Coordinating teamplay using named locations in a multilingual game environment - Playing esports in an educational context

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the video game play of a multiplayer first-person shooter, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, as part of an esports programme at a vocational school. The game environment is multilingual, and the focal participants are all Finnish-Swedish bilinguals who are proficient in English. The study focuses on the action of providing callouts, which are coordinated English words that refer to specific in-game locations and, when provided, point to opponents’ locations. The aim is to investigate how participants employ callouts as part of their in-game interaction and teamplay, and what they orient to as ‘callout competence’. With a greater understanding of the social organisation of the multilingual game environment and actions, such as callouts, we can better understand the affordances for collaborative and multilingual learning that games can provide for education. Callout competence appears to align with skills and knowledge that may be transferrable into the educational setting; that is, the components that are part of callout competence require collaborative skills and multilingual competence. These skills are part of what makes the teamwork work, as well as an inherent part of activities in an esports education programme that has broadened the classroom to encompass esports game play outside of the classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Esports
• multiplayer
• collaboration
• conversation analysis
• multilingualism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To uphold a shared understanding of the in-game interaction in FPS multiplayer games, players employ callouts, which can be described as verbal instructions of what is happening in the game. In other words, callouts are, broadly, employed to co-construct a shared knowledge and understanding of the game environment through sharing information on the locations/actions of teammates, opponents, as well as other game relevant aspects, such as grenades, weapons and health. In this article we focus on the use of callouts regarding opponent presence in a specifically named location on the map.

2. The mention of perspective is regarding whose first-person perspective the analysed data excerpt is from. Hence, the non-verbal actions are the ones that we can observe from that perspective and the talk is from the common verbal chat channel that includes all teammates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fredrik Rusk

Fredrik Rusk is Associate Professor II in Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and Arts at Nord University, and Associate Professor of Pedagogy with a focus on digital interaction at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies at Åbo Akademi University. In his research, he uses conversation analysis and interaction analysis with video recordings to study learning in interaction, multilingualism and social identity in and outside school, as well as learning in and through digital interaction, such as smartphones, video conferencing and video games.

Matilda Ståhl

Matilda Ståhl PhD in pedagogy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research focuses on identity construction online through a participant perspective on games and social media.