KivelŠ
Mikael Kivela
Department of Education
University of Helsinki
Mikael.Kivela@helsinki.fi
Rome must be destroyed, but Caesar is my friend:
Goals and social positions in face-to-face multiplayer gaming
How are social positions constructed in gaming situations where the players share both a virtual and a physical space, the playground? What are the relations between these positions and individual players goals? A discourse analytical approach to interaction is taken in this paper. A case study conducted in school context with 11-12 -year old pupils playing Civilization 2 indicates that two separate social positions are created for each participant. Arguably these in-game and playground positions are interdependent and not necessarily explicitly separated in speech but become apparent in the players' actions. This paper focuses on announcing goals, negotiating shared values and identifying with in-game characters in spoken and written language as basis for social positioning of oneself and others. Concrete examples of different social positions and their effects to both gameplay and social interaction are analysed. So what? Social positions change over time and different positions can be consciously adopted in different contexts. The point is that two quite different social positions for a person can simultaneously coexist somewhat harmoniously without significant effort in the same context. As a conclusion several ways of exploiting these dual positions e.g. in education are presented.
Keywords: multiplayer gaming, face-to-face interaction, social position, discourse analysis, educational gaming
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