As I have already begun to show, players attend to the images on the computer screen as a new semiotic fi eld and in ways that are specifi c to the ecology of the MMORPG. The dungeon is a fi xed, temporal, and spa- tial locale, representing features in both offl ine and fantasy worlds. The online landscape, marked by enemy monsters, objects, and other refer- ential environmental landmarks, provides a referential infrastructure for organizing interaction and discursive practice.
In her face-to-face work looking at play, Goodwin (2006) discusses the ways in which hopscotch players orient to the hopscotch grid as a physi- cal, multimodal resource for meaning making. Girls use the hopscotch grid—otherwise just markings on the ground—as a tangible object, a three- dimensional space, to demonstrate appropriate actions and to con- test wrong moves. Similarly, in the game world, players use the built environment as a referential grid, alongside talk and text. While the raid leader vocally produces spatial directions of where each player should be positioned during a specifi c fi ght, he or another expert player will often move their own avatar to the place described or a similar place outside the immediate location, using their “bodies” in conjunction with the built environment to demonstrate deictic reference. Once situated in the place of reference, the expert player moves his avatar up and down, in a jump- ing motion, signaling to others, while requesting joint attention. Figure 7.4 off ers a static rendition of this type of situated action (note the box).
This style of referential interaction with the landscape extends the use of deictic terms in talk (Levinson, 1983). In my last extract (see Extract 7.4), the raid leader describes the future action of the guild as being situated in a specifi c game location. Words highlighted in bold represent deictic terms used. Words marked with * indicate when players “move to” and “jump” on specifi c places on the grid.
During raids, expert players direct novice players using both deictic terms (here, there, this, that) and deictic referential gestures performed by character representations. In this example, the raid leader talks about standing close to the monster on a specifi c platform. The words “here” and “there” are realized visually, even though each person is staring at the landscape from a diff erent camera angle. In line 6, elaborating on the word “here,” the raid leader moves to the spot described, using the keyboard to move his character up and down until players confi rm notice
through text. These “stomps” require avatars to move to a place of directed reference in the dungeon, “jumping” up and down on the pixilated grid until other players discursively confi rm understanding.
This style of gesturing elaborates on the deictic speech of players, build- ing on the semiotic resources available in the local, situated game ecology. While expert players use the environment as another tool for providing
figure 7.4
Extract 7.4: * Deictic stomps
Raid Leader 1 So melee what we need to be doing, (.) 2 Is on this platform there ,
3 That we’re gonna be standing on,
4 Picture this like big circular platform around this boss, 5 Uhh we need to stand as close to it, (.)
6 As close to it as possible, * here . 7 Without being in the water, * there . 8 Because he’s gonna knock us back. (.) 9 When he does that.
10 And if you get knocked back into the water, 11 You have to jump back on the platform * here .
instruction to the group, novice players use the landscape to display com- petency and communicate readiness to proceed. Players move to the spaces referenced by experts and demonstrate attentiveness by “jumping” up and down as well. In this way, the players co-construct and maintain the space in which the game takes place (Jones, 2010). The simulated landscape of the game takes on meaning as a tangible object through practice, allowing players to defi ne and make sense of their environment through negotiation and interaction. By referencing specifi c simulated “locations” in the game, these “places” become recognizable by all guild players as sites where spe- cifi c and meaningful actions take place. This practice-based knowledge constructs notions of shared community and functions in a way that allows expert players to elaborate on technical “identities of experience.”
Conclusion
As one of the fi rst discourse ethnographies to examine new media gaming (cf. Keating & Sunakawa, 2010), this study illustrates some of the ways in which a self-organized community of gamers creatively uses the specifi c ecology of their MMPORG to perform identities informed by status and expert roles. In this complex digital environment, marked equally by its multimodality and by the multitasking of its members, we see how lin- guistic styles as ways of speaking/being specifi c to the community entail mutual and dialogic engagement in a common endeavor. As such, style is best understood as the dialogic co-construction of linguistic forms informed by shared beliefs, norms, and values giving meaning to the so- cial world of the community—rather, that is, than seeing style as simply linguistic features that occur according to particular social distributions. The social function of style in the World of Warcraft guild serves to cohere the group as a particular community with a shared competitive identity, while also distinguishing members according to their experience and in- dividual status as knowledgeable, expert players. Although these styles are not representative of all World of Warcraft players or all contexts of game, and variation may occur among other organized guilds, this study demon- strates how online game players use new media skillfully and creatively in the organization of their social worlds online.
Acknowledgments
My sincerest gratitude to Norma Mendoza-Denton and Marjorie Goodwin for their insightful contributions to this project. Thank you to my colleagues
in Tucson and Los Angeles for their collaborative feedback and to Jennifer Newon Kos and Jeanne Arnold for help with revisions; to Saija Peuronen and one external reviewer for their suggestions; and to Crispin Thurlow for his generous editorial help. Additional appreciation to Paul Connor and Alethea Marti for media assistance. Lastly, thank you to the mem- bers of the “Bloody Reavers” guild, for graciously welcoming me into their community.
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people engaging with digital communication technologies have various linguistic and discursive resources at their disposal. This also applies to internet users in Finland, the specifi c locus of my analysis. Having rela- tively easy access to these technologies, many Finns, the young educated generation in particular, are familiar with information, global language resources, and cultural practices that reach beyond their immediate locales (see Leppänen et al., 2011, for the results of a nationwide survey on the uses of English in Finland). Thus, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, the realities of globalization may be manifested in a variety of ways, such as the ways in which people manage to make sense of and use mobile lin- guistic resources across contexts (Blommaert, 2010; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). Moreover, creative linguistic resources can be used for strategic styling, for representing certain identity aspects in specifi c situations, and for emphasizing what kinds of cultures or lifestyles one is willing to align oneself with (see especially Newon, Chapter 7, and Vaisman, Chapter 9, of this volume).
New media contexts, therefore, provide an important “fi eld site” in which it is possible to examine how internet users, through their ways of communicating with one another, take up diff erent positions toward specifi c topics, people, activities, communities, and also the medium of the communication itself. Furthermore, new media environments enable people to constitute their “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) also online. Existing offl ine communities can be transferred or expanded to online contexts, or the aff ordances of new media can be used to create completely new communities. For example, Lam (2004) discusses how two Chinese students in the United States found an internet chat room to