Encouragement in videogame interactions

Abstract

This paper explores how participants encourage each other in videogame interactions in private settings. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of encouragement as multimodal practice in videogame interaction. In the paper we focus especially on a comparison of encouragements and instructions and argue that they are used differently: encouragements show another sequence structure than instructions, occur in particular contexts and are characterized by a specific turn design. We consider two types of encouragements. First we analyze encouragements occurring after a display of demotivation and projecting indices of re-motivation of the co-participant. Then we show encouragements produced to incite the encouraged player to continue his ongoing gaming action. This type of encouragements occurs when the instructed action is already going on and it is characterized by lexical repetition and a particular rhythmicity. Our study draws on a corpus of 21h video recorded mostly multiplayer videogame interactions in French.

Keywords

• videogame interactions
• instruction
• encouragement
• action ascription
• multimodality