Negotiating Play: A Discourse Analysis of Paired Videogame Play

• In Event: Games as Dialogues Between Pasts and Futures: Playing Toward Educational Reimagination

Abstract

In this paper we explore moments of collaborative play between upper elementary-aged children as they navigate a narrative-focused adventure videogame, Kingdom Hearts (Hashimoto & Nomura, 2002). A successful single player will use skill, logic, experience, and determination to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and advance through the game’s story. As a pair, players must also communicate and collaborate to succeed. Situated within a larger study of gameplay, these moments take place between two 5th grade boys who agreed to actively discuss all major gameplay decisions and share game control. Their experiences illustrate how discourse and meaning-making recursively influence one another to deepen player’s understandings and collaboration.

This work views literacy practices as a set of conceptual tools (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Cole & Wertsch, 1996) that communicate perspective through human language. Meaningful text engagement requires features of the text to be connected to meaning potentials (Gee, 2001). Lave & Wenger (1991) proposed that acting out practices is integral to learning. Learning is situated within communities’ expectations and occurs when the practices exhibited by the learner come closer in line with those expectations. In exploring videogame stories, situated learning theory allows us to consider how practices of play are themselves forms of literacy - particularly when the game is a complex multimodal text.

This study follows Gee’s (2014) structure for discourse analysis, dividing the microstructure language as Gelfuso (2020). The audio and video recordings were first transcribed, and then divided into lines and stanzas. We then cycled back to each line of discourse to highlight significant statements and draw themes for the stanzas. This process was done as a team until intercoder reliability was achieved. After the microstructuring process, we assessed the significant statements for their contributions to Gee’s (2014) building tasks such as identity, politics, and relationships. Through these lenses, we saw patterns of language from each of the participants and how they situate themselves as gamers and learners as well as their perceptions of values and collaborative play experiences.

Findings suggest that collaborative gameplay fosters creative exploration of meaning and identity. Payers’ discourse can reveal sophisticated understandings of how games guide expectations and support players’ ability to make and use meaning. For example, a player remarked, “By the way, there are a lot of signs that a boss fight is coming. A save point is is is one, OK then, and a gigantic room with nothing in it is another one. Also, a merchant is another one.” demonstrating how prior gameplay experiences inform understanding of the game environment as a text laden with narrative and structural cues. At another point, one player read a summary of early in-game choices, “You wanna see rare sights, you’re afraid of being indecisive, you [value] friendship” and their partner remarked, “That just sounds like we’re lonely.” This exchange illustrates how players use game-generated text for self-reflection and identity negotiation, blending in-game characterization with real world emotional resonance. Together, these moments show how discourse in play can bridge past experiences, present interpretation, and imagined futures.

Authors

• Laurie "Darian" Thrailkill, East Carolina University

• Hannah Dietrich, Sam Houston State University