The article I selected for this assignment was titled “dint u say that: Digital Discourse, Digital Natives and Gameplay”. This article was written by Jonathan Grantham and was published in the November 2010 issue of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research Volume 3, Number 1.
I selected this article because I have often been intrigued by the use of Leet speak in games. Leet speak is short for elite and refers to a specific type of dialog that develops among gamers within a specific game or video game genre. This dialog serves to identify new players from more experienced players. Leet speak uses in game references and coded symbols to represent other items besides the actual characters. For example the name Leet is often refereed to as 1337, where the 1 represents the letter l, threes represent e’s, and seven represents the letter t. Another example would be the phrase “hello gamers” which in leet speak would be “|-|3110 g4m3r5”. There are many different dialects of leet speak. Each dialect is specific to the game it is played in and sorts out inexperienced players as they typically cannot understand these commands. I find this dialog fascinating because it is developed among strangers who share in a unique experience through virtual worlds.
This article wanted to specifically focus on the dialect that is exchanged in game among digital natives specifically. The study had four hypothesis statements:
H1- Chat is reflected and impacts team dynamics
H2- When a leader is present, chat from the leader will promote and foster team goals.
H3- Chat during gameplay will be predominately serious.
H4- Chat will resemble structure and vocabulary typical of digital natives.
The experiment for this article included a game within a virtual world that was created specifically for this experiment. This virtual world contained puzzle pieces which were distributed throughout the virtual environment. There were sixteen players and four groups among these sixteen players. Of these players 5 were non-gamers. There were 36 puzzle pieces per puzzle and nine puzzles total. These pieces were dispersed among 100 buildings in the virtual world. The researchers studied the chat logs of each player after the game and treated all entered data (incomplete sentences, improper punctuation, isolated punctuation) as appropriate data.
The study found that the most successful group in the game was also the team that communicated the most. The team that performed the worst in the game exchanged the fewest amount of communicative messages. A break down of the nature of the exchanged messages showed that the most common message exchanged was strategic, then informative, collaborative, and finally questions. Typically the first person to start a chat dialog emerged as the leader of the group. The study also found that there was minimal evidence of vocabulary that is typically found in digital native communication processes such as instant messaging. The players used a dialect similar to spoken American English and typically didn’t use abbreviations or symbols.
I would use information from this article in my business education class for several purposes. The first purpose might be in teaching a unit about communication. I could share game messages with the students to see if they could recognize references or see where their might be inconsistency or confusion in the in-game dialog due to lack of facial expressions, body language, or tone. This lesson would serve to enforce the idea that some messages need to be made in a face to face setting and other messages are more appropriate in documented or electronic form.
I might also use lessons learned from this article if I were grading chat logs or diaries of students participating in an in class simulation. The article states that it is important for the users to communicate effectively during game play. One of the ways of achieving effective game play is through the use of sentence fragments because they are quick and easy to read and take up less space in the chat window. Therefore, I would allow my students to apply informal chat during simulated sessions.
The ideas within this article transfer to the business environment because coded language is used in this setting. Many jobs use linguistics that apply to specific job positions, tools, or inventory specific to their company on the job. This article proves that this type of communication is effective and still valid as a form of communication among coworkers.
I think that the study was a little too short to be conclusive about the linguistics of digital natives. The gameplay only took place for roughly two hours. This is hardly enough time for a significant change to occur because it limits the amount of time that possible coding can be created, practiced, and exchanged among players. I think that if the study used a more elaborate game that took place for a longer duration of time the results would be quite different.
