| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 105 === As technology thrives, the Internet has become a life partner for almost each person in this modern generation; we also cannot deny that massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) play an important role in social networks for some of us. Despite that, this social platform has barely been touched upon in academia. While online forums and instant messengers have been heatedly discussed among many sociolinguists, little attention has been paid to the question whether massively multiplayer online games, well known as a type of leisure activities, are also imbued with social meaning. From the perspective of sociocultural linguistics, the present study aims to examine how online game “inhabitants” construct a community of practice and negotiate social positions and identities through discourse.
We follow the ethnographic method of conducting fieldwork, immersing ourselves in the online game world through participation in gameplay activities and observing participants interaction with each other. I chose the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game League of Legends (LoL) to be my data source, because it is one of the most popular MMOGs around the world in recent years; I recorded one hundred matches of the game and focused my analysis on the textual communication in their game chats. It is expected that the speech acts performed through the exchange of talk could be interpreted as stancetaking moves that implicate on the intersubjectivity tactics used by the players to establish identity relations.
The concept of identity had previously been seen as a representation of an individual’s physical or mental character; it was not until the era of postmodernism that it started to be treated as interrelated with discourse, which opens a channel to the 21st century view that identity is a product of both micro-empirical interaction and ideology. This viewpoint serves as a springboard for the present study, which treats the game chats as an important medium for the co-construction of players’ personas and thus their interpersonal dynamics.
The result of the study shows that the sense of community of practice characterizing LoL players can be evident in not only the members’ shared norms of conduct but also their use of language. It seems that LoL players as a social group have a specialized register for communication that is esoteric to outsiders, with regard to linguistic forms and pragmatic functions. The communicative practices that are most frequently seen in the community include tactical reports, expressions of feelings, analyses of the current situations, appraisals of previous plays, and plans of actions. Among them, most players are involved in the use of directives for asking for allies’ cooperation and negative appraisals against others’ bad performances, which shows that they are used to taking aggressive stances to display their professional gamer identities. What is worthy of notice is that such aggressive verbal behavior should not be over-generalized to all LoL players but serve to distinguish a subgroup within them, who tend to exert their social power via the in-game messaging service.
The current study attempts to bring out the negotiation of social meaning among a group of MMOG players, including the joint enterprise and its members’ intersubjectivity. It seems that, for some, playing MMOGs is not so much a leisure activity as a way of life where they engage in serious thought on the matter of identity; that is, an MMOG is not only a platform for players’ mutual communication but also a social learning system for their communication with themselves about what kinds of gamers they shall present.
|
|---|
