This article uses video data of gaming sessions at an Internet café in order to explore the situated and embodied resources that players use for doing collaborative gaming. Prior studies of gaming have, to a great extent, not accounted for many of the semiotic resources that players utilize for conducting gaming as a collaborative enterprise. From an ethnomethodological and interaction analytical perspective, drawing on Goodwin-s concepts of semiotic fields and contextual configurations, this study shows how both on- and off-screen semiotic resources structure the gaming interaction, and how the use of these resources relate to the players- different interactional projects, such as issuing instructions or orienting themselves in an on-screen space. These embodied semiotic resources are situated in the on- and off-screen spaces in which the players interact. They provide ways of playing computer games in collaboration that are specific for gaming where the players are co-present.

To play computer games means engaging in an enterprise that is predominantly based on visual information. Games that exclude visual information can be considered experimental and exotic. Games utilize visual means so as to convey information to the player in several ways. In, for instance, World of Warcraft, graphics are used to depict a virtual world, including players’ avatars and computer-controlled opponents. The game displays text and numbers to the player, and the interface contains buttons and cursors that are used to interact with the game. To a novice or non-player, the information might seem complex and opaque. Yet, somehow, players are able to manage these interfaces and progress in the games. That which to a novice appears as a jumble of text, numbers, animations and movements is a familiar environment for the skilled player. In the normal case, the skilled player has no need either to dwell or reflect upon the meaning and significance of the game world or the interface of the game; rather, he has to engage with it, move through it and act in it. Expertise in game play can be exhibited in the ways a player successfully negotiates this terrain of the game world. In co-located gaming, players have to skilfully manage the integration of various semiotic resources in order to act in coordinated ways within the games. The relative importance of these modalities is contingent upon the situation at hand, and of the temporal order of the game.

The aim of this article is to elucidate some of the ways in which the visualaspects of a computer game show up as publicly available phenomena  n-andthrough the playing of it. This article deals with both how players acquire perceptual expertise, and of issues of how they are accountable for having acquired these skills. In a broad sense, this study explicates players’ engagement in the “education of attention”. Grasseni describes this as “[…] a relational and contextual process that shapes specific skills of perception, relation and cognition, which are in turn instrumental to justify and reproduce specific contexts of action”. In the present study, this means analyzing how instructing vision builds on and establishes appropriate and “correct” ways of behaviour in local gaming communities.

Recent work on education, identity and community has expanded the intellectual boundaries of learning research. From home-based studies examining youth experiences with technology, to forms of entrepreneurial learning in informal settings, to communities of participation in the workplace, family, community, trade union and school, research has attempted to describe and theorize the meaning and nature of learning. Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age offers a systematic reflection on these studies, exploring how learning can be characterised across a range of ‘whole-life’ experiences. The volume brings together hitherto discrete and competing scholarly traditions: sociocultural analyses of learning, ethnographic literacy research, geospatial location studies, discourse analysis, comparative anthropological studies of education research and actor network theory. The contributions are united through a focus on the ways in which learning shapes lives in a digital age.

The present study examines video documentation of some ways in which participants allocate blame for “untoward events” to co-present players in computer gaming. In such co-located gaming, players will communicate through whatever means available, relying on both on-screen communication (through chat as well as through avatar actions), as well as verbal and non-verbal offscreen communication. In blame sequences, an initial act of blaming provides a reason to locate a blameable event in the on-screen interaction just prior to the blame, thereby functioning as an instruction to “search” recent game-events for a cause of the blame. Blame elicits the scrutinizing of gameplay, and thereby for reflexively establishing at least one event (e.g. the death of a player’s avatar) as a potentially blameable offence. Foregrounding a player’s action constitutes a first step in establishing it as publicly blameable (a similar point is made by Mondada, 2009, in analyses of assessment sequences). Blame does not, however, once and for all decide the issue of who is at fault. Rather, blame is an interactional method for attributing responsibility, but at the same time as it is a move in a sequence of actions, where each one reflexively provides ground for understanding the next.

Playing computer games in co-located settings (such as internet cafés or LAN-parties) is not a quiet enterprise of silent contemplation. Players constantly talk to each other, about events in the game, about other players as well as on topics entirely unrelated to the playing of the game. A lot of talk concerns what is happening in the game (or what has happened), why this has happened and what can be done to make sure it will happen again (in the case of something favorable) or to ensure it will not (in the case of something detrimental to the progression of the game). In so doing, the players continuously interpret and formulate  events in the game.

A striking aspect of these conversations, during game play and in-between individual gaming sessions, was that they are confrontational and harshly disaffiliative. The players use “foul” language laden with sexual connotations, name-calling, challenging each others’ competence and skill in the game as well as general intelligence and abilities. This is not to say that this is the only way that players talk to one another. Blame is a prevalent feature of the players’ interaction, but it is not the only way of handling untoward events. All the same—and in contrast to many other studies of cooperative work conducted in a variety of socio-technical systems — participants’ confrontations is a striking interactional feature of the activity.