Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Lucie Štolfová Pragmatics of Let's Play: Viewers and Their Engagement in Videos Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Jan Chovanec, Ph.D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor doc. Mgr. Jan Chovanec, Ph.D. for his patience, helpful advice and comments. I would also like to thank Mgr. Stefan Veleski, B.A. for his helpful comments and my family for their support. Table of contents 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 6 2 Defining the new media and pragmatics ........................................................................ 8 2.1 Cyberpragmatics and CMC ...................................................................................... 8 2.2 CMC genres ........................................................................................................... 11 2.3 Multimodality ......................................................................................................... 13 2.4 Phenomenon of YouTube ...................................................................................... 14 2.5 Let’s Play ............................................................................................................... 17 2.5.1 Let’s Play commentary ................................................................................... 18 2.5.2 Extra-linguistic reality and time ..................................................................... 21 2.5.3 Participation framework and pseudo-interaction ............................................ 23 3 Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 25 3.1 Data ........................................................................................................................ 25 3.2 Involvement techniques in Let’s Play .................................................................... 28 3.2.1 Non-verbal content ......................................................................................... 28 3.2.1.1 Eye contact and facial expressions .............................................................. 28 3.2.1.2 Eye contact and hand gestures .................................................................... 30 3.2.2 Language content ............................................................................................ 32 3.2.2.1 In-game text reading ................................................................................... 33 3.2.2.2 Use of pronouns .......................................................................................... 37 3.2.2.3 Rhetorical questions .................................................................................... 40 3.2.2.4 Vocative ...................................................................................................... 43 3.2.2.5 Opinion sharing ........................................................................................... 46 3.2.2.6 Fact stating .................................................................................................. 48 3.2.2.7 Sharing personal information ...................................................................... 52 3.2.2.8 Written commentary in Let’s Play .............................................................. 54 4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 57 5 References .................................................................................................................... 60 6 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 65 6.1 Extract and figure code names ............................................................................... 65 6.2 Video lengths ......................................................................................................... 66 7 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 67 8 Resumé ......................................................................................................................... 68 1 Introduction Games have always been part of our shared culture. Since we were small children, we have engaged in many games ranging from sports games over lawn games to board games, all with the intention to entertain ourselves. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, people have noticed a rise of new type games connected with the rise of electronic gadgets – video games. Playing video games has nowadays become favourite pastime activity for many children and adults. With the rising interest in playing video games, many have found a way to connect entertainment with earning money by playing games while recording it and posting it on the internet. But some have gone even further and have started recording themselves while playing video games for public entertainment, pushing the fun factor of the game into the background. These videos are recognised under the name “Let’s Play” (LP). Let’s Play is an emerging phenomenon of the past decade, which attracts millions of people a day. It owes its success to the websites that thrive thanks to user-generated content – websites devised for mass consumption. Thanks to that anybody can now watch other people playing any video game and enjoy the entertaining commentary during it. “Let’s Player’s” commentary is the most vital part people seek it for because each Let’s Player as a person is unique, and so is the commentary approach to the game. And that is what makes it so attractive. There has been much research on how media connect and create a relationship with their viewers, creating pseudo-relationships, however, concerning LP as a genre itself there has been paid very little attention to it in linguistics. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the presence of unique techniques that enable Let’s Players to involve and address their audience in Let’s Play videos. Furthermore I argue that these techniques also enable them to engage in a pseudo-relationship with the viewers. To 6 analyse the engagement techniques, I will approach the selected material building on Erving Goffman’s theory of participation framework and Anna O’Keeffe’s study on the creation of pseudo-relationships. These concepts will enable me to provide an overview of the involvement techniques used in Let’s Play videos and help me to distinguish them from other non-involvement material present there. Each technique will be analysed based on the audio and visual transcription of the events taking place in each video, accompanied by video screenshots when necessary. I will also show how the use of the techniques and subsequent commentary depends on the extra-linguistic reality Let’s Players experience, making the commentary and the technique use of each Let’s Player different. 7 2 Defining the new media and pragmatics In the first part of the thesis I will be dealing with defining the internet environment LPs are situated in and what linguistic approach I chose to analyse it with. Firstly, I will begin with a general description of which theories in pragmatics and “cyberpragmatics” (Yus 2011) are relevant to the application in the context of LP. Then, I will continue with the notion of genre and how it applies to LPs while emphasising a communication theory of multimodality. Then I will focus on a more specific description of the space LPs are located in, finishing by describing LPs themselves focusing on their unique features as an emerging genre of entertainment on the internet and how participation framework works to achieve interaction between the player and the viewer. 2.1 Cyberpragmatics and CMC Pragmatics, as a linguistic discipline, is concerned with the meaning of utterance analysable only inside “the context in which it is produced and interpreted [and it is the] most suitable for the analysis of everyday communication” (Yus 2011: 2-3). Despite this statement, there has been an ongoing discussion on what really pragmatics studies and what its scope is. Fetzer and Oishi in their book Context and Contexts (2011) define the issue of the scope as follows: “Pragmatics is fundamentally concerned with communicative action and its felicity in context …The heterogeneous nature of context and the context-dependence of the concept itself have made it almost impossible for the scientific community to agree upon a commonly shared definition or theoretical perspective” (p. 1). 8 This description shows how broad the scope of the discipline is and how challenging it is to define what it should include in its study. For that reason, there have been many scholars who provided various suggestions of what pragmatics should be concerned with. Among them, there is Mira Ariel (2010) who provides an overview of possible subject focus of pragmatics. She distinguishes two approaches – border seekers and problem-solvers. According to her, border seekers function as a kind of restrictive element, restricting inclusion of topics which belong to both semantics and pragmatics at the same time. However, grammar is explained in simple terms,