Virtual Ethnography

The method of research adopted in the present study is discourse-analysis based ethnography.

As interaction in such virtual worlds as MMOGs is relatively cue-deprived compared to face-to-face communication (See Section 2.2.1), textual messages delivered in the chat box take on particularly great value in exploring how the informers construe reality. This is even true when ideologies and identities are embedded in social practices (including language) of a community. Linguistics is necessary for the enlightenment of the community’s socio-cultural models. My discourse-analysis based ethnography could be understood in terms of the two

components: ethnography and discourse analysis. This section will deal with my ethnographic fieldwork and collections of communications for analysis. Interviews are also conducted but do not serve as the main source for data collection; they are only intended for supporting discourse analysis. The method of discourse analysis will be covered in the next section.

Regarding ethnographic field research, I follow the idea of virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000; Mason, 1999), which suggests that the ethnographer should focus on the virtual persona presented in the cyberspace, instead of the person who controls it at the keyboard. In other words, although it is doubtless that the online identity reflects an aspect of oneself, our

mission here is not to know the player in real life but to take the projected aspect of self as a

“whole person” who is a citizen of the virtual world. In line with this, cyberspace is the

ethnographic reality where I immerse myself as one of the participants to observe and learn what certain experience or practices mean to them. As an online game enthusiast myself, I have had twelve years of online gaming and four years of LoL gaming experience. During these years not only did I participate in the practice of gaming but I also observed out-game discussions in forums and websites, discussed gameplay with my gamer friends, and watched professional gaming or eSports competitions online from time to time. I was an innocent player among the first three years of LoL gaming but became a player slash ethnographer in the fourth year, from Spring 2015 to Spring 2016, when I kept field notes, asked questions,

and “consciously” gathered information about the history and social practices of LoL gamers.

That was also the time during which I collected data for my discourse analysis. Since players

of a MOBA game like LoL ought to re-choose their champions for the next match, I do not have a “perpetual character” on all the game maps. However, no matter what champion I

select, I will be known to others by a fixed pseudonym, the name of myself taking on the role as a summoner. I was a level 30 summoner named 凱洛泰特斯; though I am qualified to play Ranked Game, I spent most of the time in Normal Game matches. While LoL gaming, I did not deliberately provoke other players’ responses for research purposes; rather, I pretty much stayed true to myself as a gamer, rarely posting messages on the chat channel except when replying to others’ demands or providing important intelligence for the team’s operational planning. Such gaming experiences allow me to see how the participants consider their collective practices, respective practices among different others, and most importantly consequences brought by these practices to the group.

For discourse analysis, I obtained conversation data from one hundred matches of Normal Game I played from August 2 to November 8, 2015. Within these one hundred

matches, there are around five matches in which I played with my friends. In order to collect the conversation data, I used the game’s built-in screen capture feature, that is, pressing F12

to freeze and take a shot of the moment’s full screen including the chat window. The screenshots were located in c:\riot games\League of Legends\screenshots and thus easy to

retrieve. Figure 1 is an exemplary screenshot; its chat box is zooming up in Figure 2 for more clarity:

Figure 1. A screenshot of League of Legends gameplay.

Figure 2. A zooming-up chat window during League of Legends gameplay.

In Figure 2, words in white color are messages sent by the players; they are the focus of my analysis. Names of the speakers are at the beginning of the lines, followed by parentheses containing the names of the champions they choose to play. All player names shown above are crossed out because of ethical issues; in this generation, even pseudonyms have legal protections. In my semi-raw, semi-processed transcripts for analysis in the next chapter, champion names are substituted for player pseudonyms. In the chat box, as shown in Figure 2 again, blue names belong to allies while red ones (crossed out in the first and the bottom line) are the members of the opposing team. In the 100 matches of conversation data, player messages are all given off by the team of my side (names in blue) while red names only appear when the system announces the enemy side of achievements. The system announcements are written in orange while players’ use of smart pings is decoded in beige.

On such a platform, players can post whatever messages (except that swear words are banned and replaced by asterisks) whenever they want during the gameplay. The only things they have to do are to type out the words and strike the Enter key to send them out. This interface

of online game chat has affected some of the expected discourse structures from face-to-face communication. First of all, because the CMC here is “quasi-synchronous” (Garcia & Jacobs, 1999), longer gaps or silences are more acceptable among the interlocutors’ turns. Plus,

because players may need to pay more visual attention to what is happening in the game world, dropping out of the conversation is not surprising. Second, it is never possible that

more than one speaker talk at a time, since lines of chat must be displayed in the order of

when each message is sent (Herring, 1999). Because of this, interruption from and overlapping with others’ utterances will never occur within a single line. Only when a player

constructs a turn with multiple messages can it be interrupted. This is usually when another interlocutor’s line inserts between the interrupted speaker’s lines of turn.

Also part of data collection is the interviews I conducted to further prove the presence of the sense of belonging to a community and ideologies about certain identity categories. I recruited ten LoL players to be my interviewees; all of them are my real-life friends, relatives, and students who have played LoL for at least three years. Note here that some of the interviewees are the ones who played with me in the one hundred matches where I recorded the chat. To elicit useful data from the respondents, I structure the interview with specific questions as followed:

1. Are LoL players as a whole like a miniature social organization or community, in consideration of their norms of conduct and need for apprenticeship?

2. Through what channels do you apprentice yourself for excellence in LoL gaming?

3. What do you think is the purpose of using the chat channel in LoL? Why?

4. Is there anything special about the sentence structures or vocabulary words employed by LoL players? If yes, what is it or what are they? Does the feature(s) make you feel like belonging to the game world?

5. What do you think of LoL players who dominate the game chat?

6. Do you usually find LoL players aggressive in their text messages? What kind of in-game consequences or socio-cultural effects do such messages lead to? Or why do you think these players act this way?

7. Have you ever played MMORPGs? What do you think is the difference between player textual interactions in MMORPGs and LoL?

8. What types of players are there in LoL, with regard to their gaming styles? How do these different types of players behave in the game chat respectively? Does the same categorization fit into the virtual worlds of MMORPGs?

Questions 1-2 serve to confirm with other fellow players if participants of an MMOG are indeed forming a community while they all have to learn to engage in some gaming practices in the virtual game world; questions 3-7 aim for retrieval of information about the relationship between game chat and LoL gamer identities; question 8 digs for heterogeneity within the social group of LoL players, or the emergence of locally specific identities from the very discourse. Questions 7-8 compare LoL with MMORPGs in the attempt to elucidate on the mediation of MMOG genre differences in the identity construction.

Since we have been clear about how the discourse data are collected during gameplay, we could move on to the question about the way we analyze them.