Video Gaming as Practical Accomplishment: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Play

Abstract

Accounts of video game play developed from an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) perspective remain relatively scarce. This paper collects together an emerging, if scattered, body of research which focusses on the material, practical 'work' of video game players.The paper offers an example-driven explication of an EMCA perspective on video game play phenomena.The materials are arranged as a 'tactical zoom'. We start very much 'outside' the game, beginning with a wide view of how massive-multiplayer online games are played within dedicated gaming spaces; here we find multiple players, machines and many different sorts of activities going on (besides playing the game).Still remaining somewhat distanced from the play of the game itself, we then take a closer look at the players themselves by examining a notionally simpler setting involving pairs taking part in a football game at a games console. As we draw closer to the technical details of play, we narrow our focus further still to examine a player and spectator situated 'at the screen' but jointly analysing play as the player competes in an online first-person shooter. Finally we go 'inside' the game entirely and look at the conduct of avatars on-screen via screen recordings of a massively-multiplayer online game.Having worked through specific examples, we provide an elaboration of a selection of core topics of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that are used to situate some of the unstated orientations in the presentation of data fragments. In this way, recurrent issues raised in the fragments are shown as coherent, interconnected phenomena. In closing, we suggest caution regarding the way game play phenomena have been analysed in the paper, while remarking on challenges present for the development of further EMCA oriented research on video game play.

Game‐XP: Action Games as Experimental Paradigms for Cognitive Science

“…Sudnow's work on games seems to have been a one off within the field of Ethnomethodology. However, it has recently been rediscovered by Reeves, Brown, and Laurier (), picked up from that source, and introduced to the Cognitive Science community by Gray and Lindstedt (), with much of its essence being reviewed and discussed in this issue of topiCS by Reeves, Greiffenhagen, and Laurier ().…”

“…Reeves et al. () look at gameplay through the lens of ethnomethodogical and conversational analysis (EMCA). The questions they ask are higher level questions that focus on interactions among human players or in the experience of game play for individual players.…”

Allen Newell's Program of Research: The Video‐Game Test

“…Sibert, Gray, and Lindstedt () apply optimization techniques from machine learning to identify the best combination of feature weights for selecting actions in Tetris. Finally, Reeves, Greiffenhagen, and Laurier () use ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to describe game playing from different viewpoints. While offering interesting insights, this methodology rejects the concept of cognition used by Newell and is almost at the opposite pole from Newell's mechanistic approach.…”

Ways of Spectating

“…However, while it has been suggested by others that EMCA approaches have struggled to gain purchase on 'playful' activities [53], examining such activities is not new for EMCA (e.g., [20,28]), although this literature remains fairly sparse as pointed out by Tolmie and Rouncefield [53]. Nevertheless, EMCA interest in play extends to video games (e.g., see [47]), which, briefly, has studied on-screen actions [2], players' talk, and bodily conduct 'in' and 'out' of games [34]. Yet this work also rarely discusses spectating.…”

“…For instance, spectators may be in adjacent rooms, as in [30] where dentistry students follow live video broadcasts of a dentist performing endodontic treatments, or in a large auditorium, as in [37] where an audience of trainees inspect a team of surgeons doing surgical operations through live video transmission. Likewise, spectating does not have a central place in the EMCA work on video games (see, for example, [47] for a review of such studies). This may possibly stem from the likelihood that the presence of spectators normatively points to a more 'central' activity (e.g., playing video games) which tends to attract greater analytic focus for researchers entering such settings.…”