Playing with identities: Negotiating coauthorship and role-playing interactions across game and metagame talk

Abstract

Role-playing games (RPGs) are interactionally complex activities in which participants use talk to coauthor narratives across player and character identities. Taking an interest in how talk and interaction mediate collaborative text production, I drew upon concepts and methods of conversation analysis (CA) to examine RPG play. Despite a breadth of CA scholarship that examines storytelling and gameplay, there is scant CA research that examines role-playing games. Contributing to the burgeoning program of education research on RPG literacies, I used CA to study how six adolescent boys negotiated game-based storytelling across their character and player identities. Findings illustrated how participants’ metagame talk worked to negotiate knowledge, fairness, relationships, and pacing during RPG play. Implications of this work call for youth and educators to develop a reflexive awareness of metagame talk to better negotiate storytelling and power relationships during game-based coauthorship.