Multimodality and Online Gaming Environments
Research Team: Elizabeth Keating, Chiho Sunakawa
The recent rapid development of digital communication technologies has
resulted in new spaces for collaborative activity. In new technologically
mediated spaces, people are adapting communicative practices and in some
cases inventing new ones. In this research we investigate online gaming
in the case of "LAN (local area network) parties" or temporary
gatherings of people who network their computers together to play multiplayer
computer games. We examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks
of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk
and plans. Introducing the notion of participation cues, we explain how
interactants orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span
quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible
acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces
have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action
through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms.