“I Think the Story Is the Game?” Examining Play and Story as Infrastructures of Interaction

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Role Playing, and Embodied Escape: (Re)Imagining Learning in the Peripheries of Play

Abstract

Overview and Research Question
Drawing on data from a larger IRB-approved qualitative study examining how five adults “learned to escape” across a series of multi-linear escape rooms, this presentation examines how play –as an assemblage – was produced through synchronized participation, cooperative interaction, and the ‘reading’ of the paratextual infrastructure of play. Thinking with conceptual and methodological tools from interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Kendon, 1990). conversation analysis (Goodwin, 2018), and paratextuality in games (Consalvo, 2017; Jenkins, 2004; Schmidt, 2021) it reads escape rooms as architectures of engagement. In particular, I ask: how do participants orchestrate “escape” in learning to read the paratextual environment of the room?

Theoretical Framework
Whereas in earlier work, I examined how participants leveraged the material realia of a room to decode escape (Author & Colleague, 2023b) and were shaped by sound and the sonic atmospheres of game design (Author 1 & Colleagues, 2022b), in this presentation, I read across the broader corpus to examine the macro trajectories of learning to escape. Guided by the understanding that escape room play can be viewed as a “multi-party interactive field” (Goodwin, 2006, p. 12) through which “multiple participants are building in concert with each other the actions that define and shape their lifeworld” (Goodwin, 2000, p. 75), I examine how embodied participation and interaction developed over time, across contexts, and through objects and material realia.

Methods and Modes of Inquiry
In this work, I draw on data sources, including observational notes, 1:1 pre- and post-game participant interviews, GoPro recordings of in-game interactions, and audio recordings of in-game play. Data analysis was an iterative process of examining participants' embodied interaction during the escape process and interrogating their learning trajectories across time. To understand the relationships among modes, bodies, environments, and materials, I followed Erickson’s (2006) whole-to-part analytic procedure. I first watched the video all the way through, using field notes to mark time and note verbal and nonverbal phenomena. Then, I found significant episodes, what Jordan & Henderson (1995) refer to as distinctive shapes of events. I analyzed these episodes and the social transformations therein to illustrate how a “trajectory of knowing-in-interaction” (Melander, 2012) or learning to read the room was enacted and orchestrated across participants.

Findings
Rendered through micro-interaction analyses, findings highlight how participants (re)read the room to “recalibrate” (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013) exhibitions of play to achieve escape. I argue that these transformations and recalibrations make visible the microgenetic learning, or fluency, in players learning to “read” the various paratext or environmental storytelling across rooms. In other words, learning to escape was not only a process of learning to decode the plain narrative content and story itself but the “materiality of the playground and its aesthetic form” (Sicart, 2014, p. 52). The focal escape rooms, as I contend, operated as transmedial playgrounds, each offering varied geometries and structures for interaction and consequential learning.

Author

• Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan