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CONVERSING IN MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE (MMO) GAMES: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CHAT INTERACTIONS IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT AND LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

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More and more people are becoming interested in videogames not only in terms of leisure, but also because of their research potential. Videogames are being used as test sites for acquiring social, linguistic, psychological, and other types of data from millions of players every day. The present study aims at comparing the discourses of chat interactions of two largest gaming communities of World of Warcraft and League of Legends. The study employs mixed-method approach to data collection: observations and questionnaires. Gee's discourse analysis toolkit is used as a research method to process data acquired through observations (screenshots of chat logs) to elicit what social activities are performed with the help of the language used in the MMO discourses of two games. The findings of the present study are in line with the previous research on videogames as "third places", in that the interactions found within the analyzed games reflect specific social activities found outside of game worlds with the producers of the interactions manifesting multiple social identities simultaneously.
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VYTAUTAS MAGNUS UNIVERSITY
THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF LITHUANIAN STUDIES
Maksim Bogdanov
CONVERSING IN MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE (MMO) GAMES:
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CHAT INTERACTIONS IN WORLD OF
WARCRAFT AND LEAGUE OF LEGENDS
Master of Arts Thesis
Joint study programme “Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism”, state code in Lithuania 6281NX001
Study area of Linguistics
Kaunas, 2022
Abstract
More and more people are becoming interested in videogames not only in terms of leisure,
but also because of their research potential. Videogames are being used as test sites for
acquiring social, linguistic, psychological, and other types of data from millions of
players every day. The present study aims at comparing the discourses of chat interactions
of two largest gaming communities of World of Warcraft and League of Legends. The
study employs mixed-method approach to data collection: observations and
questionnaires. Gee’s discourse analysis toolkit is used as a research method to process
data acquired through observations (screenshots of chat logs) to elicit what social
activities are performed with the help of the language used in the MMO discourses of two
games. The findings of the present study are in line with the previous research on
videogames as “third places”, in that the interactions found within the analyzed games
reflect specific social activities found outside of game worlds with the producers of the
interactions manifesting multiple social identities simultaneously.
i
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
2. An overview of previous research on online videogames ............................................ 4
2.1 MMOs and Computer-Mediated Communication .................................................. 4
2.2 Interactions in MMOs ............................................................................................. 5
2.3 Linguistic features of MMOs .................................................................................. 7
3. Research methodology .................................................................................................. 9
3.1 Data collection ........................................................................................................ 9
3.1.1. Survey design .................................................................................................. 9
3.1.2 Observations ................................................................................................... 11
3.2 Data processing and analytical approach .............................................................. 13
4. Online videogames as places for socialization............................................................ 16
4.1 Social Network Sites elements in MMOs ............................................................. 16
4.1.1 Means for social interactions in World of Warcraft ....................................... 17
4.1.2 Means for social interactions in League of Legends ...................................... 21
4.2 Linguistic and discursive features of chat interactions in LoL and WoW ............. 25
4.2.1 Structural features and linguistic means of chat interactions ......................... 25
4.2.2 Micro-level discourse analysis of chat interactions in LoL and WoW ........... 33
5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 49
References ....................................................................................................................... 52
Appendix 1: League of Legends questionnaire form ....................................................... iv
Appendix 2: World of Warcraft questionnaire form .................................................... xxiii
Appendix X ........................................................... Ошибка! Закладка не определена.
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List of Tables and Figures
Table 1. Overview of empirical data sets analyzed......................................................... 13
Table 2. Cooperative/Competitive division .................................................................... 13
Figure 1. Respondents’ distribution according to the region of play (in %) ................... 16
Figure 2. Number of respondents utilizing designated game features in WoW (in %) ... 18
Figure 3. Number of people actively using designated chat channels in WoW (in %) ... 19
Figure 4. Number of respondents utilizing designated game features in LoL (in %) ..... 22
Figure 5. Number of people actively using designated chat channels in LoL (in %) ..... 23
Figure 6. Excerpt of inter-player chat interactions in LoL .............................................. 26
Table 3. Frequency of hybrid writing elements in LoL chat communications ................ 27
Figure 7. Different instances of inter-player chat interactions in WoW .......................... 29
Table 4. Frequency of hybrid writing elements in WoW chat communications ............. 30
Figure 8. Distribution of utterances according to their type (in %) ................................ 32
Figure 9. LoL interaction extract ..................................................................................... 34
Figure 10. WoW interaction extract …………………………………………….………42
Table 5. The three Tone Units of the original utterance and their functions .................. 46
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List of Abbreviations
1H
one-handed weapon
2D
two-dimensional
3D
three-dimensional
AAA
triple “A” (classification of videogames)
ADC
Attack Damage Carry
afk
away from keyboard
APC
Ability Power Carry
brb
be right back
CC
Crowd Control
CMC
Computer-Mediated Communication
CS
Creep Score
DM W
Dire Maul West
DoT
Damage over Time
FPS
First Person Shooter
gd
good duel
gl
good luck
LFG
Looking For Group
LoL
League of Legends
lol
laughing out loud
MMO
Massive Multiplayer Online
MOBA
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
NPCs
Non-Playable Characters
RPG
Role-Playing Game
RTS
Real-time Strategy
SNS
Social Network Sites
WoW
World of Warcraft
wtf
what the f*ck
wym
what do you mean
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1. Introduction
Video games have come a long way since the first prototype of Pong was booted for the
first time ever in 1972. They evolved from 2D (two-dimensional) text-based adventure
games without any sound or colorful graphic support to full scale 3D AAA ("triple A")
titles with the budgets overweighting those of modern-day blockbusters (for example, the
budget of Grand Theft Auto V exceeds $200 million (Villapaz 2013)). The gaming
community did not sit idly during this period of progress. While game developers
invented new forms and mechanics to play with, implemented the ever-evolving hard-
and software technologies into their products, the community adapted to these
innovations. People learnt to use buttons to play Pong, keyboard to play Colossal Cave
Adventure, then came the mouse and Microsoft with their Solitaire built-in into their
Windows 3.0 OS (operating system). Of course, it was not enough for people to simply
play videogames alone, sitting in their rooms. They needed to talk about them. While the
tabletop games already had their own little local fanbases, their virtual counterparts were
only starting to grow the number of followers. The global increase in accessibility of
Internet boosted this process. This also brought online video games into existence.
On a more global scale the gaming industry can be recognized as one of the biggest
branches of the entertainment sphere. For the 2020 year only it was able to amass $159.3
billion in value, placing it ahead of Hollywood movie market (Dobrilova 2021, Mamerow
2021). Over three billion people from all over the world play video games nowadays
(Williams 2021). The industry grows and so does its consumer base. More and more
people are becoming interested in videogames not only in terms of leisure, but also
because of their research potential. Videogames are being used as test sites for acquiring
social, linguistic, psychological, and other types of data from millions of players every
day. In great part it is done by the developer companies to understand what they can
improve in their products. On the other hand, individual researchers are interested in
taking specific element of a game and studying it in a particular context. Nowadays,
videogames are popular not only to play, but to study.
Meridian 59, The Realm Online, Terra, Ultima Online, Lineage, Dark Ages,
EverQuest - these are the beginning of a whole new genre of games which is now known
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as Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. This general genre, in turn, has multiple
subgenres which usually derive from their single-player analogues, such as Role-Playing
Game (RPG) - MMORPG (World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV), First Person Shooter
(FPS) - MMOFPS (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valorant), Real-time Strategy
(RTS) - MMORTS (StarCraft I & II). However, there is one subgenre of MMOs that
stands out from the others, namely, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), because
it does not have a single-player counterpart, i. e. it is designed to be played online with
others. If we compare World of Warcraft (WoW) (MMORPG) and, for example, League
of Legends (LoL) (MOBA), as two most popular games of the present time and greybeards
of their genres, we will see a lot of differences in gamedesign, mechanics, features,
setting, lore, plot, etc. The first one was released on November 23, 2004 and has reported
100 million registered accounts (Sarkar 2014) with 4.74 million active users (Statista
2016)
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. WoW reached its peak in 2010 with 12 million active subscribers (Peckham 2013),
and now, supposedly, is in a declining state. The second game was released on October
27, 2009 and according to the recent statistics has reached a total number of growing 115
million active monthly users (‘Spezzy’ 2021). Both titles became phenomena of the
industry and provoked numerous research in different academic fields (Steinkuehler,
2007; Peterson, 2014; Reitman, 2018; Ramler et al., 2021 to name a few) yet, in
comparison to World of Warcraft, League of Legends so far has received less attention
from linguists.
Though, the abovementioned MMOs are very different in the ways they give
players possibilities to express themselves in their respective virtual worlds, these games
have one thing in common, namely, giant player bases full of people who not only interact
with the gaming software but also with other players both in- and outside of these cyber
environments, locally (character to character), on meta-level (person to person), and
combined (person to character). Such interactional multidimensionality of these games
provides a fertile ground for sociolinguistic analysis. It is deemed important to study
videogames with different theoretical approaches in different time periods to provide
1
Unfortunately, the developer company Activision Blizzard (formerly known as Blizzard
Entertainment) stopped updating its public statistics on the actual player count in 2015.
The number of active users given here is based on Activision Blizzard internal estimates.
3
stable points of reference for future research. The questionnaire-related part of the paper
deals with the Social Network Sites (SNS) concept (Ellison and Boyd 2007) in an attempt
to reveal the most prominent communicative channels two games offer to their users.
Moreover, the vast majority of the research in the field of SNS and its relation to
videogames is virtually one-sided (Rossi 2009, Chen et al. 2012, Aburahmah et al. 2016):
usually it is the social videogames existing within SNS that are researched, and not the
elements of SNS that are being implemented within the context of videogames such as
MMOs. The present study is going to address this gap with the help of a custom-made
questionnaire on the use of social functions in World of Warcraft and League of Legends.
The overall goal of this study is to shed more light on the complexity of interactional
practices that are used within the context of MMOs. More specifically, this study focuses
on online interaction patterns in two currently most popular massive multiplayer games,
namely, League of Legends and World of Warcraft. The study aims at examining how the
interactional discourses of World of Warcraft and League of Legends compare with each
other in terms of:
RQ1. What social activities are performed and how their performance is linguistically
and discursively constructed by players in the MMO discourses of the two
games?
RQ2. What means for social interactions do World of Warcraft and League of Legends
offer and how do these means affect the linguistic information exchanged
during such interactions?
To situate the aim and the research questions in a broader context, in the following
section (Chapter 2) I provide an overview of previous research on online videogames,
focusing primarily on linguistic, sociolinguistic, and interactional studies. Chapter 3
details methodological decisions concerning data collection and analysis. In Chapter 4, I
first (section 4.1) discuss survey findings concerning Social Network Sites elements in
LoL and WoW, whereas section 4.2 presents an analysis of linguistic and discursive
features of chat interactions in both games. In the Conclusion, I provide answers to my
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research questions, highlight the most important findings, and discuss recommendations
for future research on the topic.
2. An overview of previous research on online videogames
Online videogames have been explored from various disciplinary and inter-disciplinary
perspectives, including but not limited to the field of education (Thorne and Black, 2007;
Steinkuehler, 2012; Merchant, 2015; Patiniotis, 2018; and others), psychology (Song et
al., 2009; Kaufmann, 2021), art (Rough, 2016; Hepdinçler, 2022), sociology (Swoboda,
2015; Sergeyeva et al., 2018) or communication studies (Wiklund, 2005; Thorne et al.,
2012). Language, communication, and interaction-oriented studies so far investigated
such aspects of videogames as social contextuality, positioning in inter-player
communications, literacy development, and L2 acquisition.
The present study aims at analyzing players’ interactions within the selected two
games, i. e. World of Warcraft and League of Legends, thus it seems reasonable to acquire
a general picture of what MMOs are from a sociolinguistic perspective. One of the
methods of how we can approach MMOs was developed by Steinkuehler and Williams
(2006a). They proved that MMOs have the potential to serve as a so called “third place”
(Oldenburg 1999), where people are open for informal social interactions. Therefore,
MMOs can be considered as a kind of ‘neutral grounds’ for people to communicate with
each other, i. e. they are not being looked over and controlled in what language they can
use and how they can use it. “Third place” is a rather general term which, from the point
of view of this research, includes other notions, namely Computer-Mediated
Communication, interactional practices, discourse strategies, and linguistic
distinctiveness. All of them in one way or another relate to the aim of the present research
and serve as a theoretical foundation for the analytical approach used.
2.1 MMOs and Computer-Mediated Communication
Online videogames can naturally be considered a form of Computer-Mediated
Communication (CMC). In a sense, they can partially replace such services as Facebook
5
or Twitter, as MMOs provide their users with all the same features, such as personal
profile, friend lists, and chats. Different aspects of CMC in MMOs are constantly being
investigated, for example interactional patterns it promotes, its cultural influence, or the
context it creates for communication.
Colombo (2021), for instance, has recently explored the role of servers in shaping
CMC patterns in MMO games. His analysis of Minecraft data revealed diverging
communication patterns across different servers, suggesting that players’ language
choices and their linguistic behavior, in addition to other factors, were also shaped by the
server on which they were playing. Khairunisa (2020) investigated cultural aspects of
online communication in MMOs, showing that the virtual environment of MMOs does
not start to exist there to be absorbed by the players inside the game, when the game is
first launched, but rather it is formed during their play and affected by each person’s
motivation to play and their perception of the said environment. Jones (2004) explored to
what extent the notions of “text” and “context” can be applied to online (CMC)
interactions, concluding that it is counter-productive to view online interactions in
standard linguistic boundaries of ‘text’ and ‘context’. Instead, these notions should be
upgraded with the elements of “social actions and social identities(Jones 2004: 21).
All of these studies suggest that the research on videogames in the context of CMC
should consider not only players’ immediate activities but look at them from a broader
perspective. As MMOs require multiple people to interact with each other, it is necessary
to impose the social layer on whatever is being researched. In this case, the emphasis
should be made on people’s actions and experiences around their ‘main activities’ or
texts.
2.2 Interactions in MMOs
One way to approach the research on videogames as “third places” is to consider their
interactional aspect. Ducheneaut and Moore (2004) examined player-to-player
interactions describing several interactive patterns and analyzing how the game's structure
influences them and found that players interact with each other in two ways: instrumental
and sociable. The first refers to players interdependencies (c.f. one profession supports
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the other, thus there is a need to communicate to progress), and the second resembles
everyday chats in real life that do not pursue anything else but pure communication and
socialization.
Peterson (2012) investigated the linguistic and social interactions of first-time
MMO players that utilize a range of strategies associated with the development of
sociolinguistic competence: the extensive and appropriate use of positive politeness in
the form of greetings, leave-takings, informal language, small talk, and humor, as a means
to build rapport (2012: 377). It is also pointed out that a certain level of anonymity
provided by the chat/text-based nature of conversations and the fact that real people are
hidden behind their avatars contributed to a higher degree of risk-taking while decreasing
overall anxiety from partaking in player interactions. This remark supports the idea of
MMOs being recognized as “third places”.
Several sociolinguistic studies looked at the interaction practices and strategies
among the players of WoW. Rusaw (2011), for example, focused on traditional discourse
practices within the online environment and linguistic medium of the game. The
descriptive analysis of sociolinguistic practices of 10 adult World of Warcraft players,
members of the same guild
2
, demonstrated that language play”, “collaborative running
commentary” and recall of previous comments played an important role in shaping
player’s social roles and building social groups within the game and within players’ guild
(Rusaw 2011: 85-86). Swoboda (2015) examined interaction strategies used by gamers
in WoW, focusing primarily on paralinguistic means, such as, emojis or gestures,
employed in in-game communication. The study demonstrated that linguistic choices of
the players were “influenced by the considerations of the channel, the community, the
context and its conventions” (Swoboda 2015: 163).
In conclusion, there are several interactional patterns observed in MMOs players’
social behavior. In great part, this behavior is formed as a response to the challenges
imposed on the players by the game’s rules, i. e. specific needs/tasks, fast-paced
2
A guild is an in-game association of player characters. Guilds are formed to make
grouping and raiding easier and more rewarding, as well as to form a social atmosphere
in which to enjoy the game (Source: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Guild).
7
gameplay, gamedesign, etc. All of the elements of the game influence the way the players
pose themselves in communication with each other, in the meantime developing the
culture of the community they belong to.
2.3 Linguistic features of MMOs
The complex nature and diversity of interactions, as well as a sheer number of people
playing a game present a challenge to a systematic linguistic analysis of a specific gaming
community. Therefore, most of the studies conducted from a linguistic perspective so far
limited themselves to discourse strategies and language use in specific MMOs. Wright et
al. (2002), for instance, investigated the role of creative language in an online video game
Counter-Strike, revealing that the anonymity provided by the game in players’ names -
every player by default has the nickname “Player” - is frowned upon in the community.
If one wants to appear as an experienced player and not a newbie, they must have a unique
name, which would symbolize and translate a range of different qualities: “ a player's
intent, a player's perceived status, interests, age, gender or sexuality” (Wright et al.,
2002).
Same as in real life, communication in videogames can be categorized as
verbal/textual and nonverbal/graphical. In the first case text and voice chats are used, in
the second - emoticons, such as smiley faces, and gestures, that is, in-game animations
used to represent specific emotions, such as “cry”, “happy”, and other. Dresner and
Herring (2010) investigated emoticons and their functions in CMC. They identified and
showed three ways in which emoticons work in general: “1) as emotion indicators,
mapped directly onto facial expression; 2) as indicators of nonemotional meanings,
mapped conventionally onto facial expressions, and 3) as illocutionary force indicators
that do not map conventionally onto a facial expression” (Dresner and Herring 2010:
251).
Kramer (2013), with the help of a self-compiled corpus of communication in WoW
and Lord of the Rings Online consisting of chat-logs, was able to conclude that politeness,
within the context of MMORPGs, is used not to “be by default polite, as some participants
state, but rather as a strategy of communication to achieve one’s goals” (2013: 52). Due
to several challenges met during gameplay (for example, fast-paced action which requires
8
a lot of attention and concentration, such as guild vs. guild battles) players have to adapt
their language to the circumstances, thus preferring acronyms, smileys, neologisms and
other features over standard lexical and grammatical forms.
Online communication can be synchronous (live chats) as well as asynchronous
(emails), and it does not have to always put people into the ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’
positions. In the context of videogames, players often have to communicate with pre-
written Non-Playable Characters or NPCs for short. These NPCs can be compared to
characters in a book. They serve to speak in author’s stead, and as such are often used to
tell the player any necessary information they need to know. In a way, NPCs, through
their pre-written dialogues, speeches, create a very specific semiotic ecology, which then
translates onto the player. Thorne et al. (2012) looked at WoW with specific attention to
its qualities as a setting for second language (L2) use and development. The lexical and
syntactic complexity of WoW-related texts is shown to be sophisticated, complex, and
with direct and event-driven use-value to players. In essence, these texts are attended to
because they are highly relevant to the actions, decisions, and problem-solving at hand.
To summarize, the player-to-player communication in an MMO context is meant
to replace real life face-to-face conversations. People tend to use verbal (text in the chat)
as well as nonverbal (emoticons and gestures) means of communication to properly
translate their ideas to their communicative partners. They also often neglect standard
grammar rules and orthography in favor of being quick and precise in the fast-paced
context of a game. In some cases, players’ linguistic choices may be affected by the
linguistic context a game creates and directly relate to a specific phenomenon existing
only within the said game.
As this short overview has shown, language, communication and interaction-
oriented research has focused more prominently only on WoW, while interaction practices
among players of LoL so far have been mostly approached from sociological and
psychological perspectives (Carvalho et al., 2018; Reitman, 2018; Ramler et al., 2021,
etc.). Accounting for the differences between these two online games, such as the contexts
for social interactions created by the two games and their designs in particular, this study,
9
on the one hand, provides a comparative perspective on communicative practices utilized
by the members of both communities, and, on the other, contributes to previous research
on LoL, approaching it via sociolinguistic/discourse analytic lenses.
3. Research methodology
3.1 Data collection
Players’ interactional data for this study was elicited via the means of two surveys and
observations. The main purpose of the survey was to elicit data on players’ preferences
in terms of social interaction means (e. g. Social Network Sites elements) offered in WoW
and LoL. More specifically, these data allowed me to address the first part of the RQ2. To
elicit actual interactional data and to answer the remaining RQs, I employed virtual world
ethnography (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Sundén, 2012; Brown, 2015) and engaged in game
observations.
3.1.1. Survey design
The questionnaires for World of Warcraft and League of Legends were designed
following Schleef’s (2014) recommendations for sociolinguistic surveys. The
questionnaires were made as much identical as it was possible. However, due to different
nature of the games some variability was included. For example, the WoW questionnaire
has questions about the ‘mailing’ system implemented in WoW, which does not exist in
LoL. In the same way the questions about the server the respondents play on differ
according to how this system is realized within each of the games.
In total, the questionnaires consisted of 37 (Wow) and 40 (LoL) items and covered
eight themes, primarily based on the components essential for SNS (Ellison and Boyd,
2013):
1. Background information (5 and 4 items accordingly) in terms of the regions the
respondents play from and servers they play on, and players’ relation to bigger
social in-game groups.
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2. The frequency and specificities of client chat (only LoL, 7 items) usage, eliciting
the most actively used chat channels and participants of a typical communicative
act.
3. In-game chat (7 and 9 items). Same as 2.
4. Mail (only WoW, 4 items) system use and its purpose in terms of player-to-player
communication in WoW.
5. Frequency of Profile (7 and 6 items) feature use; opinions on the influence player
profile has over the perception of said player; and attitudes towards the purpose
of having a profile page/tab in a game.
6. Friend list (6 items) feature utilization and opinions on its relation to personal
bonding.
7. Other means of communication (5 items) used by the communities and their
opinions on text- and voice-based communication.
8. Biographic data (2 items). The final section of each questionnaire was made
optional and consists of questions regarding the participant’s gender and age.
The wording for the questions was chosen to be rather simple to appeal to the
communities with the assumption that no one has a linguistic background. Both
questionnaires were piloted with five respondents a week before publication and revised
considering respondents’ feedback, namely some questions were reworded to be more
precise and in line with British English standards. Questionnaire templates are provided
in Appendix 1 (for LoL) and Appendix 2 (for WoW).
The questionnaires for WoW and LoL were created using Google Forms platform.
This platform was chosen primarily for two reasons 1) it provides free access and 2) offers
comprehensive User Interface (UI). It was discovered later that Google Forms also has
convenient automatic data processing tools, i. e. it makes it possible to look at individual
respondent’s answers one at a time, see detailed information on a specific question, and
it automatically visualizes the results for each question using appropriate types of
diagrams, charts, graphs, etc. In addition, Google Forms also has an option to export all
the results to a spreadsheet, which allows for more detailed analysis.
The games’ subreddits on reddit.com were chosen as the main platform for the
distribution of the questionnaires due to their popularity among the communities: r/wow
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(at the time of writing this paper) holds 2.165.851 members with 2.000 online on average,
while r/leagueoflegends counts 5.616.957 members with 10.000 people online on
average. The questionnaires were open online for 2 months (from 18th November, 2021,
until 18th January, 2022) and updated or reposted according to the rules of the
communities, which often stated once every 3-4 weeks.
3.1.2 Observations
Observations were employed in order to collect data on player’s actual communicative
practices in the analyzed games (World of Warcraft and League of Legends). For that
purpose, I decided to engage myself with the communities by taking part in the collective
activity of playing the games and taking the role of an observer (i. e. I did not initiate
communicative acts between the players). To collect the data, I used a free open-source
program ‘Greenshot’, which enables to make screenshots with an option of choosing a
specific region of a screen (in this case - the chat window). However, the decision to
collect the data from within the games was soon proved to be not as fruitful as it was
expected to be.
As I have found out, the chance of seeing people chatting in one match in LoL,
which can take up from 25 to 40 or even more minutes to end, grows proportionally to
the time it takes to complete the said match. However, it does not guarantee that people
will actually chat. The ‘problem’ here is that the game utilizes the system of ‘signals’,
where by a couple of simple movements one can signal an important piece of information
without wasting time to move their hands over their keyboard. In case of LoL, being away
from the mouse means to put oneself in a disadvantage if they suddenly need to react
quickly, for example for an enemy ambush. Such signals include “Enemy has vision
here”, “Back down” (or “Retreat”), “I am coming here”, “Need help”, etc. Of course, this
system does not eliminate chatting entirely, instead it provides an alternative, which gives
just enough possibilities to communicate without using words. In a sense it can be seen
as an example of nonverbal communication.
To increase my chances of collecting any data I decided to remove myself from
the game’s environment. I moved over to YouTube. The possibility to fast-forward,
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pause, rewind, and the ability to watch in double speed allowed me to navigate through
the content present there comfortably and sort it quickly. I have found a couple of LoL
dedicated channels and watched through their daily uploads for the rest of the time
dedicated to data gathering in the game, which is one month for each game. The channels
chosen were picked as the first results from YouTube search for ‘League of Legends’. In
total, I observed 6 channels and 27 daily uploads made in the time between 29th of
November and 19th of December, 2021. During the observation period I was taking
screenshots of the chat windows whenever players tried to start or engage in a
conversation with others, totaling 234 screenshots with 708 lines of player-written texts
ranging from a couple to a dozen words per line (see Table 1).
In comparison to League of Legends, World of Warcraft proved to be yet another
challenge for data collection. In terms of game design, WoW has a giant open world,
which means players can actually go from one end of it to another freely. This world
(Azeroth) is divided into different sections/locales/areas, and each area has its own chat
channel visible and used by only those players who currently are in the same area. Despite
this, the game offers a ‘global’ chat channel for people all over Azeroth to communicate.
However, it is not all. Each in-game activity that requires different multiple people to co-
interact offers a new separate chat channel, e. g. ‘raid’ or ‘dungeon’. In the same manner
the ‘private’ channel is inaccessible to any but one player for obvious reasons. The game
also allows players to create their own ‘custom’ channels in case the offered ones do not
provide them with needed functionality. In total, there are 9 standard chat channels to
look for (excluding ‘custom’ ones). My survey results revealed that the majority of the
WoW players interact most actively in the so called “group/party”, “guild”, and “raid”
channels. Therefore, I decided to focus specifically on these channels to collect
interactional data from WoW. The data for WoW was collected on Twitch (rather than
YouTube). This decision was motivated by the fact that it is much simpler to find full
stream recordings on Twitch, due to its specialization, while YouTube promotes abridged
or montaged or edited content. To collect the data, I followed similar procedure as with
LoL: I identified the most popular channels at the time and observed interactions in the
game-recordings published on those channels from 3rd until 16th of January, 2022. In total,
I observed 3 channels and 3 game recordings (totaling to 22 hours of play) and made 259
13
screenshots with 967 lines of player-written texts ranging from a couple to a dozen words
per line (Table 1).
Table 1. Overview of empirical data sets analyzed
LoL
WoW
Total N
Screenshots
234
259
493
Interactions3
738
1051
1789
Lines of text
708
967
1675
Words (tokens)
3192
3823
7015
3.2 Data processing and analytical approach
Survey data was processed in MS Excel and analyzed using descriptive statistical
analysis. Observational data consisted of screenshots containing player chat interactions.
I first organized the screenshots of interactions into different categories according to the
source material.
The analysis of interactional data proceeded in two steps. Chat utterances were
first analyzed using analytical categories presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Cooperative/Competitive division
The main aim of this analytical step was to determine the functional load of an
utterance. Taking into account the very nature of analyzed games that build upon a high
3
Any kind of inter-player activity that includes textual exchange of information, e. g. chat
messages.
Friends
Enemies
Cooperative
Cooperative-competitive
Competitive-cooperative
Competitive
14
degree of competition vis-à-vis cooperation between the players, I analyzed all utterances
accounting for two factors: the addressee of the message (friends vs enemies) and the
stance of the author regarding the situation or event that motivated them to write the
message in the first place, i. e. the context (positive vs negative). As a result, all analyzed
utterances were classified under any of the four variants of cooperative/competitive
utterance types:
1) Cooperative type. This type includes players developing game strategies to outplay the
enemy team, giving in-game related advice, contributing to the general knowledge of the
enemy’s positions, praising each other’s skills, etc. In other words, anything that
helps/praises/benefits the team.
2) Competitive type. This type includes profanities addressed to the enemy team members
usually on the basis of their low skill level (for example, on a particular champion), or
generally bad play and bad decisions during the game, etc. It does not exclude simple
expressions of anger directed at objectively good players from the enemy team.
3) Competitive-cooperative type. An example for this is when one’s team member starts
to talk negatively about their teammates, for example about their bad play, having too
many deaths, not helping the team in critical moments, etc. This can be followed with
that player going afk (away from keyboard) till the end of the match or event, which puts
the team in relative disadvantage (9 vs. 10 players in LoL). In this type, a player(-s) places
their own skills/knowledge of the game over someone else’s from their team, as if they
compete not with the enemy team but with their own. In LoL the messages of this type
may be posted not in the “team” channel (where only the members of one’s team can see
them) but in “/all” channel (where the enemy team can see them). This can have a strategic
meaning as to create a demoralizing effect, however, it may not work as expected.
4) Cooperative-competitive type. An example for this type would be when one’s team
members talk with the enemy team members with positive intentions in mind, e. g.
praising enemy player’s skills at playing a certain champion or class, giving advice on
how to play in certain situations, generally being polite with the enemy team, etc.
Essentially, it is the Cooperative type but addressed to one’s foes.
15
It is important to note that people may not always express their stance when
talking to others. They can remain completely neutral. Such expressions are usually just
‘expressions’ (a simple single utterance or sentence that does not lead to a discussion and
which can be characterized as “thinking out loud”). They may not be even related to the
game or immediate situation during a match. They are not numerous, though they do exist
(2% in LoL and 5% in WoW). The present paper does not consider them being a part of a
discourse as they neither lead to any communication nor are a part of any communicative
act. On the other hand, they can be regarded to as the so-called “ice-breakers”, but which
failed in breaking the ice.
These ‘neutral’ expressions can be regarded to as addressed to one’s team or an
enemy’s team by the chat channel they were posted in, but they lack a clear stance
indication in relation to the game. In addition, they usually are not followed by any
discussion or even a single reply from a team member. Context may also be important
when deciding if a message falls under ‘neutral’ label. For example, a message can be
indirectly addressed to a concrete player in one’s team and the aim of the message is to
perform a specific action which can benefit the whole team. Therefore, it does not create
a discussion, but by the way it is contextualized we can define it as being an utterance of
the first type - Cooperative.
To analyze interactional discourse, I adopted Gee's (2014) discourse analytic
approach, which foregrounds the political and societal implications of ways of speaking.
Gee (2014) distinguishes seven ‘areas of reality’ that are formed by language, namely,
(2014: 32): 1) significance, 2) activities, 3) identities, 4) relationships, 5) politics, 6)
connections, and 7) sign systems and knowledge. According to Gee (2014), “… people
enact identities and activities not just through language, but also by using language
together with other "stuff" that isn't language”. In this thesis, following Gee (2014), I
differentiate between discourse and Discourse. I use the former to refer to “language in
use” and the latter to refer to “kinds of people” or language in context. I employ Gee’s
‘areas of reality’ as heuristic tools to investigate interactions in WoW and LoL. In addition,
the notion of discourse covers all those aspects of communication which involve not only
a message or text but also the addresser and addressee, and their immediate context of
situation, which Leech & Short (1981) note as its ‘interpersonal’ or ‘transactional’ nature.
16
Example utterances from LoL and WoW were analyzed according to Gee’s
discourse/Discourse analysis toolkit (2014). The analysis was comprised of using Gee’s
tools which represent 27 leading questions directed at revealing specific aspects of
communication present in a discourse/Discourse. The order of tools used differs for each
example, which is justified by Gee’s recommendation “to choose an order that works for
the data and the researcher” (2014: 187). During the analysis I tried to answer all of the
questions proposed, however I mostly focused on the Fill In Tool, the Frame Problem
Tool, the Doing and Not Just Saying Tool, the Why This Way and Not That Way Tool,
and some other tools.
4. Online videogames as places for socialization
4.1 Social Network Sites elements in MMOs
The main aim of the survey was to elicit particular player habits revolving around six
instruments of socialization: client chat (only League of Legends), in-game chat, mail
(only World of Warcraft), profile, friend list, and other means of communication. In total
the questionnaires for WoW and LoL were completed by 68 and 115 respondents
accordingly. The regional distribution of respondents is presented in Figure 1. An
overwhelming majority (97.1 percent for WoW and 91.3 percent for LoL) of the
respondents indicated that their region of play and actual living place match.
World of Warcraft
League of Legends
Figure 1. Respondents’ distribution according to the region of play (in %)
17
The main regions where the respondents play from, which may differ from the
region they currently live in, are North America and Europe. Only a handful (2.9% for
WoW and 8.7% for LoL) of each community’s respondents indicated that they chose to
play in a region different to the one they live in. The preference to play in the region
respondents actually do not live in was commonly explained by the presence of friends
(60% and 100% of the respondents, in LoL and WoW accordingly, who indicated they
play in a different region chose the option “I have friends there”). This simple fact could
mean that the already established social bonds between players are valued more than
one’s comfort during play. Playing in a different region means adapting to a new time
zone to play with friends, having to bear with the increased latency, which can have a
drastic impact on one’s performance in the game, and introducing oneself to a new
community.
The first important difference in social aspect of two communities is that more
than a half (54.4%) of the respondents from WoW indicated they tend to play in large
groups (guilds) or “communities within community” while only 21.7% of LoL
respondents prefer and are engaged in local groups they play with (set teams of five). In
case of LoL, the majority of players prefer playing solo.
4.1.1 Means for social interactions in World of Warcraft
WoW provides their users with four main in-game ways for players to socially interact
with each other, namely chat, mail, profile pages, and friend lists. Figure 2 shows that all
of these features are being used by the majority of players, and only a small number of
people indicated they have never examined them. However, we should consider the
frequency of use for the said features: in-game chat is regularly (‘frequently’ and ‘very
frequently’ answers) used by 58.6% of the respondents, mail by 45.6%, profile - by
43.4%, friend list - by 57.4%.
18
Figure 2. Number of respondents utilizing designated game features in WoW (in %)
The chat in WoW is separated into different channels (see Section 3.1). One of the
reasons for this is the division of the in-game world, Azeroth, into different
sections/locales/areas, where each area has its own chat channel visible and used by only
those players who currently are in the same area. In addition, there is a ‘global’ chat
channel for people all over Azeroth to communicate. Moreover, each in-game activity
that requires different people to co-interact offers a new separate chat channel, for
instance ‘raid’ or ‘dungeon’. In the same manner the ‘private’ channel is inaccessible to
any but one player. The game also allows to create ‘custom’ channels in case the offered
ones do not provide needed functionality. In total, there are 9 standard chat channels
(excluding ‘custom’ ones) in WoW. Survey results revealed that the majority of the WoW
players interact most actively in the so called “group/party”, “guild”, and “raid” channels
(cf. Figure 3). Overall, the popularity of channels is as follows (in the declining order):
group/party, guild, raid, private, local, global, lfg, trade, custom, and local defense. As
we can see, there are basically two types of channels present:
2,9
17,6
7,4
14,7
97,1
82,4
92,6
85,3
010 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Friend list
Profile
Mail
In-game chat
Use (total) Do not use
19
1. the ones that serve for more or less intimate communication where both or all
parties are known to each other (group/party, guild, raid, private), which
coincidently are the most popular among the players;
2. and the ones that are specialized on inter-player communication where one of the
agents of communication can be regarded to as a ‘stranger’ (the least popular).
Some may argue that the ‘raid’ chat channel should be categorized as the second
type. However, there is a justification for such distribution. The ‘raid’ channel relates to
the in-game activities bearing the same name. If one wishes to participate in any of them,
it is necessary to find a group who would play with you. In that regard the ‘Looking for
Group’ or ‘LFG’ chat channel may be the solution.
Figure 3. Number of people actively using designated chat channels in WoW (in %)
As survey results suggest (cf. Figure 3) not a lot of people use ‘LFG’ channel,
though many still use the ‘Group/party’ one. A possible explanation for this phenomenon
lies in the ‘Guild’ chat channel. Guilds in WoW are formed to make grouping and raiding
easier and more rewarding, as well as to form a social atmosphere in which to enjoy the
5,2
1,7
46,6
8,6
44,8
12,1
72,4
32,8
12,1
20,7
010 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Custom
Local defense
Guild
Trade
Raid
LFG
Group/party
Private
Global
Local
20
game. Therefore, it is logical to assume that players first talk to their guildmates to look
for possible partners for a dungeon or raid and then switch to the ‘Group/party’ channel
to keep the main ‘Guild’ channel clear of their immediate affairs. Thus, avoiding using
the ‘LFG’ channel at all. That means the participants of a typical raid party or group are
often known to each other even before the said party is formed.
The mailing service in WoW can be compared to emailing in real life. There are
two main ways to use it: one can either send a textual information, a message, that will
not be deleted over time in the chat, or some in-game objects (or both at the same time).
It is noteworthy that this sort of a ‘time-gated’ communication, when one can send a
message and wait for the response for more than a couple of seconds, is used only by
11.1% of the respondents. The rest (88.9%) use mailing only as a ‘delivery’ service for
in-game items.
Profile in WoW is used to indicate one’s character statistics, parameters,
equipment, achievements, and other kinds of numerical data, which is mainly used to
compare players between each other. On average (‘frequently’ and ‘very frequently’
answers) players tend to use profile pages to track their own progress (50%) rather than
to look at someone else’s characters (36.7%). As to why people use this feature, some
respondents indicated in a free-form answer that they are used to look at their friends’
profiles to decide on a gift their friends do not own yet. Some pointed out the
imperfections of the system and promoted the use of 3rd party websites that specialize on
systematizing this type of data (raider.io, check-pvp.fr, warcraftlogs.com).
Friend lists are essential for building long term relationships. The ways they are
implemented in any system are virtually the same: one can add or remove people to/from
the list, is able to directly communicate with anyone on the said list and see their status
(online/offline or in some cases where they are). World of Warcraft is not an exception to
the rule. People who met in WoW tend to move their relationship outside of the game
online as indicated by 81.8% of the respondents, and in person (60.6%). However, only
62.2% of the respondents on average continue to interact with their friends outside of
WoW.
21
One last important thing about WoW is what people use additionally to
communicate with each other and consequently what the game lacks in terms of
communicative features. As indicated by the majority (89.7%) of the respondents they do
use other ways to talk with other players: some indicated they use social networks
(Facebook, Instagram, etc.), some use messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.), and
literally all of them make use of dedicated software (Discord, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc.).
The two main reasons for this are that these services provide their users with better
chatting options and the possibility to verbally communicate with others. On average
(49.2%), people preferred voice-based communication during play over the text-based
one (22.9%). However, these numbers should not be regarded as indisputable. In both
cases, 32.8% of the players had difficulty in deciding what they prefer more. It was noted
by one of the users on reddit.com that this choice is mostly situational and depends on a
number of factors, such as gameplay (slow-/fast-paced), their mood, who are the
communicative partners, etc.
As it can be seen World of Warcraft gives their players considerable level of
freedom as to how they can socialize in the game. However, not all the systems are
perfect, and some players opt for 3rd party options. The majority of players are used to
fast-paced communication of online chats and prefer to ‘limit’ this communication to
already established social relations (large guilds and smaller groups). Finally, one of the
limitations of the game that forces its players to use other means for communication
between each other is the absence of voice-based communicative options.
4.1.2 Means for social interactions in League of Legends
LoL, in the same manner as WoW, has four unique ways for its players to socialize. These
are game client chat, in-game chat, personal profiles, and friend lists. Figure 4 indicates
that the majority of respondents make use of the aforementioned features and only some
of players have never touched them. In terms of the frequency of use, game client chat is
regularly (‘frequently’ and ‘very frequently’ answers) used by 22.9% of the respondents,
in-game chat - by 53.9%, profile - by 34.4%, and friend list - by 53.1%.
22
Figure 4. Number of respondents utilizing designated game features in LoL (in %)
League of Legends as a game can be considered to consist of two elements: game
client and the game itself. In the client, one can search for matches, browse the game’s
shop, chat with other players, follow game’s news, and examine (any-)one’s profile. The
‘game’ part is dedicated solely to playing matches as a member of one of the two teams
formed beforehand in the client. The chat present in the client and the chat used in-game
are two separate features with different aims and functionality.
Game client chat offers functionality similar to the in-game chat in WoW. It is
used to talk with everyone currently online (‘public’), with certain individuals (‘private’),
with members of one’s team (‘group’), and with members of one’s club (cf. Figure 5).
Also, the client chat offers a function to create one’s own channel if the standard ones are
deemed insufficient. As indicated by the frequency of use, the client chat is the least used
option for social interaction in the game. One of the reasons for that is the competitive
nature, and the very design of the game. They promote individuality, which translates into
players’ social behavior within the game. In support of this idea, 78.3% of the respondents
indicated they do not belong to any group within the game and, thus, prefer playing alone.
5,2
8,7
20,9
39,1
94,8
91,3
79,1
60,9
010 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Friend list
Profile
In-game chat
Game client chat
Use (total) Do not use
23
Figure 5. Number of people actively using designated chat channels in LoL (in %)
In-game chat is dedicated solely to the communication between 10 players placed
in two teams of five. Both teams have their own separate team-only channels and a shared
/all channel. More than a half (53.9%) of the respondents prefer to talk with their own
team and only a quarter (26.4%) would engage in conversations with the enemy team.
Often such interactions would include obscene language (74.8%) targeted at the members
of the enemy team (41.8%) as well as one’s own team (80.3%).
The profile feature in LoL is basically the same as in WoW, with the only
difference being different sets of information present to the viewers. On average
(‘frequently’ and ‘very frequently’ answers) players tend to use profile pages to track
their own progress (47%) rather than to look at someone else’s profiles (21.8%). There
are varying reasons as to why people use profiles in LoL, some of them include showing
off, strategical scouting of the enemy team members, and “expression of
personality/preferred aesthetics. Some mentioned the disadvantages this system has in
comparison to the 3rd party websites that specialize on systematizing this type of data, as
illustrated in (1):
4,3
4,3
18,6
75,7
24,3
010 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Custom
Club
Group
Private
Public
24
(1) There are all sorts of third-party tools, most notably op.gg, that offer more information
than the game profile. Clearly the game profile could take cues from third-party tools to
make the information it display[s] be more useful.
- R1, LoL survey
Friend lists in LoL offer the same functionality as any other friend lists. In terms
of the length the relationships formed in LoL have, people who met in the game tend to
move their relationship outside of the game online as indicated by 79.8% of the
respondents, and in person (60.6%). However, only 51.4% of the respondents on average
continue to interact with their friends outside of LoL.
The fast-paced nature of the game sometimes requires its player for ‘immediate’
communication which is clearly not achievable through text-based interaction. That is
why the developers implemented the system of ‘signals’ (see Section 3.1), where by a
couple of simple movements a player can signal an important piece of information
without wasting time to move their hands over their keyboard. However, in some cases
even that would be insufficient. Therefore, people turn to other ways to communicate
with other. 89.6% of the respondents indicated they do use other ways to communicate
with other players: some indicated they use social networks (Facebook, Instagram, etc.),
some use messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.), and almost everyone (99%) uses
dedicated software (Discord, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc.). On average (73.8%), people
preferred voice-based communication during play over the text-based one (14.6%).
To sum up, League of Legends does enough for its players to feel comfortable
during play. They do not have to feel anxious for talking with strangers because they can
use ‘silent’ signals. The game, in essence, does not force its users to interact with each
other more than is needed to achieve a common goal. On the other hand, people who
come into LoL with an already established social group will not be able to find proper
means to communicate with each other and will have to go for 3rd party services.
In conclusion, both games offer almost identical possibilities for social
interactions and lack in the same aspects. The only major difference between the reviewed
features lies in their quality, which in turn is directly related to the games themselves.
World of Warcraft is a grand-scale open world MMORPG which gives a lot of ways for
25
the players to interact with each other, thus it has to provide an equal number of ways for
the players to communicate with each other (chat channels). League of Legends is a fast-
paced MOBA which concentrates on one activity exclusively, thus it does not need to
offer a lot, though it tries to appeal to a greater audience by some of its Quality of Life
implementations (the ‘signal’ system). The communities of both WoW (49.2%) and LoL
(73.8%) with different intensity vote for the necessity of the voice-based communication
in both games. The difference in these numbers can again be explained by the nature of
both titles, with League of Legends being a highly competitive game and World of
Warcraft, on the other hand - a cooperative game with some elements of competitive play.
4.2 Linguistic and discursive features of chat interactions in LoL and WoW
The main aim of this section is to discuss in more detail how players linguistically and
discursively construct their social interactions in the virtual worlds of LoL and WoW.
First, I discuss chat interactions in terms of their structural, linguistic, and functional
features. To illustrate social activities performed in MMO discourses, in the sub-section
4.2.3 I present a micro-level analysis of two selected interaction excerpts following Gee’s
discourse analysis toolkit.
4.2.1 Structural features and linguistic means of chat interactions
Structural features (LoL). Both analyzed games employ game chat function.
Nevertheless, despite some structural similarities in terms of how messages are conveyed
and their linguistic content, the games differ in visual representation of these messages
and possibilities for communication between multiple players. To illustrate this, I first
discuss structural and linguistic features of interactions in LoL, and then highlight the
most prominent features of interactions in WoW.
Figure 6 provides an excerpt of chat discussion between five players from one
team and occasional interjections from an enemy team member in LoL. It can be noticed
that the message log in LoL is structured very clearly: first comes the time stamp
indicating when the message appeared during the match, then comes the (nick-)name of
26
the player, on the 3rd place in round brackets is the name of the character or champion
they are playing as, and finally the text of the message itself. In some messages one can
see “[All]” before the name of the player. It is an indication that the messages were sent
to the /all chat channel and are visible to both teams.
Figure 6. Excerpt of inter-player chat interactions in LoL
27
Hybrid writing in LoL. As can be seen from Figure 6, some messages may appear
to be divided randomly in different parts (lines 1-2, 6-7, 8-9, 23-24, 26, 28, 30), some
lack in grammar, and some contain words or expressions used in game-specific meanings,
such as “jungle(-er)” or “gank(-ing)”. Turkle (1995) noted, that the specialized linguistic
practices used by gamers in MMOs appear to non-gamers as the “discourse of Dante
scholars, ‘a closed world of references, cross-references, and code’” (1995: 67).
Steinkuehler has labelled such linguistic practices as “hybrid writing” (2006b: 42). This
type of writing consists of (a) abbreviations, e.g., Wtf for what the f*ck’ (line 27), lol for
laughing out loud’ (line 29), afk for away from keyboard’ (line 21), or wym for what
do you mean(line 14), (b) truncations, e.g., lvl for level (line 19, 22) or mins for
minutes (line 20), (c) typographical errors, e.g., tops for ‘top’s’ (line 13) or theres for
‘there’s’ (line 4), (d) syntactic erosions, e.g., the omitted referential he from [he] wont
jungle’ (line 28), [he] wont communicate’ (line 30), and (e) specialized vocabulary, e.g.,
jungler (line 4) - a specific role to play in a team which concentrates on jungle - parts of
the game map structured as mini labyrinths between three main lanes: top, mid, and bot.
Table 3. Frequency of hybrid writing elements in LoL chat communications
Hybrid writing element
Total N occurrences
Relative Frequency
a) abbreviations
110
3 %
b) truncations
38
1 %
c) typographical errors
246
7 %
d) syntactic erosions
172
5 %
e) specialized vocabulary
532
16 %
Total N of words
3192
Table 3 summarizes the distribution and frequency of different features related to
hybrid writing in the entire LoL chat interaction corpus. Table 3 shows that the specialized
vocabulary prevails in the whole LoL dataset (every sixth word or 16% of every word
analyzed). The typographical errors type includes incorrect spelling, and such a high
number of these instances (7% of total or roughly every 13th word) can be explained by a
rapid nature of the game process. Every player in LoL needs to be concentrated on the
28
match they are part of, and even a single moment of distraction can be destructive to the
overall score. That is why the players do not have time to check what they wrote or retype
their message anew. The syntactic erosions type mostly includes absence of direct
references, e. g. to particular players, (subjects) and verbs (predicates). It is mostly caused
by the fact, that communication usually happens between separate players and not the
whole team. At the beginning they refer to each other directly, however after the initial
addressing, probably to save time typing a message, they omit the subject as the addressee
being the only communicative partner at the moment understands the reference. In the
case of the whole team communicating, or simply with more than 2 communicative
partners, the related subjects persist. The omission of predicates is often justified by the
context or structure of a message. For example, in the message “Jinx to the top” it is
implied that the player playing as Jinx should [go] to the top (lane). Abbreviations and
truncations are the least used elements of hybrid writing in LoL. They mostly deal with
gaming lexis in general, e. g. afk ‘away from keyboard’ or brb ‘be right back’, or lexis
developed in modern online communications, e. g. wym ‘what do you mean’ or wtf ‘what
the f*ck’. In some cases, both abbreviations and truncations are used in regard to the
specialized vocabulary, i. e. LoL’s terminology. For example, one will often find such
words as ADC, APC, CS, CC, or DoT, etc. These are all abbreviation examples that refer
to specific in-game mechanics (e. g. Creep Score or Crowd Control, etc.). Truncations
usually refer to the lexis specific to the game, i. e. names of items, champions, objectives,
etc.
Structural features (WoW). Figure 7 below illustrates the structure of chat
interactions in WoW. The first major difference between the two games is their chat
windows. Where LoL offers a strict division on team and /all channels only, WoW
provides its players with option to easily switch between the multitude of chat channels
(10 at any given time) on the fly by clicking at the respective tab at the top of the chat
window. Thus, even though WoW players are not limited in the number of people they
can simultaneously interact with they are restricted in the number of abstract ‘rooms’ they
can simultaneously be part of. This fact allows WoW players for more freedom to
communicate with strangers playing the game along with them in comparison to LoL
players who are limited to 10 (mostly random) people in a single match. In addition, the
29
color coding of messages is more developed in WoW: in LoL only the names of the
senders are color coded to indicate members of different teams (blue - friend, red -
enemy); in WoW whole messages are colored according to the chat channel they are sent
in. Whole message coloring helps when a player chooses to see messages coming from
different channels simultaneously as seen in some examples on Figure 7.
Figure 7. Different instances of inter-player chat interactions in WoW
30
The structure of a message in a way resembles that of LoL messages. If it is not a
message sent privately, first comes the channel name in square brackets, followed by the
name of the character, i. e. the player, then in some cases comes the action performed, for
instance “says” or “whispers”, and finally the text of the message. If the message is sent
to a specific player and is not meant for the eyes of the others, in the chat log it begins
with a “To”.
Hybrid writing in WoW. As can be seen in Figure 7, features of hybrid writing
(Steinkuehler 2006b: 42) are also present in chat interactions of WoW. There are instances
of (a) abbreviations, e.g., gd for good duel (line 10, 11) or gl for good luck’ (line 19),
(b) truncations, e.g., critt for critical (line 6) or ppls for people (line 3), (c)
typographical errors, e.g,, critt for crit (line 6) or thr ,ob for the mob(line 25), (d)
syntactic erosions, e.g., the omitted predicate go in ‘don’t [go] 10 mid at start(line 17),
and (e) specialized vocabulary, e.g., antonio perelli (line 20) refers to a particular NPC
vendor whose merchandise differs according to his current location.
Table 4. Frequency of hybrid writing elements in WoW chat communications
Hybrid writing element
Total N occurrences
Relative Frequency
a) abbreviations
257
6 %
b) truncations
110
2 %
c) typographical errors
177
4 %
d) syntactic erosions
187
4 %
e) specialized vocabulary
591
15 %
Total N of words
3823
Table 4 summarizes the distribution and frequency of different features related to
hybrid writing in the entire WoW chat interaction corpus. Table 4 reveals that the
specialized vocabulary element of hybrid writing prevails in the whole WoW dataset
(roughly every sixth word or 15% of every word analyzed), same as in LoL. Abbreviations
as the second most used element of hybrid writing are popular among the players of WoW
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for their conciseness. WoW is a much bigger game than LoL both in size and mechanics
it has. Many places, items, or NPCs/creatures, etc. in Azeroth have names consisting of
two and more words according to the game’s fantasy setting. It is much less time
consuming to type “DM W” than “Dire Maul West” or “1H” for “One-handed weapon”
for example, even if it means losing some cohesiveness for unexperienced players such
as myself.
The syntactic erosions element mostly includes absence of direct references, e. g.
to particular players, (subjects) and verbs (predicates). In team-based in-game activities,
e. g. raids, it is common to address one’s whole team when issuing orders, and as raids
require a lot of concentration from the players, it may be disadvantageous to spend time
writing messages in the chat. In that case, team leaders rely on the context to be
understood. For example, a message consisting only of the name of a specific objective
on the game map implies that the team should concentrate its attention on that specific
objective at that specific period of time. The necessity to perform the task can be
exaggerated even more if the message was written in uppercase. The omission of
predicates is less common and generally follows the same principle as in LoL.
The typographical errors element includes incorrect spelling, and its frequency
(4% of total or roughly every 22nd word) can be explained by different contexts the game
offers for communication. In case of people participating in raid activities the chance of
finding a typographical error in someone’s message is much higher than in a message of
someone who simply logged in to chat with their guildmates for example. Truncations is
the least used element of hybrid writing in WoW. They mostly refer to the lexis used by
the game, i. e. names of items, classes, objectives, etc.
In conclusion, both LoL and WoW chat interactions are full of examples of hybrid
writing. In both games specialized vocabulary dominates the linguistic content of the
messages posted in chats, which may be explained by the ideational content of the said
messages that in most cases directly refers to in-game systems, features, events, objects,
etc. Roughly every third or fourth message in a chat in both games will include an element
of hybrid writing. The players who wrote these messages clearly did not abide the
standard grammar rules of the language they used, i. e. English, though somehow the acts
of communications found can be considered complete. Both the senders and the receivers
32
of the messages fully understand each other in the context of each game, which is proved
by the fact that the ‘answer’ messages do not pause related conversations with requests
to ‘senders’ to explain themselves. However, if we had to put a LoL player together with
a WoW player in one chat in the context of LoL or WoW, they most certainly will have
troubles in understanding each other due to the high degree of specialized vocabulary
used in common chat interactions in each game.
Utterance types and their distribution. Figure 8 below shows the distribution of
found utterances from both LoL and WoW by their types: cooperative, competitive,
cooperative-competitive, competitive-cooperative, and neutral (see Section 3.2). Out of
738 utterances in LoL the utterances of cooperative type combined (cooperative and
cooperative-competitive) take up to 74% of the utterances total with 24% being of the
competitive type combined (competitive and competitive-cooperative). In WoW 92%
from the total of 1051 utterances are of cooperative type combined and 3% were found
to be competitive in nature.
Figure 8. Distribution of utterances according to their type (in %)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Cooperative Competitive Compet-Coop Coop-Compet Neutral
League of Legends World of Warcraft
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In conclusion, the Cooperative type of utterances was found to be dominant both
in LoL (55%) and WoW (90%). This result mostly aligns with what the genre of MMO
implies, i. e. cooperation between strangers online. Though, as it was mentioned earlier,
League of Legends was designed to be competitive, that is why the utterances of
Competitive types are more widespread than those in World of Warcraft, which surpasses
LoL in Cooperative type utterances in relation to the Competitive ones (see Figure 8).
4.2.2 Micro-level discourse analysis of chat interactions in LoL and WoW
The present section is dedicated to discourse/big-D discourse analyses of example
interactions from LoL and WoW. In order to illustrate what social activities are performed
and how it is done in the discourses of both games I will rely on a micro-level analysis of
two selected interaction excerpts from both games. The selection of these two excerpts
was determined by richness of the information conceived in their respective
communicative acts and their typicality in the contexts of each game. The results of the
analysis are then used to compare both discourses additionally answering RQ1.
The downfall of Mordekaiser
The interaction I analyze here occurred on December 10th, 2021 in the chat of one of the
observed matches in LoL. This particular match was not a ranked one, i. e. it did not affect
players’ statistics in the end and in general is accounted to as a safe way to play the game
for fun without stressing over the “competitive” part of it too much. For general context
of this interaction: Mordekaiser was signaling Lee Sin to help him score an easy kill (i. e.
point for the team), however Lee Sin did not come, thus the chance was lost. The
following analysis is structured around Gee’s tools as indicated in the italics.
34
Figure 9. LoL interaction extract
4
Significance building. Every person manifests their social identity or, from the
linguistic point of view, their social discourse through what they say and how they say it.
In some cases, this identity is used to show the owner of it in a position of power or
4
To make the referencing and addressing easier during the analysis I refer to the players who
wrote specific messages/lines as the champions they were playing as, e. g. if I refer to
Mordekaiser, I refer to the player nicknamed LeifrQcOu, in the same manner Lee Sin is the player
Chînã.
35
authority. In the analyzed extract, lines 63-66 suggest that Mordekaiser presents himself
as an experienced player, who accuses a team member of being too “emotional” over their
skill at the game. The wording of lines 63-64 suggests it is an answer to a previously
asked question, it specifically begins with “old enough”. However, what follows does not
relate to the age of the player per se, instead Mordekaiser uses a specific quality, “to know
better than stress out over a bad player”, to characterize his experience in multiplayer
games. The same quality is used here to differentiate Mordekaiser from the rest of the
team or at least those who were talking with him at the moment in the chat implying they
were the ones who were stressing out. Moreover, the “bad player like this lee sin” shows
us Mordekaiser has a clear idea of how the champion Lee Sin should be played and that
the current Lee Sin did not meet his expectations, what actually was the reason for the
whole story. Simply by this single message we see that Mordekaiser puts himself not only
above one player (Lee Sin) but his whole team or, again, those who were talking with him
in the chat at the moment.
Doing and not just saying. The lines 65-66 attempt to downplay what was said
previously. Mordekaiser tries to calm down his communicative partners, suggesting there
was a heated discussion on the topic, and addresses them with a friendlier informal
“guys”, as well as making this sentence the theme of his whole second message by writing
it first, i. e. emphasizing it. Then follows his reasoning for what Lee Sin’s actions led to.
Mordekaiser states they have already lost that game on 9:48 timestamp (for reference,
this match ended after 46 mins). However, Mordekaiser does not refer to anything
directly. For now, we can only guess what is meant by “emotional” in line 66, whether it
was an in-game action which put the team in a clear disadvantageous position or maybe
it had something to do with what Lee Sin said in the chat. The important point is that in
this competitive game a player was accused of showing his emotions. That, in fact, tells
us more about how we should perceive Mordekaiser’s identity and his figured world of
LoL. Additionally, the way he uses deictics, such as “jungler” (line 66), in his message
actually tells us precisely what Lee Sin did or rather did not succeed in doing from
Mordekaiser’s point of view. In the lines 65-66 Mordekaiser refers to Lee Sin as
“jungler”, not the player but his role, supposedly to not repeat himself. However, in the
36
same message he places the role in one row with another player - Darius (a top laner, the
direct opponent of Mordekaiser).
Fill in. In League of Legends there is a clear distinction between more than 140
champions available to play based on their supposed role, which in turn is based on a
character’s stats and skills. In total, there are five roles to fill: top laner / bruiser, jungler
/ assassin, mid laner / mage, bot laner / marksman, and support / healer or tank. They are
named after the region of the map they occupy at the start of the game (except the support
who helps the current bot laner). The map is symmetrical, but the jungles are mirrored,
so both teams have the same regions to play in. The role of a jungler is to hide in his
team’s jungle or infiltrate the enemy team’s one and occasionally ambush one of the main
three lanes. In the jungle there are neutral monsters and monster camps to gain experience
and currency from. Despite the jungler role being almost self-sustainable, the main
purpose of it is in unexpected ambushes or ganks it can create.
Activities building. In the lines 65-66, Mordekaiser refers to another player in a
derogative manner by using the role (jungler) instead of calling the player directly (“lee
sin) to show, first, his disrespect towards that player and, second, Lee Sin’s inability to
fulfill the role of a jungler. The comparison to Darius indicates that the problem
Mordekaiser is concerned about is in an unsuccessful gank from Lee Sin. By doing or
rather saying what was said Mordekaiser tries to reason with other teammates while
competing with one of them. These actions in turn constitute more global social activities
of “socializing (with one’s team)” and “playing a game of League of Legends”.
Frame problem. For an outsider to the context of the game everything above may
seem enough to justify Mordekaiser’s frustration over Lee Sin’s inability to play his role
properly, as well as perceiving Mordekaiser as a mature and experienced player of not
only LoL but other, supposedly competitive, multiplayer games. However, to properly
analyze what was said we need to look at it from the insider’s point of view. We need to
understand social values of this community.
Fill in. In general, players of LoL follow a set of unspoken rules when interacting
with other players who were put in one team, which can be regarded to simply as etiquette.
By default, players are polite to each other because there are no reasons for hate when the
37
match starts. Everyone wants to win and understands that to succeed they need to
cooperate with each other, to play as a team. Bad-talk in this case is a side-effect.
However, this is not an absolute rule. There might be people playing for a whole day and
having a bad streak of loses, people having a bad day in general, or people in bad mood
who transfer their anger into the game using a “shield” of anonymity it provides. As a
researcher and observer, I have to speak from my own experience with the game (more
than four years).
First of all, I want to raise the importance of timestamps in the chat and time in
general for a League of Legends match. From the gameplay point of view time dictates
when the first wave of creeps/mobs start to spawn, when the jungle monsters start to
appear, when super mobs (dragon and baron, they are very important for a team’s success)
start to pop up. It has a strategic importance. From the gamedesign point of view, time
dictates the bare minimum of how long a match can be by controlling the availability of
the option to surrender, i. e. end a match prematurely by letting one’s team members to
vote. Surrenders cannot be called before the 15 minute mark. However, the surrender vote
is considered an "early surrender" and must be unanimous if the vote is called prior to the
20 minute mark. If a player is AFK, that player's team can surrender at 10 minutes with a
unanimous vote, or at 15 minutes with the normal vote rules. In the case of Mordekaiser,
judging by his second message (lines 64-65) in particular, the match was supposed to end
before the timer would hit the 20 minute mark. However, as I mentioned earlier, the match
ended only a bit after 46 minutes and the team won.
Secondly, it is important to mention that the community of League of Legends is
considered one of the most toxic communities in the online gaming segment of the
Internet. Simple google search “is lol toxic” fetches more than 25 million results on
people debating how and why the community is as it is. In the defense of the game, and
from my own experience, I would say it greatly depends on the circumstances related to
each player individually. The points I made earlier about bad-talk are true, but one may
get lucky and play a match where everyone just booted LoL for the first time that day,
nothing bad happened to them, and they are more or less happy. However, even these
prerequisites do not guarantee a stable/polite outcome if something during the match did
go wrong.
38
Doing and not just saying. Sometimes language can be used to impose one’s point
of view onto others and with the additional context from the above two paragraphs in
mind, we can look at Mordekaiser from a different perspective. “just takea breath guys”
in line 65 can now be seen as a mockery. Instead of a more neutral/defensive “take a
breath (guys)”, he lowers the register of the message into casual speech and, kind of,
“reverses” its “polarity” by including adverb ‘just’ at the beginning of the sentence.
Additionally, the fact that the message “you lost the game” was sent in the chat at 9:48
timestamp, almost at the literal beginning of the match, is a clear sign of player’s toxicity.
By saying what he said, Mordekaiser conditions his team to lose. He states it as a fact, as
something that has already happened, and not as something that will only happen in the
future. An interesting detail here is that he uses second person pronoun “you” instead of
a more expected first person plural “we” to refer to the team. Mordekaiser not just
distances himself from the team trying to redeem himself as if saying “it’s not my fault”,
he does not associate himself with the team in the first place. He clearly did not play in a
team at that moment. He played alone and for himself.
I began this analysis by trying to identify who was the author of the messages.
Mordekaiser turned out to be an experienced in online multiplayer games toxic player,
probably a male (83.3% of the questionnaire respondents identified themselves as males).
However, there is more than that. As Gee (2014: 106) suggests, there are quite often more
than one identity present at any time. It applies to Mordekaiser as well. To learn more
about who he is we need to look back at what has led to what he said.
Situated meaning. Let us start by clarifying “emotional” in Mordekaiser’s second
message (lines 65-66). Previously we reviewed it in isolation from the context of what
preceded it. Now is the time to look at how it all started. The lines 1-15 show what
provoked Mordekaiser to write in the chat from his first message. “pinged” here refers to
the signal system discussed in the Section 3.1.2. It is one of the “non-verbal” ways for the
players to communicate with each other during a match. Mordekaiser called for help
several times pinging “Attack Darius” when Lee Sin was nearby. Mordekaiser expected
to receive help because in his view or figured world junglers are regarded to as supports,
who should come to aid whenever they are called. However, Lee Sin prioritized defensive
play and did not risk ganking or ambushing an enemy player this early into the game.
39
This conflict of views then developed into indirect accusations from Mordekaiser’s side,
namely starting with the line 4 we can see his clearly negative opinion over Lee Sin’s
unwillingness to help. First, Mordekaiser compares Lee Sin to an abstract ‘perfect’
jungler “with map awareness”, then to an enemy team member Darius. Instead of taking
part in a one-sided argument, Lee Sin decided to mute Mordekaiser. The ‘mute’ option
lets players to limit whose messages they want to receive in the chat. This seemed to be
‘the last straw’ for Mordekaiser and it was when he ‘abandoned’ the team by leaving his
role as a top laner, which put the team in a serious disadvantage. This fact supports my
previous statement that Mordekaiser did not associate himself with the team in the first
place. He disregards social values adopted within the community.
Figured worlds. The simple decision to not take part in the argument was called
“emotional” by Mordekaiser. He transfers his beliefs of what a match of LoL should be
on others and expects them to behave accordingly. As a top laner he has his own values
in the context of the game, but they were not shared by others. In the set of ‘team’ and
‘individual player’ values Mordekaiser put himself over his team, which in the context of
the game provoked negative reaction from the team towards him.
Politics building. On the one hand. it is generally perceived as appropriate for
someone to silently leave a conversation with others whom they do not want to argue
with. On the other hand, the one who started the argument will either feel victorious that
they ‘won’ the argument or offended that they are not being heard any longer. The latter
is the case with Mordekaiser. The failure to fulfill his “positive face needs” (Gee 2014:
119) of being involved leads to Mordekaiser continuing his argument for the duration of
the match. Even his first two messages in the chat (lines 1-2) already established how he
wanted to be perceived: he wanted others to do what he told them to do, he expected some
sort of subordination from his teammates.
Big “D” discourse. The last important milestone in Mordekaiser’s story is right
before what we saw in the lines 63-64. Mordekaiser revealed one of his social identities,
who he is outside of the game in the lines 60-61. He was provoked by a message from
Malphite (line 59) who tried to motivate him to continue playing and fulfilling his role as
a top laner by offering a gift. Mordekaiser responded in a rather offensive way instead of
40
a neutral (no) I don’t need it (thank you)”. He began by stating his salary and mentioning
his occupation as a welder, which suggests he is much older than an ordinary LoL player
(from the questionnaire results the majority of the respondents fall in 17-24 years old
range). The inclusion of “really” and “ur” moves the register of the message into
casual/informal speech, however, “ur” is common in online text communication, while
“really” is used to emphasize Mordekaiser’s opinion, thus operating as a clear stance
marker. In the current structure of the utterance “really” also emphasizes the following
negation “dont” with an alternative being “i dont really need ur money”. In its current
position “really” can be interpreted as “sure” or “certainly” and serves to “brush-off” the
received offer. The following question by Samira (line 62) leads us the point where we
began on the line 63.
In a sense, Mordekaiser’s “emotional” on the line 66 serves as an intertextual
element as it directly refers to what was said/done before by another person. In the
meantime, it serves as a justification for the relationships he created with his team
members. Probably, he uses the fact that he is older than an average player to put himself
into a position of authority. That is why his views of community values differ from those
of his teammates.
It is also important to note the difference in message structures of Mordekaiser
and the rest of the players. Even though everything put in the chat is in a way abrupt and
the sentences are unnecessary separated in different places, there is a common factor at
play here. If one had to look at these chat logs and then switch to, for example, a
transcription of a prerecorded speech used in some research (for instance, Gee 2014: 15,
21-22), they would see some similarities between the two. Players in LoL do use complex,
developed sentences, of course giving preference to short ones to be quick in typing them
out, but they divide these sentences in a way as if they were verbally saying them out
loud. Every change to a new line/new message is a little intonational stop that divides
idea (tone) units (Gee, 2014: 22). For example, the lines 7-8, 9-10, 24-25, 30-31,
33/35/37, 40-41, 46-47, 53-56/58 could have been written in just one line each. The
message on the line 35 clearly refers to the first one on the line 33 as it is the continuation
of the same idea but without the familiar comma sign, and if we add the missing subject
from the line 33 “who” and predicate “doesnt” to lines 35 and 37, it becomes a complete
41
sentence. Commas are generally rare in online chat interactions, and here the absence of
it or rather the implied use of one gives Mordekaiser time to take another “breath in” to
continue his message on the line 33.
What makes Mordekaiser stand out from the rest of the team is that more often
than not he uses structurally full sentences, with the logical beginning and end, subject
and predicate, situated within one message at a time. It may be an indication of a
generational gap in how players process their ideas for others to consume. Younger
players tend to split up their written sentences into manageable idea units simulating oral
communication, while older ones, who are used to emailing or professional
communication resort to full sentences as a work of habit. Of course, this is a preliminary
hypothesis, and further research should be done with a properly defined sample to make
any concrete conclusions regarding this aspect of chat interactions in MMOs.
My guild is my castle
It was mentioned previously that World of Warcraft is different to League of Legends in
how the chat system is implemented. There are nine distinct chat channels (excluding
Custom) and every one of them is used for specific purposes or rather contexts. Thus,
‘local’ is the main choice for strangers in one area to talk with each other; ‘guild’ for
example is used specifically for communication between members of the same guild; and
‘raid’ is the medium for communication between members of one group who agreed to
participate in the activity. Every chat channel in WoW serves to fulfill a specific social
activity related to the channel itself, and as suggested by previous examples the activity
can usually be derived from the name of the channel. To look at every single channel and
see what is talked about in them is an enormous task and would require much more space
paper-wise. Therefore, for this study, I decided to focus only on the most popular channels
as defined by the questionnaire results (‘raid’, ‘guild’ and ‘group/party’). In the following
paragraphs I will analyze an example of communication between guildmates in WoW.
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Figure 10. WoW interaction extract
Figure 10 above is an excerpt of a guildmates’ talk in WoW. The ‘guild’ channel
allows for multiple people (everyone in the guild who are currently online) to chat
simultaneously. As it can be seen, there are at least eight people chatting at the time the
screenshots were taken. Their names are in square brackets after the name of the channel.
Of particular interest to us is the message in lines 20-21 made by the player named Jakohc.
At first glance, the message consists of three sentences with some traces of
punctuation. However, there are at least two problems in understanding the meaning of
43
it. First is the use of a highly specific terminology originated from the game and gaming
in general. Second is a vague reference to what was said previously in the beginning of
the message. To clarify the prior:
- “toon” is another way to call an in-game character, it’s synonymic to ‘avatar’;
- “brb” is literally ‘be right back’;
- “/w” is a special chat command that lets people use the ‘private’ channel, i. e. send
messages directly to each other;
- “inv” stands for ‘invite’.
To address the latter, we will have to consider the context which provoked this
conversation. A couple of minutes before the lines 20-21 there was another message
posted in the chat by Jakohc. On the lines 2-4 one can find an example of the most
complete and developed sentences used in the chat of WoW. Supposedly, this message
was posted by Jakohc as can be seen by the nickname of its author. However, it is not
precisely true.
Contextuality of the utterance. The message (lines 2-4) states the fact of death of
the in-game character “Jakohc the Warlock” at character “level 10” by ‘the hands’ of
some “Princess”, and then follow his “last words”. The possessive determiner “our” the
message begins with redirects us to the guild itself. It was and is a common tradition in
larger communities to refer to its members as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. Next, we see the
character’s class - the Warlock. A class dictates what set of abilities or skills a character
has, and generally is the determiner of a playstyle. “level” refers to character progression.
There are 80 levels in total a character can achieve in WoW. Knowing that, we can assume
Jakohc the Warlock died at the beginning of his journey to the ‘end’ of the game. Then
comes a specific location, “Elwynn Forest”. In Azeroth (gameworld of WoW) Elwynn
Forest is the starting location for every human race character. It may indirectly tell us the
race of Jakohc, but he died at level 10 not 1 or 2. The fact that the forest is the starting
location for humans does not mean that only humans are allowed there. Characters of
other races from the Alliance (humans, night elves, dwarves, gnomes, draenei, and
worgen) can also come here to do some quests for example. Now, “Princess” is somewhat
misleading for anyone not familiar with the game and the location specifically. According
44
to the related quest description it is a a prize-winning pig”. In WoW all quest related
objects, either unanimous items or ‘living’ beings, have distinct names for ease of
recognition. That is the case with Princess. Finally, the second sentence of the message
(lines 3-4) directly quotes Jakohc’s own last sent message in the chat before this one.
In terms of orthography, Jakohc’s message on the lines 2-4 is as perfect as it can
be. Here the player properly used letter cases, commas, full stops, and quotation marks.
If we compare it to any other message from this chat or any other, it will certainly stand
out. The reason for this is it was not written by a human. The message was ‘written’ and
‘posted’ in the chat by a script or bot (programmable sequence of performed actions). In
fact, parts of the message were prewritten for the script to fill-in omitted parts. Originally,
the message most probably was “Our brave ___, ___, has died at level ___ in ___ to ___.
___ last words were “___””. Every missing piece in this template is filled by the
information gathered directly from the game: ‘brother/sister is taken from the chosen
gender at character creation screen, as well as name and class; level is accessed from the
character statistics screen in-game; location can be seen on the map; the killer Non-
Playable Character (NPC) is the last NPC Jakohc was targeting before death; ‘his/her’
depends on whether ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ was chosen as the first option; and the “last
words” are stored in the memory of the script which affects the whole guild chat but
works with each player individually.
There is a reason for Jakohc to use a script to notify his guildmates of his death.
First, he is not the only one to use it. Second, the guild Jakohc is part of is not an ordinary
gaming guild. This is a speedrunners’ guild. Speedrunning is a practice that has existed
in the world of gaming for a long time. However, only recently it became popular. The
main concept of speedrunning is to complete a game as fast as humanly possible.
Sometimes, when a game cannot be completed, for example a MMORPG (there is no
‘end game’ screen or credits), speedrunners try to achieve specific in-game tasks that are
considered by the community of the game as being an ‘endgame’. In case of WoW, it is
to achieve character level 80, the maximum level. Everyone in Jakohc’s guild, including
him, does exactly that. They compete with each other in the race to level 80 and use scripts
in the chat to show others in the guild how far they were able to progress before ultimately
resetting their progress by dying in-game.
45
After the scripted message on the lines 2-4 Jakohc received some advice on how
he could have succeeded in killing Princess and staying alive (line 13). There were five
players who took part in the conversation simulating a real-life discussion on what has
just happened. Not all of the messages directly refer to Jakohc. For example, Catbear
negatively reacts to Zuckerr’s suggestion to Jakohc using fences around the area where
Princess is to his advantage (line 17). Ny, in turn, negatively reacts to Catbear’s reaction
(line 19). For the purpose of understanding the initial message by Jokohc, which here is
on the lines 20-21, we should also consider the message by Zuckerr on the line 18. “super
risky” and “too” indicate that Zuckerr will try to kill Princess in the same way Jakohc
tried to do it, i. e. without using the proposed ‘fence’ method. This message prompted
Jakohc to write the last part of his message (lines 20-21) where he tells Zuckerr he will
write to him directly to invite him in a group to fight Princess together. However, it is not
just Jakohc stating a fact, that he will write to Zuckerr. He asks for Zuckerr’s help.
I previously mentioned the use of emoticons in videogames (see Section 2.3)
referring to the work of Dresner and Herring (2010). Jakohc’s message (lines 20-21) is
an example how emoticons can affect the meaning of an utterance. Two kinds of smiley
faces are used here: :P and =). Both of them are used to map facial expressions to their
preceding utterances. Thus, the negatively offensive rejection of “Nah fuck that” acquires
a teasing, ‘smiley’, lighter meaning that can be translated as “Nah, I’ll do it my way”.
With the help of the second ‘face’ Jakohc basically asks Zuckerr the question “Will you
help me?” without asking the question. In some contexts, it may be viewed as a rude way
to ask for help. Essentially, Jakohc makes Zuckerr help him. However, here everyone is
engaged in the process and at the same degree is interested in making progress, thus
perfectly understanding that cooperation is the key to achieving the common goal.
Moreover, Jakohc made use of Zuckerr’s message on the line 18, which tells us Zuckerr
was yet to face Princess and he was going to do it the same way Jakohc did. Fortunately
for Jakohc, Zuckerr agreed to help as seen on the lines 23 and 24.
Syntactic analysis. Now that we completely understand what Jakohc’s message
(lines 20-21) is about, we can review it from the point of view of Syntax. In ordinary
written text, punctuation and capitalization separate the utterances into different tone/idea
units (e. g. sentences) (Gee 214: 74), and each of them may serve a distinct function. In
46
MMO communication such rules are usually not followed. However, we can use Jakohc’s
segmentation by full stops to divide his utterance into three separate tone units.
Tone unit 1 is interpersonal and serves to indicate Jakohc’s opinion on the
suggested method of killing Princess proposed by Zuckerr and opposed by Catbear (lines
13 and 17). The method itself is based on abusing limitations of this NPC’s Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and requires much more time and patience than just fighting the pig
face-to-face but provides a greater degree of safety from being killed by the said NPC.
By saying what Jakohc said the way he said it, he thanks others for valuable advice but
rejects it in favor of his own strategy. The ending emoticon “:P” serves as a sign of teasing
and shows how the preceding sentence should be read. The choice to use the rather
informal “fuck” shows the kind of relationships the agent (Jakohc) has with the other
participants of this conversation, which can be described as playful, non-normative,
(closely) related, due to the fact they all are part of one guild, a group of people with
similar interests.
Table 5. The three Tone Units of the original utterance and their functions
Tone Unit 1
Tone Unit 2
Tone Unit 3
Original utterance
(parsed):
[Nah fuck that.. :P]
[ill remake a toon and
brb..]
[Zuckerr ill /w u for inv
=)]
Gloss:
Thank you, but I would
better do it my way
I will create a new
character and come back
Zuckerr, could you help
me with the Princess
afterwards?
Function:
Interpersonal
Ideational
Interpersonal
Tone unit 2 is ideational, presupposing a particular configuration of process,
participants, and circumstance (Martin, Matthiessen, & Painter, 1997). The material
action of creating a new character, thus starting a new attempt at speedrunning WoW,
performed by Jakohc himself and returning back to the game world is used here to inform
not only others in the guild who were online at the moment, but Zuckerr specifically
because of the next tone unit. The reason for this action lies in the context of what
preceded this message, which is the death of the previous character to Princess (the pig),
i. e. a failed attempt. The choice of lexical means to express the idea of starting over in
47
this tone unit presents Jakohc as a rather experienced player who is familiar with the in-
game terminology developed by the community/insiders (“toon”) and the gaming
environment in general (“brb”), which is not easily understandable by outsiders.
Tone unit 3 is interpersonal and directly addressed to another player. The theme
of the sentence indicates the addressee. This addressing, being placed in the first position
in the sentence, shows a certain degree of respect coming from Jakohc towards Zuckerr.
In a way, by doing this Jakohc creates what Gee (2014: 118) calls “social goods” of, in
our case, respect and distributes it to another player. Another option for how this sentence
would have been constructed suggests placing the addressee at the end of it, which would
devaluate the importance of Zucker’s involvement and change the whole meaning of the
sentence as if it was Zuckerr who was asking to be invited to participate in the activity.
The purpose of the emoticon “=)” here is to ask a question without explicitly doing it,
which Jakohc succeeded in communicating to Zuckerr as evidenced by Zuckerr’s next
messages (lines 23-24).
Social activities review. There are two main activities present in this MMORPG:
playing the game and socializing. The utterance produced by Jakohc can be considered
to represent a certain activity within the game - speedrunning. Tone unit 2 relates to
describing one of the many actions which constitute this activity. However, as there could
be multiple discourses present in one act of communication, there could be multiple
activities performed through these acts. At the moment of posting his message in the chat,
Jakohc was playing a videogame, participating in a discussion, speedrunning, fulfilling
his “face needs” (Gee, 2014: 119), cooperating with other players, and socializing in his
guild’s chat. Some items in the given list are actions and some are activities. As Gee notes
(2014: 97), it is hard to draw the line between the two. In my opinion, there are two main
activities present in this MMORPG, while everything else should be considered as actions
that constitute these activities.
Big D-discourse analysis. From the above we can finally move to the last point of
Gee’s toolkit, which is the social identity of the issuer. Through his utterance Jakohc was
able to accomplish several community-valued goals at once: (a) developing one’s avatar
in terms of experience and wealth, and (b) creating social relationships (even though they
are often finite in nature). Earlier it was mentioned that the guild Jakohc is part of is all
48
about speedrunning the game or, in the case of WoW, achieving the maximum character
level as fast as possible. This, as well the fact that Jakohc uses a highly specific
terminology to refer to in-game objects, shows his experience as a player, which puts him
closer to being a “veteran” player rather than a “newbie”. In addition, Tone unit 3 serves
as a bridge for co-interaction with another member of the community by suggesting them
to participate in a shared activity.
It is worth pointing out that while speedrunning is certainly a way to play the
game, it is not a default one. WoW, as any other game, gives their players specific routes
for character progression they can use. Usually, it is justified by the in-game context.
Thus, humans start in one area and visit one set of regions of the in-game map, but night
elves, for example, start in different area with different regions around it. However, the
game gives its players some freedom in how they can progress. That means humans can
come to the areas where night elves start and vice versa. Such a decision to leave one’s
starting area in favor of another one may not be logical story-wise but may be fruitful
progression-wise. This is what speedrunners do. They reject the story content of the game,
because they simply do not need to go over it again and again, in favor of gaining
character levels as quickly as possible. There are many player-created routes other
speedrunners use and develop. In relation to Jakohc’s guild, everyone in it follows the
same route that happens to go through humans’ starting area and the quest with Princess
specifically. The fact that Jakohc knows about and uses this route shows that he is not
only a “veteran” in WoW in general, but he is not an amateur in speedrunning the game
as well. He not only participates in a social activity but co-interacts with other participants
(Tone units 1 and 3), who share his views about the game. At this point, Jakohc, as a
speedrunner, performs a role different to the one assigned to him by the game (Warlock),
or rather he uses this in-game role to fulfill his social role as a speedrunner.
The above analyzes showed that players in both LoL and WoW perform different
actions through their written speech, that can resemble oral speech through its division
into separate tone units. The actions found in part constitute more global social activities
that are shared between the games, which are 1) playing a game and 2) socializing in a
game’s chat. In addition, players in both games were found to manifest several social
identities while interacting with others, depending on the context of communication.
49
5. Conclusion
Both LoL and WoW are examples of the MMO genre of videogames. They provide their
players with a number of functions allowing for social interactions. Based on the
statistical analysis of the observed chat logs and their illocutionary forces it was found
that, despite the fact that the game designs of both titles differ (competitive and
cooperative), the inter-player communications are shown to perform very similar actions
of cooperation. Besides that, some degree of variability being cooperation with one’s
competitors in LoL (see Section 4.2.2) was also noticed. The only major difference
between the two is the almost complete absence of competition-oriented messages in
WoW. This fact can be explained by the lack of in-game ways to communicate with one’s
enemies in team-based in-game events such as arena fights. In general, players in both
games prefer cooperation with the aim of achieving a shared goal.
The majority of observed inter-player communications follow the same pattern of
being abrupt and divided by their idea units, i. e. there are usually not many complete
developed sentences written in the chat. The preference is given to shorter sentences with
a high chance of abbreviations being used due to the immediate needs of each player
defined by the in-game context. If the in-game situation allows for leaving control over
one’s character to properly talk with others, players will most likely choose to follow
standard grammar conventions. For example, Mordekaiser (see Section 4.2.2) preferred
complete sentences because he was not paying attention to the match and was ready to
surrender. In fact, he was trying to manipulate others into surrendering early. As another
factor for his choice, it may be explained by his age difference in comparison to an
ordinary LoL player and his experience in ‘professional’ communication, thus it may be
his work of habit. In case of Jakohc (see Section 4.2.2), his character had already died
when he composed his message, therefore there was no need for him to pay any attention
to what was happening in the game. In addition, he did not take part in any collective
activity, and no one relied on him, which separates Jakohc from Mordekaiser.
Players of both games use “hybrid writing” (see Section 4.2.1) to communicate
with each other. This type of writing consists of (a) abbreviations, (b) truncations, (d)
syntactic erosions, and (e) specialized vocabulary, all of which are present in the collected
50
data. Some of the elements appeared to be more widespread than others, specifically
specialized vocabulary, which may be explained by the ideational content of posted
messages that in most cases directly refers to in-game systems, features, events, objects,
etc. Though, this observation is in line with Steinkuehler’s (2006b) findings, more
research is needed to make any concrete statements regarding this topic.
In relation to RQ1, the discourses present in both games share the same activities
performed during inter-player communications, namely playing the game itself and
socializing within the said game. Different actions constitute these activities and change
from game to game. The main ‘places for socialization within the two games are
considered to be their chat windows and specific in-game groups or communities within
communities members of which share similar social values (guilds in WoW).
There are certain differences between LoL and WoW. The former provides its
players with enough functionality to allow ‘non-verbal’ communication through
signaling. It takes less time to convey game-specific information to other members of
one’s team by pressing one button and dragging one’s mouse than typing words in the
chat. However, the drawback of this system is a negative impact on the socialization
aspect of the game, as well as a degree of ambiguity this system creates. The topics for
such a ‘communication’ are limited to game-specific situations/events/actions and using
signals for anything else might fail to deliver that information. WoW, on the other hand,
gives its players a higher degree of freedom in how they can organize their
communication in in-game chat channels offering nine of them instead of two in LoL.
Such a massive increase in available sources of messages may become destructive to
overall player experience with the game. WoW solves this problem by color-coding whole
messages according to the channel they were sent in. In LoL, for example, only the name
of the sender is colored.
Even though World of Warcraft and League of Legends are games of different but
related genres with different design choices in their structures, they share a lot of things
in terms of inter-player interaction (RQ2). Both games provide their users with specific
ways to interact with other users, namely chat windows, friend lists, and profile pages. In
addition to that, WoW offers a mailing service that supports in-game item exchange
51
between players as well as leaving time unrestricted messages, that do not get deleted
after some time in contrast to the chat window.
In terms of social interaction means (RQ2), survey results have shown that most
players rely on chats for in-game interaction. Nevertheless, due to certain limitations,
some survey respondents advocated for the use of third-party services to fulfill the need
in verbal communication proper. In addition, some players give their preference to third-
party websites in regard to getting access to systematized data on some of the in-game
information.
This study explored social aspect of MMOs through micro-level discourse
analysis of example chat logs following Gee’s discourse analysis toolkit and custom-
made questionnaires. Nevertheless, it is necessary to perform more specialized research
into in-game communications to make any specific statements. The limitations of this
study include absence of the sample analysis and relatively small number of collected
data in comparison to the scale of both games’ communities. Also, the paper dealt with
two titles simultaneously. However, such a comparative analysis allowed to view both
games’ communities and what they had in common.
For any future research on the topic of inter-player communication it is advised to
pay attention to not only what was said and how it was said but to the identity of the one
who said what was said as well. The findings of the present study are in line with the
previous research on videogames as “third places” (Steinkuehler and Williams 2006a), in
that the interactions found within the analyzed games reflect specific social activities
found outside of game worlds with the producers of the interactions manifesting multiple
social identities simultaneously. In terms of Computer-Mediated Communications
research, this paper may be of value as a reference point in a comparative diachronic
analysis of chat interactions in the reviewed games with the aim to detect any developing
trends in the ever-changing nature of online interactions. In addition, future research may
also investigate what role does a player’s age have in shaping communication patterns
within a game and to what extent MMO games can be considered as part of a global
MMO Discourse.
52
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Appendix 1: League of Legends questionnaire form
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Elite video game competition provides a setting for studying how digitally connected teams handle massive amounts of information that no individual could manage on their own. This article discusses observations of the University of California, Irvine's scholarship League of Legends teams' practices and competitions from fall 2016 through spring 2017. The observations explore the nature of distributed cognition of time and temporal information in a high-pressure, competitive environment. The capacity and strategies of these teams to maintain high levels of coordination, while sitting at desktops for hours at a time, can provide insight into how other kinds of teams might learn to collaborate skillfully in networked settings.
Chapter
The Night Journey (2007–2018) is one of the first experimental art game ever made according to the promotional content description made by its designers. The game directed by video artist Bill Viola who is known with his video installations that question fundamentals of human existence in relation to the nature. The Night Journey frames the similar conception with an unconventional journey to the basis of humane circumstances overwhelmed by a challenging environment. Although there is no narrative path to follow and no goals to achieve, decisions made by the players can create procedural changes in their existence and the world surrounding them. Thus, the game falls apart from the conventional understanding of user experiences and it moves to a conceptual experience that is symbolic and more metaphorical. The game raises an inquiry on being a video game with its mechanics and at the same time being an artwork with its aesthetic, conceptual and artistic qualities. This triggers an outmoded debate on involvement of technologies to art practices. Respectively photography, cinema, video and more recently digital technologies became the subject of the same debate in academic and practical circles. The commercial aspects of the aforementioned technologies have created confusion regarding their regard as art-forms. The position of their aesthetic experiences against being reproducible have remained open to discussion when compared to traditional art practices. When the video game literature today is examined, it is observed that the similar dilemma is a subject of discussion. This article aims to define the relationship between video game and art within the framework of current practices and discussions, and to identify the possibilities and potential boundaries of the video game medium as a contemporary art practice in terms of artist, artwork and audience. In this context, three exhibitions led by Museum of Modern Art Museum of New York, Victoria and Albert Museum and Barbican Center is examined to understand past, present and future of videogame as artwork.