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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 724

Part of Session 135: The sociolinguistics of football (Other abstracts in this session)

Doing playing football

Authors: Baldauf-Quilliatre, Heike
Submitted by: Baldauf-Quilliatre, Heike (ICAR, France)

Football as a game does not generally solicit thoughts about verbal interaction. Even if communication is necessary for playing (e.g. when discussing strategies, commenting changes or analyzing constellations), the game itself is nonverbal. However when the play is not “real”, but “virtual”, that is, when people play computer- or video games together, the situation changes. In this case, players do not need to make physical efforts which hamper verbal communication; they are generally in a place which is much smaller, where face-to-face communication is easier than on the field; also they need to communicate in order to coordinate their activities on the screen (cf. Mondada 2011 and in press). In this way, playing football together on video game consoles or computers is not only physical, but also verbal interaction. Looking closer at the players’ verbal actions, we can find activities from a recipient’s point of view (e.g. assessments, comments) as well as activities from the football player’s point of view (e.g. directives).
I will focus on the question how the game players mark their activities as “playing football”, that is, which verbal activities they use to signal that they are now “in a football game”. As I will show, this does not only have to do with football-vocabulary in the largest sense, but also with the way they construct the play verbally. Directives, verbalizations of football players’ activities, projections, assessments etc. serve to “put football playing in words”: The game players do not only comment on what they or their avatars are doing in the game (cf. play-by-play commentary), they also interact  with each other and influence their own actions and those of their partners.
The main argument in this paper will be the role of assessments in this constellation. I am less interested in assessments as a form of (emotional) involvement or as a sort of analysis of the play. Rather, my study draws on assessments as evaluation of playing strategies in medias res, related to the general knowledge about the game’s rules (Gerhardt 2008) or as a special form of directives: When do the game players assess the actions of their avatars? How and what do they assess? Above all, how do these assessments contribute to the development of the game?
This perspective of “doing playing football” does not only allow to learn more about how people play video games together, it also shows how football is conceptualized as a team play, how it is developed as team play and how the game players position themselves between competition and amusement. Insofar the paper aims to contribute to the study of a special kind of game as interaction and to our knowledge how this interaction is verbalized.
The analyses are based on 1h30 of a video-recorded football game (Fifa08 for playstation PS3), during which two adolescents play together against other players via the internet.