Gaming as a Situated Collaborative Practice

Abstract

This article uses video data of gaming sessions at an Internet café in order to explore the situated and embodied resources that players use for doing collaborative gaming. Prior studies of gaming have, to a great extent, not accounted for many of the semiotic resources that players utilize for conducting gaming as a collaborative enterprise. From an ethnomethodological and interaction analytical perspective, drawing on Goodwin’s concepts of semiotic fields and contextual configurations, this study shows how both on- and off-screen semiotic resources structure the gaming interaction, and how the use of these resources relate to the players’ different interactional projects, such as issuing instructions or orienting themselves in an on-screen space. These embodied semiotic resources are situated in the on- and off-screen spaces in which the players interact. They provide ways of playing computer games in collaboration that are specific for gaming where the players are co-present.