Open AccessSpectating: How non-players participate in videogaming
Author(s) -
Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre,
Isabel Colón de Carvajal
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal für medienlinguistik
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2569-6491
DOI - 10.21248/jfml.2021.33
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , gaze , argument (complex analysis) , space (punctuation) , psychology , focus (optics) , selection (genetic algorithm) , computer science , human–computer interaction , artificial intelligence , medicine , physics , psychoanalysis , optics , operating system
This paper investigates situations in French videogame interactions where non-players who share the same physical space as players, participate in the gaming activities as spectators. Through a detailed multimodal and sequential analysis, we show that being a spectator is a local achievement of all co-present participants - players and non-players.Our argument is twofold. Firstly, we focus on three gaming interactions and connect the different configurations to the non-players’ participation practices. We analyse the development of the game, watching, commenting, gaze and body movements of players and non-players, as well as the configuration of the spatial environment are intertwined. Three different “ways of spectating” are identified: doing being a couple, doing being friends and doing being a supporter. Additionally, we describe a selection of embodied practices used to locally achieve these “ways of spectating”, indicating that spectatorship is co-constructed.