessary features.
Disable VPN or Firewall: Sometimes, VPNs or firewalls can interfere with the connection to the meeting platform. Temporarily disable them and see if the issue persists.
Switch Devices: If possible, try joining the meeting from a different device to see if the problem is specific to one device.
Reduce Bandwidth Usage: In cases of slow or unstable internet connections, ask participants to disable video or share video selectively to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Update Drivers and Software: Ensure your operating system, audio drivers, and video drivers are up to date. Outdated drivers can cause compatibility issues with the Dryfta meeting platform.
Contact Support: If none of the above steps resolve the issue, reach out to the platform's support team. They can provide personalized assistance and troubleshoot specific problems.
By following these troubleshooting tips, you can tackle many common problems encountered on Dryfta meeting platform and have a more productive and seamless meeting experience.
20230721T101520230721T1800Europe/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
Boosting French language learners’ interactions with digital board games
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Since April 2020, many Japanese institutions have organised their courses online amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, we had to rethink and reorganise our French language courses at the University of Tokyo and Keio University. Our previous research used board games to help our students practice French as an Additional Language or FAL (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). We found that games allow learners to forget their actions' consequences and free speech (Agaësse, 2022, 2018, 2017; Silva, 2008, Brougère, 2005). Moreover, games help learners have higher confidence and interact more, encouraging them to invest in developing their FAL skills. As a result of this work, a new problem emerged: how to adapt board games to a digital medium, such as video games, using remote devices? In this article, we start by presenting the Japanese context of our research with a focus on the sociocultural background, the educational system's characteristics and the role of foreign languages. In this work, we explore what can constitute a hindrance or, on the contrary, promote their engagement in using FAL in an online teaching-learning context. Then, we leverage theories from neurobiology and psychology by introducing Panksepp and Biven's Basic Affective Systems (2012) to analyse the use of games in classes and its impact on the behaviour of Japanese students. To adapt to the new online class format, we developed and implemented a framework to use digital versions of board games on the Steam digital game platform. The objective of these activities was to encourage FAL learners to develop their language skills and collaborate more with others actively. At the end of each play session, we distributed feedback questionnaires to learn more about the students' lived experiences. We analysed the effects of playing on language acquisition, interactions and the need for support and guidance. This research results indicate that using digital board games allows learners to overcome some of the barriers associated with online courses and develop more personally, socially, culturally and linguistically.
bibliography : Agaësse, J. (2022). Le jeu des émotions dans les dispositifs d'enseignement-apprentissage : Une perspective énactive et émergentiste de l'enseignement-apprentissage du français langue additionnelle au Japon avec des jeux de société. Thèse de doctorat en didactique des langues. Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès. Agaësse, J. (2017). « Les jeux de société et la didactique des langues : À vous de jouer ! » Revue japonaise de didactique du français, 12(1-2), p.194-204. Agaësse, J. (2018). « Les émotions dans la classe de langue étrangère ». Revue japonaise de didactique du français, 13(1-2), p.6-19. Brougère, G. (2005). Jouer/Apprendre. Economica. Douglas Fir Group (The). (2016). "A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world". The Modern Language Journal, 100 (supplement), p.19-47. Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. New-York. W. W. Norton & Company. Silva, H. (2008). Le jeu en classe de langue. CLE International
Le jeu numérique, un outil pour améliorer les compétences langagières des publics faiblement scolarisés ?
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
In order to interact properly, speakers need to understand a variety of written and oral information while considering the context in which they are produced. Thus they need to develop interactional skills. However, previous studies have proven that speakers with low levels of education do not possess the required skills to interact efficiently in a number of situations that they encounter. This research will focus more precisely on interactional communicational skills since it is rarely addressed among French studies. Over the past years, we have witnessed an increasing number of studies on video games for a learning purpose, leading us to think that this could be a promising technology that might contribute to the acquisition of linguistic and interactional skills. Our research intends to show how COTS video games (commercial off-the-shelf) can be used to improve the interactional practices of adults with low levels of education. Based on problematic situations met during play phases by the targeted group, we identified, described, and analyzed the affordances of some video games in a learning perspective related to the development of oral interaction skills.
Pour comprendre le monde qui l'entoure, un individu doit comprendre ce qui est dit ou écrit, construire du sens en interprétant parfois des informations contradictoires, tout en tenant compte du contexte. Il faut donc, dans toute situation rencontrée, qu'il mobilise des ressources langagières pour informer, argumenter, négocier, etc. Entretenir des interactions sociales satisfaisantes nécessite ainsi l'acquisition de compétences interactionnelles. Or, nous relevons des difficultés de maitrise de certaines compétences interactionnelles au sein des interactions avec des locuteurs faiblement qualifiés, ne permettant pas ainsi une co-construction aboutie de l'échange (Eme et al., 2009 ; Langbach, 2014). Depuis quelques années, nous observons un nombre grandissant d'études sur l'utilisation des Jeux Numériques pour l'Apprentissage (JNA). Celles-ci semblent indiquer qu'ils représentent une des ressources susceptibles de contribuer efficacement à l'acquisition des connaissances, à la compréhension des contenus et au développement des compétences cognitives (Girard et al., 2013 ; Baptista et Oliveira, 2019). Notre étude s'intéresse aux jeux-vidéo grand public (commercial off-the-shelf) et exclue les jeux sérieux (serious games) déjà largement théorisés. Nous souhaitons ainsi en montrer la pertinence ou non afin d'améliorer les pratiques interactionnelles des adultes natifs faiblement scolarisés. Dans cette optique, notre expérimentation vise, dans un premier temps, à analyser les pratiques de jeux vidéo effectives de notre public. Dans un second temps, nous cherchons à identifier, décrire et analyser les affordances (Gibson, 1986) des jeux vidéo auxquels ce public joue et ce, dans une visée d'apprentissage et de développement de leurs compétences interactionnelles. En effet, les matériaux langagiers présents dans les jeux vidéo, leur complexité lexicale et syntaxique, représentent des affordances linguistiques. Par ailleurs, ils représentent également des affordances interactionnelles puisque le jeu met l'accent sur la compétence communicative et encourage l'action collaborative d'experts et de débutants, orientée vers un but (Rama et al., 2012). Ainsi, ce sont des matériaux à partir desquels l'action et la langue peuvent émerger (Thorne et al., 2012).
Eme, E., Reilly, J. & Almecija, Y. (2009). Compétences narratives et communicatives chez des personnes en situation d'illettrisme. Revue Européenne de Psychologie Appliquée, 59, 123-138 Gibson, J. J. (1986/1979). The Ecological Approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Langbach, V. (2014). Analyse et mesure des insécurités langagières chez des adultes en situation d'insertion. Thèse de doctorat. Université de Lorraine. Baptista, G., & Oliveira, T. (2019). Gamification and serious games: A literature meta-analysis and integrative model. Computers in Human Behavior, 92, 306‑315. Girard, C., Ecalle, J., & Magnan, A. (2013). Serious games as new educational tools: How effective are they? A meta-analysis of recent studies: Serious games as educational tools. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(3), 207‑219. Rama, P. S., Black, R. W., van Es, E., & Warschauer, M. (2012). Affordances for second language learning in World of Warcraft. ReCALL, 24(03), 322‑338. Thorne, S. L., Fischer, I., & Lu, X. (2012). The semiotic ecology and linguistic complexity of an online game world. ReCALL, 24(03), 279‑301.
Commercial video game as social interaction in L2 English learning in Norwegian secondary school
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Digital technologies are considered a crucial aspect of educational policy around the world (Erstad et al., 2021). In Norway, the common core curriculum has for the first time emphasised language identity developed outside school as a resource in school, and one aspect of teenagers' language identity developed outside school, is through the use of advanced technologies, such as online gaming (Brevik, 2019). The word "games" is explicitly referred to in the new English subject curriculum in secondary school for the first time. However, little research is conducted in classrooms on how teachers actually use commercial games in English instruction, and even less on the combination of video games and other forms of resources (e.g. analogue).
As part of the research project Vocational and General Students' use of English in and out of school (VOGUE), this paper provides knowledge on the use of online gaming in L2 English instruction and aims to investigate how the combination of playing an online game and reading a printed novel influences student engagement and learning. This paper presents a video-based classroom study from a secondary school. The data were collected from 30 English lessons in two 8th grade classes (students aged 12–13 years), involving one teacher, six student teachers and 60 secondary school students during a two-week game-based project. Video recordings can be strengthened by adding supplementary data, thus the video recordings were complemented with screen recordings, student texts and student interviews. The paper therefore draws on four datasets: (1) video recorded classroom lessons, (2) screen recordings from students' laptops, (3) students' texts concerning the video-based instruction, and (4) student interviews concerning their experiences of such instruction.
The video and screen recordings were analysed using the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO), which provides a valuable lens to ways of conceptualizing teaching quality (Grossman et al., 2013). The PLATO scores are qualitatively examined together with the students' perceptions and students' texts. This study is the first to use the PLATO protocol for recordings of game-based instruction, and thus discusses advantages and difficulties in the operationalisation of PLATO for such observation. The findings show that the combination of playing an online game and reading a printed novel matters in terms of student engagement. In addition, girls and boys perceived the combination of gameplay and reading somewhat differently, based on their prior experience with gameplay outside school, suggesting that their experience with the digital resource outside school influences both engagement and learning.
References
Brevik, L. M. (2019). Gamers, Surfers, Social Media Users: Unpacking the role of interest in English. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 35, 595–606. Erstad, O., Kjällander, S., & Järvelä, S. (2021). Facing the challenges of 'digital competence' – a Nordic agenda for curriculum development for the 21st century. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 16(2), 77-87. Grossman, P., Loeb, S., Cohen, J., & Wyckoff, J. (2013). Measure for measure: The relationship between measures of instructional practice in middle school English language arts and teachers' value-added scores. American Journal of Education, 119(3), 445–470.
Presenters Shilan Ahmadian PhD-candidate, University Of Oslo, Norway
Of taunting, swearing and slurring – insults as social practice in competitive games
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
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.
Between collaboration and deception: an analysis of player interactions in streamed Among Us games
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
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
Non players’ embodied practices of engagement in videogaming
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Videogaming is a very popular activity and different studies have shown how players organize their gaming activities in physical presence or at a distance. 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). It proposes a micro-analysis of one gaming-situation in order to show how a non-player engages in the player's gaming interaction. We will show 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.
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
Marking Digital Objects in Online Cooperative Video Games
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
In online cooperative video games, players are often required to coordinate their actions in a context of visual asymmetry by relying on talk and semiotic resources available on the game interface, which come to constitute accountable practices of gameplay (Reeves at al. 2017). In this presentation, I will focus on the practice of marking digital objects in cooperative battle royale video games (e.g. Fortnite). In these games, players start each match without weapons or items, and one of the main tasks to play the game effectively is to build up an inventory that allows to survive as much as possible. To do so, players 'loot' the virtual environment of the game and collaborate in locating objects in space and making them available to co-players with the use of talk and graphic 'markers'. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, it will be argued that this type of marking actions is understood by co-players not only as oriented to 'showing' the object (Rosenbaun and Licoppe, 2017), but also as a way of offering it and making it relevant to the strategic organization of gameplay. In particular, I will consider the coupling of marking and verbal formulations, while focusing on the epistemic (Heritage 2012) and benefactive (Clayman and Heritage 2014) status and stances taken up by the participants. More in general, these sequences display how gamers' competent expertise (Sudnow 1983, Reeves et al. 2009) is performed while orienting to collaboration and team play. The corpus comprises three hours of online interactions in English and Italian between three distant players teaming up on Fortnite. The data include the synchronized recordings of each player's screen and voice chat.
References:
Clayman S., Heritage J. (2014). "Benefactors and beneficiaries. Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests". In: Drew P., Couper-Kuhlen E. (eds.) Requesting in Social Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 55–86.
Heritage J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1-29.
Reeves S., Brown B., Laurier E. (2009). Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise. Games and Culture 4: 205-227.
Reeves S., Greiffenhagen C., Laurier E. (2017). Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment. Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Play. Topics in Cognitive Science 9: 308-342.
Rosenbaun L., Licoppe C. (2017). Showing 'digital' objects in web-based video chats as collaborative achievement. Journal of Pragmatics 27 (3): 419–446.
Sudnow D. (1983). Pilgrim in the Microworld. Chicago: Warner Books.
Accounting for the failures in video game playing activities
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
This paper explores the sequential trajectories of accounting practices for the failures faced in video game playing activities. It attends to how the accounts for the failures recharacterize what happened in the game and for which specific reasons. This study draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and is based on a corpus of video recordings of video game playing activities using Kinect. Accounting for the failures involves practices such as accepting the responsibility for the negative game results, claiming to be doing the game movements in acceptable ways, soliciting explicit accounts for why the machine is not recognizing the player movements, displaying confusion over these particular game results. The spectators may agree with the positions exhibited by the players or they may provide further accounts, respecifying and recategorizing what happened in the game and why. The accounts provided by spectators usually put the blame on players, associating the failures with the ways in which they produce their bodily movements, with their timing, and with their acceptability by the machine. This paper discusses the link between the work of accounting for the failures and the work of attributing responsibility for them, and argues that social and moral order are inseparably intertwined.
This paper explores the sequential trajectories of accounting practices for the failures faced in video game playing activities players and spectators jointly engage in. It attends to how the accounts for the failures recharacterize what happened in the game and for which specific reasons. Highlighting the accountable and assessable nature of the negative game outcomes, or failures, this paper shows that these kinds of outcomes occasion a search for the responsible parties for such troubles, through which the game events are reconstructed (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Robinson, 2016). The data comes from a corpus of video recordings of video game playing activities using Kinect, which necessitates the players to produce the game moves with their entire bodies in particular ways to be recognised by the machine. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992), this study looks into how players and other participants (such as spectators) produce and negotiate the social and moral order of their situated game playing activities (Goodwin, 2006; Jayyusi, 1984; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig, 2011). The participants in the data speak Turkish. This study elucidates the interactional practices through which the participants account for the failures in video gaming interactions. These practices include but are not restricted to accepting the responsibility for the negative game results, claiming to be doing the game movements in acceptable ways, soliciting explicit accounts for why the machine is not recognizing the player movements, displaying confusion over these particular game results. The responses from spectators may agree with the positions exhibited by the players or they may provide further accounts, respecifying and recategorizing what happened in the game and why. The accounts provided by spectators usually put the blame on players, associating the failures with the ways in which they produce their bodily movements, with their timing, and with their acceptability by the machine. The interactional work of accounting for the failures in video gaming interactions is specifically manifested and negotiated by the linguistic formulations of agency (Pomerantz, 1978; Watson, 1978). The ways in which participants form their accounts, such the use of pronouns, the choice of actions or process verbs, the positive or negative constructions, etc., describe what happened in the video games in specific ways, thereby assigning agency and attributing responsibility for the failures in particular ways. This paper describes the interactional organisation of accounts for the failures in video games and how these accounts recharacterize what happened in the video games. It also discusses the link between the work of accounting for the failures and the work of attributing responsibility for them. Based on this discussion, this paper argues that social and moral order are inseparably intertwined.
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
This study explores: (1) how players perform collaboration in the virtual world with a "constrained set of possibilities afforded by the game" (Bennerstedt & Ivarsson 2010) through controlling the actions of their avatars, and (2) how do competent players (creatively) utilize the limited resources in the virtual world to achieve the type of collaboration that might not be possible in the real world. Unlike Bennerstedt and Ivarsson's (2010) study that analyzes how players achieve shared missions or "quests" to progress within the game, the current study focuses on collaborative actions that are not relevant to core game tasks, but joint social activities that are performed "just for fun." Data used in this study is extracted from play sessions of an MMO game, Sea of Thieves, where players form a team and explore an open world via a pirate ship from a first-person perspective. The dataset includes five one-hour-long play sessions. Preliminary analysis shows (1) players actively engage in both spontaneous joint activities and coordinated joint activities, (2) actions taken by the avatars on the screen are controlled by players in a sequentially organized manner, (3) players adopt verbal, vocal, and visual resources to complete the joint activities.
Non-task-related joint activities in MMO games Human interaction is fundamentally cooperative and is based on joint attention (Tomasello 2008; Tomasello 2009). Playing video games, especially those Massive multiplayer online (MMO) games, nowadays has become a mainstream leisure activity that enables physically remote players to interact with each other and accomplish collaborative goals in the virtual environment. Although studies have found negative effects of playing video games (Greitemeyer 2018; Greitemeyer & Mügge 2014), recent studies show that multiplayer collaborative video games facilitate pro-social behaviors and social interaction as they provide a "meeting place" for players from diverse backgrounds to experience sociality (Voida & Greenberg 2009). Moreover, researchers in ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) studies find that MMO games are socially organized ( Reeves, Greiffenhagen & Laurier 2017). However, many MMO games are designed in a way that players see through a first-person perspective, which provides restricted visual access to the space and other players' activities. Compared to face-to-face interaction in the real world, the virtual world inevitably reduces the interaction between players (Manninen and Kujanpaa 2005). Given the challenges of social interaction in video games, this study explores: (1) how players perform collaboration in the virtual world with a "constrained set of possibilities afforded by the game" (Bennerstedt & Ivarsson 2010) through controlling the actions of their avatars, and (2) how do competent players (creatively) utilize the limited resources in the virtual world to achieve the type of collaboration that might not be possible in the real world. Unlike Bennerstedt and Ivarsson's (2010) study that analyzes how players achieve shared missions or "quests" to progress within the game, the current study focuses on collaborative actions that are not relevant to core game tasks, but joint social activities that are performed "just for fun" (from interviews with a participant), such as playing music and taking group selfies. Data used in this study is extracted from play sessions of an MMO game, Sea of Thieves, where players form a team and explore an open world via a pirate ship from a first-person perspective. The dataset includes five one-hour-long play sessions. Preliminary analysis shows that: (1) players actively engage in both spontaneous joint activities and coordinated joint activities, (2) actions taken by the avatars on the screen are controlled by players in a sequentially organized manner, and (3) players adopt verbal, vocal, and visual resources to complete the joint activities as they do in face-to-face interactions.
References Bennerstedt, Ulrika & Jonas Ivarsson. 2010. Knowing the Way. Managing Epistemic Topologies in Virtual Game Worlds. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 19(2). 201–230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-010-9109-8 Reeves, Stuart, Christian Greiffenhagen & Eric Laurier. 2017. Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Play. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(2). 308–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12234 Voida, Amy & Saul Greenberg. 2009. Wii all play: the console game as a computational meeting place. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09), 1559–1568. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518940
Disalignment strategies in a collaborative online serious game
Oral Presentation[SYMP74] Video games as social interactions: from multimodal conversation analysis to perspectives in applied linguistics10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
In this contribution, we analyze the data that have been collected within an interdisciplinary project on embodiment in collaborative serious games for soft skills training in Lyon (France). During the game, participants can communicate with each other through a webcam and a microphone. As for the game setting, players are members of the crew of a submarine that suffers damage and needs to be repaired. The player taking her/his turn has an immersive view of the room s/he is in, while the inactive players have access to the plan of the submarine. By relying on the plan of the submarine from a bird's eye perspective, the inactive players can guide the active player and inform him/her of possible damage and flooding. During video game sessions, participants who are playing may receive advice or instructions from co-participants about the game actions to be accomplished during their own turn. In doing so, the co-participants are not merely limited to a spectator role (Baldauf-Quilliatre & Colón de Carvajal 2021), but they position themselves in an encompassing game perspective by prefiguring future single moves and also sequences that concern the actions of the whole team of players. Game strategies emerge and can be illustrated by extended turns-at-talk. In this contribution, we focus on the conversational resources used by players for disaligning when teammates propose actions to be realized in the ongoing game round. A current player can exhibit disalignment from an envisaged prospective action through dispreferred resources (silences, outbreaths, non-lexical vocalizations), by responding verbally and argumenting against the co-participant's proposal or by rejecting responsibility for the action mentioned as possible next accomplishment (e.g. by saying "I don't know"). The player can also suspend the course of game actions and mobilize other teammates by soliciting their opinion on the actions to be taken and, in a broader perspective, on the strategy of the game which also involves the future actions of the other players (Reeves et al. 2017). In our data, these suspensions can be realized by movements of the cursor, which can be positioned on a specific designated object in the video game interface without the current player clicking on it. The study of strategies that participants deploy during this collaborative serious game makes it possible to identify the emergence of disagreements between the members of a team. More generally, this gaming activity is to be considered as a site of observation where certain interactional skills can be highlighted from an applied linguistics perspective (Fasel Lauzon et al. 2009). The analysis of disalignment strategies makes it possible to scrutinize the ways in which participants express and crystallize their disagreement about the scenario of future in-game actions, which is always subject to negotiation.
Baldauf-Quilliatre, H. & Colón de Carvajal, I. (2021). Spectating: How non-players participate in videogaming. Journal für Medienlinguistik 4(2), 123-161. Fasel Lauzon, V., Pekarek Doehler, S. & Pochon-Berger, E. (2009). Identification et observabilité de la compétence d'interaction : Le désaccord comme microcosme actionnel. Bulletin VALS-ASLA 89, 121-142. Reeves, S., Greiffenhagen, C. & Laurier E. (2017). Video gaming as practical accomplishment: Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and play. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(2),308-342.
Shilan Ahmadian
Isabel Colón De Carvajal 
Biagio Ursi
Lydia Heiden
