‘You Are Gonna Get Beat Up No Matter What’: Managing incipient conflict in wargame interactions

• In Event: 1442 - Conflict in Social Interaction

Abstract

This research builds on interactional research on conflict, complaints, and membership categories by studying the management of incipient conflicts, drawing on video-recordings of co-present hobbyist “wargame” interactions. By wargames, I mean tabletop board games that simulate historical or fictional war or conflict scenarios; these are often long, typically zero-sum, and involve multi-factional and shifting alliances and conflicts. Notably, when sitting down to play a wargame, or any board game, players assume at least two roles: one as a player of a game, and one as a character within the game. The game is a recurrent basis for incipient conflicts between players, despite norms about the ontological separation between players and their respective characters. These incipient conflicts become observable through players displaying frustration or displeasure (cf. Yu 2011) with another player, or through complaints. My analysis shows how the institutional context of the game constitutes an interactional resource for avoiding or managing incipient conflict by referring to its characteristics or by deploying aspects of procedure. Second, this research expands on existing research on the ways that complaints and conflict can display orientations to the consequentiality of particular categories. This becomes especially clear as it relates to players’ orientation to and deployment of the norms as a resource (cf. Wieder 1974) for confining allowable conflicts to those between characters in the game, and for sanctioning players who initiate conflicts with other players.

Author

• Joseph Sterphone, University of California, Santa Barbara