Blame and rebuttal in multiplayer computer gaming
| Author: | Sjöblom, Björn |
| Abstract: | |
| The current study examines co-located, networked multiplayer gaming at Internet cafés in order to explore players’ methods for doing causal explanations of events in the games. Interaction in these venues is highly complex, involving conversation, gestures and posture, on-screen actions such as avatar movement and scrolling, in ways that constitute dynamic contextual configurations (Goodwin, 2000). The data consist of 30 hours of video recordings of adolescent boys playing computer games in two separate Internet cafés, and is supplemented by software recordings in order to capture the details of on-screen interaction. In these games (e.g. World of Warcraft, Counter Strike), players cooperate in achieving a specific goal, such as winning a match against another team. After failing to achieve this goal, they frequently need to explain “what went wrong”. In doing this, players often accuse and blame each other for failing to act in the locally appropriate way, creating conditional relevance for a rebuttal of the blame-ascription (Buttny, 1993). Such accusations frame the co-player as incompetent in various ways, e.g. as failing to make the appropriate choices at crucial game-states. The rebuttals are designed as various sorts of excuses and justifications: as re-accusation of the accuser, accounts of the competitors cheating, of unfair rules or faulty machinery. Only in very rare cases will the accused concede to being the direct cause of the mishap. Through the detailed sequential analysis of how players co-construct accounts of blame and rebuttal, this study serves to show how players interactively co-construct and de-construct the skills and knowledge necessary for competent computer gaming. |
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