Insulting with Emotes in Hearthstone: Examining use of communication in an Online Multiplayer Game - Dr Jonne Arjoranta

The Institute of Digital Games is thrilled to have Dr Jonne Arjoranta in this academic year's Game Seminar Series with his presentation Insulting with Emotes in Hearthstone: Examining use of communication in an Online Multiplayer Game - 6th November 15:00 at the Institute of Digital Games Lab

The Game Seminar Series: All facets of digital games

The Game Seminar Series (GSS) are special academically oriented lectures that are held approximately once a month at the Institute of Digital Games. They are open to the public, but targetted to give University of Malta students suplementary information and update them on current research in the field. Research and education doesn't happen in silos, especially not in the multi-disciplinary field of game design. The Seminars bring together academics, practitioners and enthusiasts with a common love for games of any type: digital, analog, urban, free-form, and can range from the highly technological to the extremely philosophical. There is sure to be something to interest you. If you'd like to be kept up to date on our GSS and other events we invite you to subscribe to our Newsletter.

The Seminar: Insulting with Emotes in Hearthstone: Examining use of communication in an Online Multiplayer Game - Dr Jonne Arjoranta

WoW animated emotes have been a popular manner of player-to-player interaction for some time now and these have been used in ways that the designers probably had never anticipated. In this seminar Dr Jonne Arjoranta examines player-to-player interaction in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). The game designers have attempted to limit what they see as negative interaction by forcibly limiting player-to-player social interaction. Based on an analysis of forum discussions, this empirical study illustrates how players utilize Hearthstone's restricted communication affordances for negative and insulting purposes, and how players negotiate their shared symbolic reality concerning this type of interaction, labeled "Bad Manner(s)" or "BM". The continuous debate over an issue which ultimately cannot be solved shows that players care deeply about the game and the surrounding culture. His study delves into player-to-player communication, and offers insight into game design from a social interaction point-of-view. By doing so, it connects with the larger questions of emergent negotiations of meaning related to human communication behavior in technology-mediated settings with designed limitations on communicative affordances.

The Expert: Dr Jonne Arjoranta

Dr Jonne Arjoranta holds a doctoral degree in digital culture from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is specialised in philosophical hermeneutics, game studies and internet cultures and is interested in playful politics, game hermeneutics and geek culture. His dissertation Real-Time Hermeneutics: Meaning-Making in Ludonarrative Digital Games deals with the structures of meaning in digital games. He has published, for example, in Game Studies, Games and Culture and International Journal of Role-Playing. He is an editor of the Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies.

*Please note that attendees to this event may be filmed*

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