Disputes, Stakes and Game Involvement: Facing Death in Computer Gaming

Abstract

Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting.

Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafés (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures.

Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether.

Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.

Citation

Sjöblom, B. and Aronsson, K. (2012), "Disputes, Stakes and Game Involvement: Facing Death in Computer Gaming", Danby, S. and Theobald, M. (Ed.) Disputes in Everyday Life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 377-405. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-4661(2012)0000015019