Breaking the Borders

The border between Gaming and Education

A lot of teachers and parents think it problematic when their students and children play video games, and their concern is not without reason. Games do tend to take up a lot of time, which in the view of teachers and parents, could be used for better things. 

However, I think it certainly is not without benefit for students who are learning English or any relative subjects. For example, a game which has a basis on human history (Totalwar and Cilvilization series, for example), will provide both basic and advanced information(depending on the game) for history students or anyone interested in history. 

My opinion is that when learning a language, games can be more helpful, if used appropriately by the students and sometimes teachers. Teachers could use the text/spoken materials from the game contents, and students are exposed to a lot of English in most multiplayer games. I would love to do more research on this concept.

What I am posting below is one of my assignments I did for my MA course, analysing spoken interactions in online gaming. This is what made me think the possibility of non-educational games actually being educational(I'm sorry for the font being quite small - you can hold the "control" button and mouse wheel up to zoom in).

Introduction

Conversation analysis is a systematic analysis of the talk produced in social interaction or talk-in-interaction(Hutchby and Wooffitt 1988). During the first part of the assignment I transcribed a post-game discussion, but this was not the only data I had collected; I also recorded in-game conversation between myself and my friends who play the strategy game called League of Legends. In this data, I detected that there were lots of repetitions made by the participants. This hardly ever happened in the post-game discussions. In this assignment I aim to analyse how the repetitions are used and how they affect the participants.

Definitions and point of interest

There are mainly two types of repetitions which occurred in the data I collected. First of these types is when one speaker repeats an utterance(self-repetition), and the second is when other speakers repeat what the first participant said(other-repetition). A repetition produced by another speaker achieves a different action from one initiated by the same speaker(Wong 2000). Tannen(1987) declares that both of these repetitions result in a rhythmic pattern, but this is not an aspect which I want to focus on. However she also mentions that sometimes repetition is used to utter a correction(Tannen 1987), and this was evident in my data. These repetitions are lexical and mostly prosodic, to which Marsh and Tainio(2009) claims that in a video game, this results in players attending to and collaboratively building their understandings and experiences of game events. My data reflects this to some extent. Additionally for both of these repetitions, they are used as a conversational feature that helps create a supportive interactional alignment(Gordon 2003).

Some “repetitions” I thought was particularly interesting, was when the speakers did not repeat lexically, but repeated the meaning. These “repetitions” resulted in what Gordon(2003) claimed; showing alignment within the team, without the participants actually repeating what was said. My collected data supports Gordon(2003)'s statement; repetition helps create alignment.

Analysis

In general, I think the fast-paced nature of this game is mainly responsible for the participants frequently speaking quickly and repeating multiple times; they are always preoccupied and are enthralled at what they are doing inside the game, and everyone in the team is aware of it. Therefore the role of the repetition in the following extract can be described as signalling participation or involvement with discourse(Marsh and Tainio 2009).

Extract A

02 S: Yo; defend this >tower defend this tower!<

03 H: Yeah we will, we will

The two speakers here, while both demonstrating the first type of repetition(self-repetition) I mentioned earlier, also shows that the first speaker's signalling for participation was a success. In line 02, S requests assistance urgently in defending a tower, and we can see that it was an urgent statement as he speeds up midway. This phenomenon is more apparent in extract C, which I will analyse later.

Extract B

06 H: Look >[what they're doing they're coming in coming in<]

07 E:       [(what happen) they're coming in] they're coming

08    in=

09 T: =coming Nidalee

In extract B, the self-repetition is present again from the first and second speakers, but they are also other-repetitions. Interestingly, the other-repetition start as an overlap. Both players may have seen the opposing team at similar times, and are both announcing to their team. This extract also illustrates alignment of the players(Gordon 2003) although not strongly evident. In line 09, in response to H and E's repetitions of “they're coming” T repeats “coming” and identifies “Nidalee”, a member of the opposing team. This does not mean that H and E were not aware that “they” was “Nidalee” as T identified, but to those who were not participating in the conversation at this time, or were not paying attention to where “they” were “coming in”, T's clarification is extremely helpful; everyone now knows where “Nidalee” is.

Extract C

01 H: Back=

02 T: =Ho;;;[ly fuck]

03 H:       [Tony ]

04 S: [[>Back out, Tony, back out<

05 H: [[just go(x) go base

06 (1.0)

07 T: I'm getting the fuck back to base, man=

08 H: =I reckon we should give them this >tower it's< lo;w, like >leave leave

09    [leave leave ]<

10 S: [>I got my<(x)]I got my tower(...)I got my(.) ulti

This extract is very interesting as it has a number of aspects in it. Firstly, there is another example of self-repetition in line 04 and line 10. The example in line 10 is clearly a repetition for self-repair(Tannen 1987) from “tower” to “ulti”. Secondly, what S said in line 04 is can be considered to be an example of other-repetition as well, with added words. Combining line 01 and 03, H tells T to “back”, and S in line 04 reinforces it. Thirdly, it consists of another example of joint use of repetition and urgency , since in line 04, while repeating, everything S says is spoken quickly. A more stronger incident illustrating this is at line 08 and 09, where H repeats “leave” four times quickly, signalling the team for immediate action(Marsh and Tainio 2009).

Additionally, there is one of the repetitions I remarked as interesting in the previous section of this assignment. Looking at lines 04 to 05, there are no lexical repetitions other than the self-repetition by S. However, they both start speaking at the same time and the meaning of what S and H say are the same; “back out to/go back to base”. Both players have created the same supportive interaction for T(Gordon 2003). Finally, in line 07, T acknowledges the two other players' involvement in his situation, and adheres to it. What has happened between lines 01 to 07 is that through repetition of meaning, the players have reached a common understanding of the current situation in the game(Marsh and Tainio 2009), and as a team, their decisions reached an alignment(Gordon 2003).

Extract D

09 S: [[Let's go

10 H: [[Dude there's a lot of them there=

11 S: =>There's three they're [three< we're four!]

12 A:                         [O;;nly three there]

13 T: (0.5)Go!=

14 H: =We go for Ahri first then

Extract D is the only extract which shows disagreement within the team from the data I have picked out. In line 09, S looks for an engagement with the enemy team, and the evidence for this is at line 11. However in line 10, H notices that “there's a lot of them there” and does not want to engage. Then at line 11 S repeats the fact that their team outnumber the opponents, and A at line 12 repeats this also, to which the others' response is to engage; at line 13 T shouts “Go!” and H, who was the one disagreeing, suggests the first target in line 14. The participants' team was at a disagreement, but through repetition they were able to come to an interactional alignment(Gordon 2003). Also, it is questionable whether the same result would have come out if A did not repeat and hence reinforce what S had said in lines 11 and 12; just one person's repetition may not have been enough to convince the team to engage in this situation(Wong 2000).

Conclusion

In summary, repetitions which I have covered in my data are self-repetition, other-repetition, and non-lexical repetitions but repetitions of meaning and how they affected the participants. There were several ways self-repetition was used; joint usage with speed to display urgency, for signalling participation(Marsh and Tainio 2009), and also for self-correction(Tanen 1987). Most frequent usage of other-repetition was reinforcement, but there was also an aspect of acknowledgement and alignment(Gordon 2003). Similarly, repetition in meaning also showed the same phenomenon where participants demonstrated a quick coherence in their decisions. This coherence in the team's decision is particularly important in the game which the participants are playing. This is because without everyone in the team being on the same page, engagements with the enemy will mostly end with disadvantageous results. Therefore it was extremely interesting to see how repetition aided the process of alignment.

References

Gordon, C. 2003.Aligning as a Team : Forms of Conjoined Participation in (Stepfamily) Interaction Research on Language and Social Interaction Journal, Vol 36, Issue 4 : 395-431.

Hutchby, I and Wooffitt, R. 1988. Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marsh, A.P. and Tainio, L. 2009. Other-Repetition as a Resource for Participation in the Activity of Playing a Video Game, The Modern Language Journal, Vol 93, Issue 2 : 153-169.

Tannen, D. 1987. Repetition in Conversation: Toward a Poetics of Talk. Language Journal, Vol 63, No.3 : 574-605.

Wong, J. 2000. Repetition in Conversation: A Look at “First and Second Sayings” Research on Language and Social Interaction Journal, Vol 33, Issue 4 : 407-424.