Making a Mistake, or Cheating: Two Sequential Trajectories in Corrections of Rule Violations

ABSTRACT

What happens when a player in a game makes a move that may violate a basic rule? We address this question by analyzing amateur pétanque play, in which participants, from the same throwing position, try to land their throwing balls as close as possible to a target ball. We examine what happens when someone stands in the “wrong” place to throw, and find two distinct sequential trajectories that this projectable violation occasions: (a) The complainant uses a minimal correction format (with address terms, pointing gestures, and indexical expressions), treating the mispositioning as a mistake; (b) the complainant solicits an account for the mispositioning (with a why-interrogative format that attributes knowledge and intentionality to the player), which leads to the accusation of cheating. Data include video recordings of naturally occurring game play, and the participants use English as a lingua franca, although they sometimes resort to Swiss German, French, and Portuguese.

KEYWORDS:

• Correction
• rule breaking
• cheating
• games
• rules
• social interaction
• multimodality

Rule violations are recurrent reasons for controversy in game play, and they prompt particular interactional work to be solved. Research on the organization of social interaction has shown that the breaking of rules can be identified and understood as mistakes (Jefferson, 1972) but also treated as attempts to cheat (C. Goodwin, 2000). Although the reasons for this can be informative for our understanding of fundamental organizational aspects of action formation and ascription (Levinson, 2013), they have not been investigated in their own right. In this article, we examine amateur pétanque game play as a perspicuous setting for looking into how players display their understanding of emerging rule violations through correction practices. Pétanque is a strategic ball game played in two teams. A basic rule is that all players throw their balls from the same place, which we refer to as the throwing circle, during each round of play. When players are identified as projecting to play from the “wrong” throwing circle in our data, they are corrected. The corrections are done in such a way that they treat the trouble either as a mistake or as doing cheating, resulting in two distinct sequential trajectories. In this article, we will (a) explain the practical problem of identifying and using the correct throwing circle that the pétanque players are confronted with each time they move to throw their balls, (b) examine the cases in which players are seen to break the rule by using the wrong throwing circle, and (c) account for the distinct sequential trajectories that the two observed correcting practices occasion.

Examining the legality of game moves in children’s games, Sacks (1992) pointed out that game play involves series of related actions, which often have two parts. For instance, kicking a ball and catching it can be seen as two actions that have a relational relevance and are recognizable as particular moves in the game. The observable intelligibility of game moves reflexively ratifies their detectability as conforming with the rules of the games or as violating them, which makes up to their accountability (Garfinkel, 1967; Mondada et al., 2020, 2021; Robinson, 2016). As Garfinkel (1963) argued, the conditions that amount to the intelligibility of game moves as an intersubjective achievement pertains to the normative organization of social order in general. When people engage in playing games, they design their actions in ways that are seen to be doing playing a particular game, thereby aligning with and reproducing the basic rules of the games. Basic rules are constitutive of games and provide the players with an expected procedure of the game, offering them similar environments and opportunities for making their actions. That is, basic rules establish the boundaries of what are the game-related actions, thus regulating and specifying the conduct of the players. Players design and accomplish their actions according to the rules, and they expect other players to do the same: Expectations are shared among all players (Garfinkel, 1963, 1967, 2019). To exemplify, basic rules include that the circles and crosses when playing tic-tac-toe are marked inside the squares (as opposed to on the lines) or that a penalty when playing football is kicked from the indicated penalty spot (as opposed to anywhere else). Parties to the game display and recognize that they share an understanding of the basic rules of a game as the game (see also, Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970; Livingston, 2008; Svensson & Tekin, 2021).

Players continuously monitor and negotiate the acceptability and meaningfulness of their game-relevant conduct (M. H. Goodwin, 2006; Liberman, 2013; Mondada, 2013; Tekin, 2021), especially in relation to their suitability to the rules of the games (DeLand, 2013; M. H. Goodwin, 1995; Hofstetter, 2021). Using the same rules in a game provides equal conditions for all players and thus embodies an aspect of “fairness,” even though not all rules establish the relevance of equity. In institutional interaction such as small case arbitration, the aspect of fairness may be embodied in the organizational aspects of the interaction, such as the organization of turn-taking (Burns, 2009), which also has been examined in the context of play (Hofstetter, 2021; Ivarsson & Greiffenhagen, 2015; Svensson & Tekin, 2021). In game play, fairness concerns the formatting of game-relevant conduct in accordance with the rules of the game. In Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 141) words:

Insofar as the players are committed to compliance with the basic rules that define the game, the basic rules provide for players the definitions of consistency, effectiveness, efficiency, i.e., of rational, realistic action in that setting. Indeed, actions in compliance with these basic rules define in games “fair play” and “justice.”

Focusing on board game interactions, Hofstetter and Robles (2019) demonstrated that players negotiate the appropriacy of their respective conduct that they claim and ascribe to each other, orienting to the fairness of the strategic aspects of their game moves. Examining players’ orientations to “sporting play,” the authors showed how the categorization of actions as being manipulative is accomplished through intention ascription of prior or ongoing courses of actions. Similarly, Evans and Fitzgerald (2016) discussed how team members in basketball training sessions manage the acceptability of aggressive behavior by way of establishing activity-bound actions with regard to membership categorization.

Yet the negotiation of game-relevant conduct is a more general phenomenon, especially concerning the moral order of the game. Players not playing according to the rules can be treated as lacking relevant knowledge, and violations can be solved by formulating and/or explaining the rules without invoking any moral implications. However, game conduct observably departing from the rules can also be seen as cheating, which implies being treated as knowing the rules and strategically breaking them to gain advantage. For instance, Karlsson et al. (2017) discussed how children negotiate rule violations in their game-playing sessions and argued that children manage the moral order of their activities by both dealing with moral transgressions and handling strategic advantages in the games. To categorize some actions as cheating or some players as cheaters thus constitutes interactional work to manage moral transgressions (C. Goodwin, 2000; M. H. Goodwin, 2006).

Drawing on this body of work, this article deals with how players in pétanque play orient to and treat emerging problems with a basic rule in the game: namely, that all players in one round of the game throw their balls from the same place—the throwing circle. We argue that the ways in which participants initiate the corrections of erroneous game conduct reveal their understanding and treatment of why players project to break the rule. Although players constantly monitor and inspect their respective game-relevant conduct as (un)acceptable with regard to the rules (M. H. Goodwin, 2006; Svensson & Tekin, 2021), issues of cheating can emerge. This is especially the case when a player who engages in faulty play is expected to know the rules of the game.

This article is organized as follows: First we explicate the details of the data used in this study and its setting. We then exemplify the characteristic organization of the sequences that make up the core collection of our analyzed instances, showing how players use and orient to throwing-from-the-same-circle as a basic rule of the game. The next two sections examine how the players’ mispositioning is corrected, occasioning two distinct sequential trajectories: Projectable violations of from-where-to-throw can be treated as making a mistake, or they can be treated as intentional wrongdoings, thereby as doing cheating. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings.

Data and setting

In this section, we introduce the pétanque game and some of the features the players manifest as its basic rules—that is, rules oriented to as necessary in order to be seen and recognized as doing intelligible game play (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992; Svensson & Tekin, 2021). The rules we describe are based on the players’ observable conduct, as this is reconstructed through the video recordings and the multimodal transcription of them.

Pétanque is a strategic ball game. It is played in two teams, and its basic material comprises a target ball, 12 throwing balls, a play field and a throwing circle (see Figure 1). The two teams consist of two or three members, who together dispose of six throwing balls. In this data, the player who starts the round usually throws the target ball and draws a circular shape on the ground with his or her feet (the throwing circle), from which all players throw their balls during that round of the game. The goal of the game is to place the balls as close as possible to the target ball. During the game, the teams alternate to throw their balls until they place a ball closer to the target ball or they have thrown all their balls. The team that has one of its balls closest to the target ball when all balls are thrown wins that round. The winning team gets additional points for each ball that is closer to the target ball than the other team’s closest ball.

Figure 1. Schematic explanation of the pétanque game.

The strategic aspect of the game relies on the progressively increasing number of balls on the play field, the balls’ relative positioning vis-à-vis the target ball and the possibility to place balls between the other team’s balls or to kick them away. This implies that the perspective of the play field is crucial to each throw. The players’ perspective of the play field is also essentially dynamic as it changes with each thrown ball, which accounts for the rule that all participants use the same throwing circle during each round of the game.

This article draws on a larger set of video recordings of naturally occurring amateur pétanque play in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, but it focuses on a subcorpus of about 1.5 hours of game play. In this subcorpus, the players engage in 22 games in different player constellations. The present study is based on the analysis of 205 instances in which the players are faced with the practical problem of locating the relevant throwing circle as they move to play. Among these 205 instances, we have identified four cases in which the players are treated as being mispositioned and are corrected, as they break a basic rule of the game. Adopting the analytic perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA, see Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1992), we will present one case from the group of instances in which the incipient player is correctly positioned and then discuss the problematic cases in depth.

The players in this data are more or less acquainted with one another and engage in game play in various constellations that change over the hours, as some players leave and others join. In the data, the players discuss their various degrees of playing experience with the game, which we address where and when it is relevant for the analysis. The participants use English as a lingua franca, but they occasionally resort to (Swiss) German, French, and Portuguese when interacting with particular persons. The recordings were made with three cameras: Two of them were positioned on a tripod providing a stable view, and the third was manipulated by a mobile cameraperson, adapting to the dynamic configurations of the game. The audio and video recordings have been transcribed following the conventions for talk and embodied conduct, respectively developed by Jefferson (2004) and Mondada (2018). When relevant, participants’ conduct is supplemented with figures, taken from the video data. In the figures, we have indicated the throwing circles that are consequential to our analysis as TC1 (throwing circle 1) and TC2 (throwing circle 2). We use pseudonyms when referring to participants in order to conceal their identities. All participants gave their informed consent to participate in this study.

Throwing from the same circle as a basic rule of the game

In professional pétanque play, players use prefabricated plastic circles to indicate from-where-to-throw, whereas the amateur players in our data draw circles with their feet on the ground at the beginning of each round. As a consequence, although they recurrently wipe out “old” circles, multiple possible throwing circles become identifiable on the ground during the game. In this way, locating and using the relevant throwing circle of the particular round of the game emerges as a practical problem that the players encounter each time they go to play. Player change is thus the routine sequential environment when players are facing the task of identifying and occupying the relevant place from which they should play.

This study is based on a collection of 205 instances of player change in the game. Among these, we have identified four instances in which the participants correct the location from which the next player projects to play, which indicates that this kind of rule breaking is relatively rare. Yet, prior to presenting the analysis of the sequential organization of these four cases, this section exemplifies the ordinary features of how players orient to the throwing circle as a constitutive feature of the game procedure in the environments of player change.

Excerpts 1a and 1b illustrate two instances of player change and the use of the throwing circle as an instruction of from-where-to-throw. Werner and Pedro play against Diana and Emma. We join the action as Werner draws a circle on the ground and selects his team mate, Pedro, to throw the first ball at the beginning of a new round in the game: Excerpt 1a | petanque_BS_1_050617_003349

Werner throws the target ball and then draws a circular form with his foot on the ground (3–5, Figures 2–4), before he walks away from it and explicitly selects his team mate, Pedro, to play next through “voilà monsieur” (6). In this way, he treats the drawing of the circle as procedural for beginning to play. After picking up one of his team’s balls (7, Figure 5), Pedro steps into the circular form on the ground (7, Figure 6) and throws (7, Figure 7). In this way, he treats the circle as an instruction from-where-to-throw and as a constitutive feature of the game. The other players tacitly accept Pedro’s position when playing as legitimate game conduct. Pedro’s throw is the first in the game, and his ball therefore becomes the closest ball to the target ball by default. Diana, from the other team, plays next. Excerpt 1b | pétanque_BS_1_050617_003349

After Pedro’s ball stops rolling, he completes his turn at play by stepping out of the throwing circle, making it available for the next player (Figure 8). The other players evaluate his throw with positive assessments (9–17), and Diana manifests herself as the next player and projects to throw by walking forward, picking up a ball, and stepping into the same circle from which Pedro has made his throw (Figures 9 and 10). In this way, she further establishes that particular shape—that is, that particular throwing circle—as the relevant place for playing in this round of the game.

Players systematically achieve the organizational aspects as rules of pétanque play in and through their embodied conduct. By continuously configuring their bodies and the game materials within the immediate physical environment as a play field of pétanque, including the inscribed throwing circles on the ground, they display their shared understanding of the activity they collectively engage in as playing pétanque and reflexively establish these procedural aspects as basic rules of the game.

Most of the time, players locate the relevant throwing circle without any observable and reportable problems. However, they may also project to play from another throwing circle than the one used in that round and get corrected by other players, which is further indicative of the throwing position as pertaining to a basic rule in pétanque. In the next two sections, we will see that the ways in which the corrections are carried out may treat the rule breaking either as making a mistake or as doing cheating, occasioning two distinct sequential organizations.

Treating the wrong position of a player as making a mistake

The previous section showed that in each particular round, players throw their balls from the same throwing circle as a constitutive feature of the game. This section examines the instances in which players treat other players as standing in a “wrong” throwing circle by mistake and correct their positioning, which prompts the player to move to the “correct” location in that round of the game.

Excerpt 2 shows the beginning of a new round in the game, in which Pedro and Werner play against Emma and Diana. Werner has thrown the target ball, drawn a throwing circle with his foot (“throwing circle 1” in the transcript), and moved away from it (cf. Excerpt 1). We join the action as Pedro picks up one of his team’s balls, while Werner, Diana, and Emma are talking about other things. When Pedro projects to play, he steps into another throwing circle (“throwing circle 2” in the transcript) than the one Werner just draw: Excerpt 2a | petanque_BS_1_050617_004720

Werner selects Pedro as the next player by uttering his name and pointing toward throwing circle 1 (4–5, Figure 11). Pedro first pursues his initiated walking trajectory, going behind Werner, but then he aligns with the instruction to play by turning around and walking back to the play field (8–12, Figure 12). Although Werner has asked him to play by pointing to the relevant throwing circle, Pedro displays some uncertainty by momentarily stopping and looking down (12, Figure 13), before stepping into another throwing circle: throwing circle 2 (Figure 14). This prompts Werner to suspend the conversation with Emma and Diana (14) to correct his teammate’s current location in throwing circle 2 through the spatial deictic expression “there” (16) and by again pointing to throwing circle 1 (Figure 15). Excerpt 2b | petanque_BS_1_050617_004720

By treating Pedro’s position as wrong, Werner exhibits that he monitors how the game progresses and displays knowledge about the rules and entitlement to ensure that they are followed. The minimal correction format, restrained to indicating the solution to the trouble, also treats Pedro as a competent player with regard to the rules and considers the mispositioning as a mistake. Pedro acknowledges and immediately complies with the correction by going to the throwing circle 1 and projects to throw (18, Figure 16), which Werner confirms as adequate by explicitly affirming it with “yeah” (18). This straightforward, minimal, and prompt correction format, essentially observed in instructive activities (see, Macbeth, 2004), further establishes Pedro’s initial positioning as a mistake. This corroborates research on other-corrections as being swiftly done (Kendrick, 2015), especially when they concern “factual” issues (Svensson, 2020). In overlap, Diana displays her own understanding of Pedro’s position as ambivalent with regard to the rules, as she explicitly questions which circle is the correct one (17), while repeatedly pointing to the two different throwing circles (Figure 15). Her recognition and interrogation of the two alternative circles explicates the players’ practical problem in identifying the relevant and correct throwing circle. It also displays that players can be knowledgeable about the game rules, but they might still have difficulties in applying them in particular game situations and, furthermore, that one needs to be seen as having some competence in an activity in order to commit a mistake in that activity (see Wittgenstein, 1958).

Albeit in different ways, both Werner and Diana orient to Pedro’s position, as the incipient player, as a constitutive feature of the game. By way of inspecting, correcting, and questioning his position, they treat him as projecting to break a basic rule, thereby reflexively establishing the relevance for all players to throw from the same circle. The side sequence, suspending the unfolding conversation to fix the problem of Pedro’s positioning (see Jefferson, 1972), shows that (a) the game play emerges as a multi-activity in which players switch between game-relevant embodied courses of action and conversational courses of action in situated ways; (b) the players monitor one another’s embodied trajectories and their accordance with the rules, reflexively establishing the game as a rule-governed activity; and (c) the players display their rights and entitlements to correct what they deem as unacceptable game conduct.

In this excerpt, we have described the sequential organization of correcting the wrong positioning of an incipient player. We claim that the correction, formatted with a pointing gesture and an indexical expression indicating the correct throwing position, shows that the correcting party treats the mispositioning as inadvertent—that is, as a mistake. The player’s initial hesitancy and subsequent immediate embodied compliance further validates this analysis.

The same problem of mispositioning when projecting to play emerges in the next excerpt. Yannick has just joined Emma and Diana’s team, as they play against Pedro and Werner. We join the interaction as Yannick has thrown the first ball in the game and just moved away from the throwing circle (throwing circle 1 in the transcript), and Emma is explaining to Diana that it is now Werner and Pedro’s team’s turn to play. As Pedro goes to play, he steps into another throwing circle (throwing circle 2 in the transcript), and gets corrected. Excerpt 3 | petanque_BS_1_050617_005320

During Emma’s formulation of who plays next (1), both Diana and Pedro have started to walk toward the balls grouped together on the ground, and they both pick up balls of their respective teams (Figure 17). As Pedro stands up and turns around, facing the direction of the play field, he requests a confirmation of whether it is his turn to play next (3), which Emma provides (5). As Diana moves away (6), Pedro takes a step into throwing circle 2 in front of him (Figure 18), treating it as the relevant place from-where-to-throw. Similar to Excerpt 2, Emma corrects Pedro’s positioning as she notices where he stands through the deictic expression (“this one,” 8) and by pointing at throwing circle 1 (7, Figure 19). Pedro, however, pursues his preparation to play without taking notice of the correction (9), which prompts Emma to lean forward with her upper body while maintaining the pointing gesture and to summon Pedro by calling his name (9–10), treating his lack of response as noticeably absent (Pomerantz, 1984). This time, Pedro attends to the correction by suspending his projection to throw and beginning to walk to the throwing circle that Emma points at (11). Furthermore, by producing the change of state token “ah” (Heritage, 1984) as he approaches throwing circle 1, he claims a revised understanding and implies that his prior positioning was a mistake (13, Figure 20). As in Excerpt 2, the minimally formatted correction, indicating the solution to the problem, treats Pedro as committing a mistake while being knowledgeable about the rules. This is further evidenced by Emma’s “sorry” (12), retrospectively apologizing for insisting on the correction. Whereas the insistence on the correction, thus on the mispositioning of the player, highlights the orientation to provide equal conditions for all players, the apology orients to the possibility of being heard as interruptive or offensive (Svensson, 2020). In this way, Emma admits the morally delicate aspect of doing correcting, while preserving her treatment of Pedro’s mispositioning as unintentional.

The treatment of a rule violation as a mistake is also observable in the next excerpt, in which Diana, Emma, and Yannick play against Werner, Brad, and Helen. We focus on the sequence in which Emma steps into throwing circle 2 instead of throwing circle 1 when it is her turn. We join the game just after Diana has made her throw and selects her teammate Emma to play next: Excerpt 4 | petanque_BS_1_050617_011800

Participants in social activities orient to the dynamic and situated ecology of each moment in interaction. In this excerpt—and in difference from Excerpts 2 and 3—the correcting party, Diana, is behind her teammate Emma when she initiates the correction (Figure 21). This explains why she summons her by name twice (5, 7) before she proceeds with the correction, which is done with a similar format to what was observed in Excerpts 2 and 3: by the indexical expression “here” (9) and pointing to the throwing circle 1 from which she has thrown (Figure 22). This is finely coordinated with Emma’s turning around and seeing the pointing gesture. She acknowledges and complies with what Diana is doing as a correction by starting to move toward throwing circle 1 (9). Although her initiated movement trajectory is clearly visible, Diana pursues her own walking back to throwing circle 1, repeats the indexical “here” (11, Figure 23), and then starts jumping inside the circle (Figures 24–26). This exaggerated indication of the correct place transforms the correction into a joke, treating Emma’s initial throwing position as a mistake. That Diana summons her teammate twice in order to accomplish the correction partly explains why she engages in the extra interactional work to turn it into something funny, which retrospectively downplays the corrective aspect. This downplaying is even more relevant, given that Diana has just thrown her ball and left the throwing circle and that when knowing the rule there should be no confusion about where to go to play next.

Only after Werner initiates laughing (13), Diana gives place to Emma by stepping out from the throwing circle and walking away. This is also closely coordinated with Emma, who immediately steps into it (13, Figure 27) and produces an explicit apology before she resumes her preparation to throw (14). In this way, Emma’s apology treats her own position as possibly violating a rule of the game (Robinson, 2004) and exhibits her prior position as a mistake (14). Werner, in turn, continues to laugh, and then retrospectively characterizes what happened as “too funny” (18) and as “a story too ticklish to tell” (20). In this way, he contributes to establishing a non-serious aspect of the episode in terms of the moral implications of rule breaking.

The examples discussed in this section follow a similar sequential trajectory: They involve players who project to play from a wrong throwing circle and are corrected by other players, who indicate the correct throwing circle used in that round of the game. The players also acknowledge their mistakes and comply with the corrections by moving into the legitimate throwing circle. These excerpts share several organizational features: (a) The corrections are initiated when incipient players project to play from a wrong throwing circle; (b) the corrections are formatted with various summons, indexical expressions, and pointing gestures, which are used to call the current player’s attention to the correct throwing circle (exceptionally, in Excerpt 4, the correcting party accomplishes the correction by using her whole body); and (c) the corrected players acknowledge the corrections by suspending their preparations and moving to the indicated circles to make their throws. All of the players engaging in the work of correcting treat the initial throwing positions of players as mistakes, which is reflexively established through the ways in which the corrections are formatted. The corrections present solutions to the noticeable wrongdoing of the players, as opposed to, for instance, soliciting accounts for why these mispositionings take place. The characterization of the problematic positionings as mistakes is further established through the corrected parties’ conduct, which involves not only swift compliances with the corrections but also receipts of new information and displays of surprise and embarrassment.

Treating the wrong position of a player as doing cheating

In the previous section, we showed that participants treat players who project to throw from the wrong throwing circle as being mistaken, because of not being aware of or not knowing the location of the relevant and legitimate circle from-where-to-throw. In this section, we will discuss the only case we have identified in the corpus in which projecting to break the rule concerning from-where-to-throw is challenged, questioned, and treated as an attempt to cheat. In Excerpt 5, Diana, Emma, and Yannick play against Werner, Brad, and Helen. We join the interaction as Werner steps into a throwing circle (indicated as throwing circle 2 in the transcript) and prepares to play: Excerpt 5 | petanque_BS_1_050617_012605

Similar to the cases discussed in the previous section, the incipient player’s (Werner’s) stepping into the wrong throwing circle and preparing to throw occasions a correction. However, in difference from the other instances we have identified and analyzed, the correction in this excerpt is initiated by the surprise token (“ah,” 2), indicating a noticing that departs from her expectations (see, Hayashi, 2009). She continues by soliciting an account for Werner’s position with a why-interrogative (“why are you playing there,” 2), while pointing to the throwing circle in which Werner stands (Figure 28). With this question, Diana holds Werner accountable for the position from which he projects to play, treats him as being aware of his position (Bolden & Robinson, 2011), and thus implicitly dismisses the possibility that he is in the wrong throwing circle by mistake. In this way, she also orients to the player’s knowledge and responsibility, categorizes him as an advanced player, and treats the event as unacceptable and subject to criticism (cBolden & Robinson, 2011). When Werner pursues his preparation to play without answering or orienting to Diana’s query, Emma aligns with the correction initiation (“we- yeah,” 4) and joins in correcting him by repeating the indexical directive (“back,” 4), a format comparable to what we have observed in the other excerpts. Diana, in turn, treats Werner’s response as noticeably absent and pursues her prior account solicitation by calling out Werner’s name (5). Only after Emma’s repeated directives and Diana’s call—through which they exhibit some moral indignation, treating Werner’s positioning as transgressive (Drew, 1998)—does Werner comply with the correction by looking down and stepping backward to throwing circle 1 (Figure 29). This indicates that he is aware of and knowledgeable about an alternative throwing circle located behind him, which also is the legitimate throwing circle used in that round of the game, and suggests that his initial positioning in throwing circle 2 was deliberately done.

As Werner steps into throwing circle 1, he responds to Diana’s initial question and the ensuing corrections by stating that he does “not care” (7, Figure 30). As such, although he complies with the correction in an embodied way, he verbally insists on not caring about where he makes his throw. By accounting for his prior incorrect position as not caring about it, he minimizes the implication of the correction for his game conduct and claims to dismiss the importance and relevance of following the rules. Furthermore, he resists the formal constraints set up by the why-interrogative (Stivers & Hayashi, 2010), which makes a particular kind of response sequentially implicative. The why-interrogative also has an accusatory tone (Bolden & Robinson, 2011; Koshik, 2003), which in this case becomes aggravated by the initial lack of response and the subsequent claims of carelessness. This lack of response is also noticeably different from Excerpts 2, 3, and 4, in which the participants display surprise and produce apologies. Whereas correcting through a direct indication of the correct position treats the player as not being aware and not knowing, correcting through a why-interrogative that solicits an account treats the player’s position as intentionally and deliberately done.

Werner’s account prompts a series of reactions, which also treat this account as problematic. Emma produces an outcry and a sarcastic laughter (9) while Diana verbally counters Werner’s carelessness or inattentiveness by claiming that “we do” (11). In this way, Diana rejects Werner’s categorization of individual players’ stances as relevant (“I don’t care,” 7), and promotes the categorization of the rest of the players as a collectivity (“we do care,” 11, 12, 15; Lerner & Kitzinger, 2007). This response not only refutes the acceptability of Werner’s account but also underscores the importance of playing according to the rules. Implicitly, it also treats Werner’s conduct as detrimental with regard to the other players. As Werner downplays the seriousness of the episode by chuckling and shaking his head (10), exhibiting a playful orientation to the situation (see, Glenn, 2003; M. H. Goodwin, 2006), Emma formulates another criticism of Werner’s account through a sarcastic comment concerning Werner’s stance toward caring about and following the rules (13). By referring to Werner’s previous preoccupation with emerging problems throughout the game play, she treats this as changing over time and thus not being credible. Werner nevertheless repeats this claim and accentuates the first-person pronoun (14), which counters Diana’s reference to the collectivity and prompts another round of “we do” (15) and “i don’t” (16) as Werner starts preparing to play.

Whereas this exchange concerns the relevance of playing in accordance with the rules (see also Svensson & Tekin, 2021), it also claims and imputes some particular practical reasoning to Werner’s prior positioning. Importantly, it stands in contrast to how the corrections in Excerpts 2, 3, and 4 unfold sequentially, as the players—including Werner himself—treat Werner as knowing that he was standing in the wrong circle. This is also what prompts Emma to make a sarcastic reference to a previous statement by Werner regarding the organization of taking turns at play in this team. Werner claimed that there is an agreed “distribution of labor” in his team in terms of who-does-what-when in and for the game, which relies on competence, and it is Werner who throws the last balls in his team due to his proficiency in the game (see line 19 in Excerpt 2). Emma reformulates his account by modifying it (“distribution of cheating labor,” 18). The recycling of his earlier talk enlarges his own claimed competence to include cheating—implying the need to be a competent player in order to do cheating—and characterizes Werner’s prior position as an intentional move that is part of his task to do just that. In this sense, cheating progressively emerges as a relevant categorization of action that is ascribed in and through the interaction (Levinson, 2013). The fact that we have identified only one instance in which an observable issue with not playing according to the rules occasions the accusation of cheating might be due to the uncommonness of cheating, but also to the social delicacy of doing such accusations.

Concluding discussion

The throwing circle is a constitutive feature of the pétanque game that establishes a relevant field of action for incipient players and makes possible and relevant certain kinds of actions at certain points in time, reflexively generating a dynamic relationship between the players’ bodies and the structured environment for organizing and playing the game (see also C. Goodwin, 2000; M. H. Goodwin, 2006). Players recognize the throwing circles as particular areas from where to throw their balls, they visibly and observably step into them to make their throws, and their walking trajectories, approaches and positions toward, in, and around these circles are monitored for their relevance in relation to ongoing game play. This is ultimately evidenced in the ways that players projecting to play from a wrong throwing circle are identified and corrected.

In this article, we have focused on the sequential environment of player change and made a systematic analysis of how players are seen as projecting to break the basic rule in pétanque concerning from-where-to-throw and are treated as either making a mistake or deliberately standing in the wrong place, the latter occasioning an ascription of cheating. The analysis shows that in the environments of rule breaking, the inspectability of game conduct as a potential instance of cheating is related to the progressively established, in situ categorization of players as more or less proficient in the game, and the situated awareness of the current game situation they are expected to have and exhibit. These attributions and claims of knowing and being aware are crucial for how the players characterize the wrong positionings as purposeful actions through which players exhibit their intentions to cheat.

The ways in which these corrections are initiated and accomplished in Excerpts 2, 3, and 4 treat players as making a mistake and being in need of instruction about a particular aspect of the game at a specific point in time. The correction format includes negation markers (such as “no”), address terms (usually the names of the players), indexical expressions (such as “there,” “here,” “this one”), and pointing gestures, presenting solutions to the problem of positioning in space. The corrections are situatedly treated as instructions, making relevant an alternative positioning in the form of moving into the correct throwing circle, and immediately complied with. Conversely, the emerging trouble in Excerpt 5 occasions a why-interrogative, soliciting an account for the erroneous positioning. In this way, the player is treated as knowledgeable not only about the rules but also about his then-current positioning in the play field, for which he is explicitly held accountable (Scott & Lyman, 1968). The absence of an acceptable account in the form of a transformative response—countering the very grounds of the question in terms of the interest that at least Diana was taking for granted (Stivers & Hayashi, 2010)—develops into a verbal duel in a progressive and playful manner in terms of opposing standpoints. It also occasions the ascription of the player’s action as doing “cheating labor.” This way of ascribing cheating—as an action relevant to the moral and social organization of game play—is akin to how morally relevant actions, such as blamings (Pomerantz, 1978) and accusations (Drew, 1978), are attributed in and through interaction: Persons initially establish the relevance of particular kinds of searches about what happened in the situated activities, and the responses to these searches occasion utterances that add up these action ascriptions. In this way, the ascription of cheating indicates the participants’ treatment of what happened, initiated by a surprise token displaying a noticed departure from the expectations and a why-interrogative seeking an explanation for it.

This contrasts with Goodwin’s findings (M. H. Goodwin, 2006, chap. 2), in which accusations of cheating in school girls’ hopscotch gameplay is made through straightforward categorizations of “cheater,” following some disagreement tokens or response cries. Goodwin argued that participants in games use the rules—and, in fact, “play” with the rules (in the sense of resisting to them and breaching them)—to build relationships and exercise doing conflict within and as a playful framework (M. H. Goodwin, 2006, p. 67). Conversely, the participants in this data refrain from engaging in open conflict and resort to minimal instructive corrections. This is indicative of the interactional delicacy of accusing people of cheating, which invokes a range of socially dispreferred claims, such as not having the ability to play fairly and even immoral connotations including being deceptive, dishonest, and so on.

Our analysis also underscores that the accomplishment of correcting emerging issues of embodied activities partly relies on who is doing the action as a constitutive aspect of these sequences—in this case, the incipient player: Whereas correcting a player’s throwing position can be initiated verbally by the “other” player(s), it can only be resolved by “self.” Even in Excerpt 4, when Diana enters the right throwing circle, the problem is not solved until Emma, the next player, steps into the correct throwing circle. By redoing the action, the corrected player complies with the correcting action as solving a problem of acceptability concerning a particular aspect of the given situation as intelligible and legitimate pétanque game play (for a discussion on the relationship between problems of “intelligibility” and “acceptability” in interaction, see Svensson, 2020).

Studying cheating from an interactional point of view presents obvious challenges. When successfully accomplished, cheating is designed to deceive persons and to manipulate the sequential implicativeness of courses of action in the sense that what should be done, or how something should be done, is replaced with an unnoticed alternative. Only when this aspect fails and the action is seen does it gain its observable and reportable character—otherwise, it remains unseen and unnoticed (Garfinkel, 1967). This explains why studies discussing cheating have primarily focused on this as a categorization of particular players (C. Goodwin, 2000; M. H. Goodwin, 2006; Karlsson et al., 2017) and/or how this category of players pertains to rules and morally legitimate play (Evans & Fitzgerald, 2016; Hofstetter & Robles, 2019). In this article, the explicit reference to cheating as a specific action is closely tied to the recognized competence level of the player whose game conduct is treated as problematic (see also, Jayyusi, 1993). In other words, the ascription of cheating is made relevant by the recognizable incongruency between the type of player (i.e., a competent, expert, advanced, and knowledgeable player) and the type of problem (i.e., identifying the relevant throwing circle). To treat players as cheating or as making mistakes is concerned with treating them as knowingly or unknowingly designing game-relevant conduct to be intelligible. These different treatments have resemblances to the differences between a wink and a twitch, as first discussed by Ryle (1968/2009) and then taken up by Sidnell and Enfield (2017): What is in a wink that is missing in a twitch could be glossed over as intentionality. The difference between the treatments of making a mistake and cheating has to do with the attributions of knowledge and intentionality to the players who are about to break a basic rule of the game.

Focusing on the sequential trajectories that projectable violations of the rule concerning from-where-to-throw occasion in pétanque play, this article shows and explains the systematic features of the observable variations in how these projectable rule violations are indicated, corrected, and resolved. Our analysis demonstrates and discusses the two interactionally distinct ways in which these projectable rule violations are attended to, treating them either as making a mistake or as cheating. Beyond the findings contributing to our understanding of how correcting practices address issues of claimed and attributed knowledge and intentionality of specifically categorized players, this study also presents some thoughts about correction as a perspicuous environment for dealing with issues of action formation and ascription.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the players for consenting to participate in this research study, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers and the editors for their useful and constructive comments. This study was supported by the FiDiPro project “Multimodality: Reconsidering language and action through embodiment”, funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of Basel.

Disclosure statement

There is no known conflict of interest.