By observing college students at a Learning Center playing video games, we identified some instances in which players spoke through their characters as evidenced by first person and second person pronoun usage. It is crucial to note that this is highly dependent on context such as the speaker’s full immersion in the game.
Participants played competitive multiplayer games such as Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart to ensure that we would obtain more data. One video recording camera was positioned below the television screen facing the participants in order to capture gaze and to know who was speaking. Another video recorder captured what was occurring on screen so that we could identify whether or not the participants’ utterances were game related. The audio recorder from a phone was placed near the participants to capture audio.
We began our analysis by identifying the subject of the utterances using the codes: PERSON, if a participant was voicing his/her own thoughts, talking about his/herself, or talking to/about another participant; CHARACTER, if (the name of) a character in the game was mentioned, certain attributes that only a character in the game could possess/ perform were mentioned, or if the participant was speaking through the character; GAME, if there was commentary about the game itself; and OTHER: NOT GAME RELATED.
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