Organising participation in video gaming activities

This chapter focuses on video game-playing as a locus for media engagement and everyday social interaction. Game-playing is analysed from a multimodal perspective: as a temporally unfolding, interactionally accomplished event shaped by the game as a material and semiotic structure which the players attend to in their verbal and nonverbal actions. The chapter investigates how adolescents playing a console-operated video game in the home environment draw upon the game’s discourse locally, in the situated, emergent activities through which they co-construct social play. Detailed analysis of data reveals how players produce their utterances in an indexical way, incorporating specific locally available discursive resources in their talk and adjusting to the constantly changing contexts presented by the game.