2.1 Digital games for change

The call for this special issue indicates that the emergence of digital games in education evokes a shift from information-processing and transfer models of learning towards more participatory and dialogical views of interaction. Studies of video games for learning and the serious games movement have gained momentum as learning scientists have exposed the failures of traditional schooling to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills (Prensky, Reference Prensky2001, Reference Prensky2006) while demonstrating how video games can shape new literacies (Gee, Reference Gee2003) and can situate players as participants in online Communities of Practice (CoPs) that promote, for example, mathematical thinking (Steinkuehler & Williams, Reference Steinkuehler and Williams2009) and scientific habits of mind (Steinkuehler & Duncan, Reference Steinkuehler and Duncan2009).

Interest in video game studies in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has recently grown. However, we found a scarcity of literature that considered either the affordances of the constellation of resources for L2 development that exist in the virtual worlds of games or the processes by which the ecosocial environments of games extend learning opportunities (Young et al., Reference Young, Slota, Cutter, Jalette, Lai, Mullin, Simeoni, Tran and Yukhymenkoforthcoming). Thorne (Reference Thorne2008) reported that the WoW environment is a site for engaging and meaningful communicative activities. Players’ plurilingual conversations, collaboratively assembled repair sequences, and distributed opportunities for the performance of expert roles, were also reported. Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio (Reference Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio2009) used conversation analysis to study the process whereby games provide multimodal resources for situated language learning and documented how learners become competent players as a result of participation and apprenticeship in the collaborative gaming environment Final Fantasy. Additionally, Zheng et al. (Reference Zheng, Young, Wagner and Brewer2009) analyzed empirical data using sociocultural and ecological psychological perspectives and concluded by identifying a new construct, negotiation for action, that can more fully help us understand native and non-native speaker collaboration in the virtual environment of Quest Atlantis. These studies not only whetted our appetite for understanding what is going on when language learners are playing these games, but also contributed empirical significance for a promising L2 instructional approach featuring language use in digital vernacular contexts via participation and socialization in online interest communities, 3D virtual environments and online games (Thorne, Black & Sykes, Reference Thorne, Black and Sykes2009).

Given the evidence provided by the literature combined with our own gaming experiences, we strive to ask more sophisticated questions addressing the processes in which language learners engage, the type of projects they work on, and the genres they adopt and use in gameplay. An orientation towards input, competencies, and cognitive load fails to provide a framework to answer questions relevant to processes. In contrast, distributed, ecological and dialogical perspectives extend internal views to incorporate external representations, material artifacts, and social norms in sense making (Hutchins, Reference Hutchins1995; Thibault, Reference Thibault2011). Integrating analysis of current discourses on common practices in virtual world communities as they were reported in Second Life language teachers’ blogs, Zheng and Newgarden (Reference Zheng and Newgarden2012) developed a theoretical explanation for how digital games have challenged us to rethink language learning and described how ecological, dialogical and distributed perspectives can provide the basis for a new learning landscape in which learners, instructors and the environment coexist, co-design and coact. Reconceptualizations of coaction vs. transfer, affordances vs. input, learning environments vs. tasks, learning to be vs. learning about were suggested to broaden the repertoire of language learning constructs. Addressing the distributed and ecological nature of virtual world technology, the authors suggested a new 3CsFootnote ² for classical SLA to consider, namely, caring, coaction and community of being/becoming.

2.2 Coaction

Literature on interaction and communication has recently been defined in depth with respect to coordination (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, Reference De Jaegher and Di Paolo2007) and collectivized interaction (Reed, Reference Reed1996). Coaction refers to coordinations between interacting parties that are seemingly synchronized and collectivized (Cowley, Reference Cowley2011; Wegner & Sparrow, Reference Wegner and Sparrow2007). “Coaction occurs when one agent's full-bodied and linguistic action is influenced by or occurs in the context of another agent's – and together they do something that is not fully attributable to either one alone” (Wegner & Sparrow, Reference Wegner and Sparrow2007: 18). This coupling demands negotiation for meaning and action to coordinate functionally on a task at hand. The process of gradual alignment moving from disruption, collision or communication breakdown to seamless coaction is relevant to the research questions under investigation in the current study. The communicative projects assigned with the keyword “coaction”, illustrate the process of alignment. From an ecological psychological standpoint, language is a perception, action and caring system, in which speaking and listening “demand an ongoing commitment to directing others and being directed by them to alter one's attention and action so that movement from lesser goods (i.e., one's present position, achievement, or goal) to greater goods (i.e., values) is realized” (Hodges, Reference Hodges2007b: 599). Ecologically, talking or doing something together is a form of way-finding as both parties utilize each other's utterances, sounds, syntax, semantics, postures, movements, etc., as affordances to come up with something that is not recognized in either party's individual contribution (Hodges, Reference Hodges2007a). Thus, coaction is not equivalent to paired group activity, in which highly coordinated behavior may not be necessary to accomplish an instructional objective; but rather it is a functionally coordinated process that may have an unexpected outcome. In other words, in coaction, creativity in language and action is promoted. Though coaction is different from Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the ZPD in learning, coaction between newer players and more expert others in the WoW CoP is a primary mode for meaning making. We want to emphasize that meaning is constructed though coaction, but construction of meaning does not always involve coaction.

Zheng and Newgarden (Reference Zheng and Newgarden2012) synthesized and operationalized coaction in avatar-based virtual worlds as interaction that is collectivized as agents coordinate to pursue shared values, and as the means by which distributed meaning making emerges in languaging. The authors proposed that coaction manifests in two ways in virtual environments: (a) the coaction of player and avatar as together they perceive and act to accomplish virtual and real life goals on multiple timescales, and (b) the coaction of players as they coordinate to kill while caring for others. Coaction has both visible and invisible embodied aspects that depend on alterity, which Linell (Reference Linell2009) describes as other orientation that acknowledges difference and potentially, tensions and contradictions.

2.3 Languaging, agency and values realizing

The distributed view of language rejects that language is essentially symbolic and denies that brains contain representations of verbal patterns (linguistic forms). “Rather, language is social, individual, and contributes the feeling of thinking. Simply, language is distributed” (Cowley, Reference Cowley2009: 495). In the DLG framework, where language is conceived in terms of first-order (real time conversing) and second-order (symbolic, distanciated, conceptual forms of written language) domains (Love, Reference Love2004), it is useful to consider first-order dynamics as languaging. We trace languaging to Maturana (Reference Maturana1988), who suggested it occurs when people coordinate actions recurrently in the praxis of socioculturally established activities of daily life. Linell (Reference Linell2009) adopted the term languaging to refer to linguistic actions and activities in actual communication and thinking. When we language in social situations, we do not encode or decode structural meanings and cultural norms, we use “our senses, to concert activity while orienting to second-order constructs” (op.cit.: 499). In ecological terms, agents’ languaging behaviors are not caused by stimuli, rather, it is the affordances, which are opportunities for action in the ecosocial environments, that can motivate agents to act (Reed, Reference Reed1996) and coact (Zheng & Newgarden, Reference Zheng and Newgarden2012; Zheng, Reference Zheng2012). Verbal language may not be required during languaging until there is a need to negotiate for meaning, therefore, languaging encompasses both non-verbal actions and verbal activities.

The ecological psychological concept of affordance expands cognition to both perception and action, that is, agents engage in both meaning-making and values-realizing activities in goal-seeking behaviors (Gibson, Reference Reed1979; Reed, Reference Reed1996). Meaning-making only partially explains languaging activities, in that agents take effort to pursue information and knowledge. To complete needs and move forward with goals, that is, to accomplish “way-finding” (Hodges, Reference Hodges2007b), agents also realize values, which according to Reed (Reference Reed1996), is what organizes an action system. In this article, we are particularly interested in how WoW players deploy their agency in organizing their actions and interactions in game play. Adopting values-realizing theory, which concerns how agents make a conscious choice among multiple values at play in any given moment of action and interaction, enables us to reveal a dynamic pattern of languaging across timescales. This dynamic pattern is called periodicity in Baldry and Thibault's multimodal terms (2006), referring to “structures that repeat themselves in a patterned way and that allow variation within a fixed framework” (op. cit.: 26). We further explain this concept in the methods section.

For second language learners immersed in the L2 culture, the values-realizing process is integrated with learning to take skilled linguistic action, which as Cowley (forthcoming) explains is “…concerting activity under material and cultural constraints. As they (L2 learners) do so, they link linguistic patterns (including ones shown in grammars and dictionaries) with affect, artifacts and social skills.” This is accomplished as learners increasingly orient to situation transcending practices (Linell, Reference Linell2009), the sociocultural histories of individuals and languages that constrain and shape local dialogical interactions. Analytically, there are two aspects of situation transcending practices in dialogue: (1) participants’ past knowledge, thinking and experiences are connected; (2) participants orient to framings of genres and sociocultural and institutional traditions. Therefore, the saliency of values realized within each interaction is dependent on the ongoing dialogical relationship development between participants and environmental constraints, which leads to the selection of certain values from among the heterarchical array of potential values available.

Languaging is a useful construct to understand action-oriented approaches to language learning as, for example, is illustrated by the Common European Framework. By emphasizing the biological, embodied, dialogical, and socioculturally defined and situated nature of language, which we rely on to realize values and enact our lives as we coordinate with others, the term languaging captures the multidimensionality of linguistic interactions and integrates language, thought and actions.

In sum, the distributed language approach we employ stresses the “centrality of coacting agents who extend their worlds and their own agency through embodied, embedded processes of languaging behavior rather than uses of an abstract language system” (Thibault, Reference Thibault2011: 211). Agency and co-agency involve caring and enkinesthetic (reciprocal affective neuro-muscular flow felt between agents in dialogical relations) coordination among coacting agents (Stuart, Reference Stuart2011), which is deeply values-realizing and dialogical (Hodges, Reference Hodges2009). We provide a rationale in the Methods section for using multimodal analysis to illustrate the complexity of a sequence of gaming activities in which players engage in first-order languaging to coordinate their verbal interactions and actions (Reed, Reference Reed1996), by orienting to second-order forms and artifacts such as game texts, computer-generated non-player characters (NPCs), maps, or inventory items. We also explain why we use Communicative Activity Types (CAT) to frame our analysis and to describe how the WoW environment affords a rich, diverse, and agentive ecological niche that is different from classroom environments.

4.1 WoW communicative activities

Within this episode, thirteen communicative activity sub-types were identified. Using Transana's keyword percentage map, we ordered the CAs in range from most to least frequent (Figure 3). The first three most frequent CAs among these are Coordinating, Gameplay knowledge distributing and Reporting on actions, which together account for nearly half of all CAs. Dynamic languaging is largely for figuring out what to do and how to do it together (Coordinating), sharing information about the game in order to help others play better (Gameplay knowledge distributing), and informing others about what has taken place when players are acting independently but still oriented toward some shared goal (Reporting on actions). It is likely that the next two most frequent CAs, Negotiation of meaning and Understanding other's perspective, are in support of the first three predominant CAs mentioned above, but in this episode they are primarily involved with learning the L2 by taking skilled linguistic action in WoW play.

Fig. 3 Communicative Activities (CAs) from Most to Least Frequent

4.2 Periodicity of communicative activities (CAs) across time and space

In terms of the periodicity of CAs, there are different frequencies across the major locations of play (Figure 4). The patterns of CAs in Westfall (Hops Quest) (Figure 4, Area 1), where players spent 65% of the episode, are not as strong. In fact, there is lower frequency in all keyword categories (CAs, Coaction, Instructor Support and Values Realizing), with the exception of the category Actions, which were similarly distributed across all locations. This can be explained in part by the technical adjustments affecting the Skype call that occurred at the beginning of gameplay.Footnote ⁵ Although technical problems will arise, we view them as adding another type of communicative project to the languaging dynamics.

Fig. 4 Communicative Activities across locations.

From the start of the final 17 minutes of this episode, the players embarked together on a new adventure, beginning with the communicative projects that make up the collection called “The Dark Road to Darkshire” and concluding with CPs that occur in the town of Darkshire. It is clear that certain of the most frequent overall CAs became even more dense during this journey along a dark, deeply wooded road. Gameplay knowledge distributing, Reporting on actions, and Responding with language or action occur more closely together beginning with the group's travel on the road to Darkshire. Gameplay knowledge distributing occurred just 10 times during the Hops quest, but 18 times within the final 17 minutes of play (Figure 4, Area 2). CAs in this portion of play allowed players to share previous game experiences (of being attacked and killed), to learn how to use features of the game interface (camera perspective, and the mini-map) and to locate and use Non-Player Characters (NPCs) for armor repair and flight to other locations. In the final location, the city of Darkshire (Figure 4, Area 3), there is a concentration of these CAs: Coordinating, Expressing need, Distributing gameplay knowledge, Understanding others’ perspective, Reporting on actions, Seeking help, and Responding with language and/or action.

4.3 Coordination of killing and caring

Looking at a range of keywords from categories of Actions, CAs, Instructor Support and Values Realizing, ordered according to their association with either Killing at one end of the spectrum and/or Caring along the other end (Figure 5), it is clear that there were far more “neutral to caring” things happening in this episode, arguably a typical episode in this regard, than there were “violent” acts or even intentions.

Fig. 5 Communicative Activities across locations.

In fact, the Group 1 keywords, all Actions keywords, are the only overtly violent activities; Group 2 represent more individualistic activities, while Group 3 denote activities that are more other-oriented and Group 4 are activities that directly involve caring for others. In terms of values flux, the Killing and Caring map (Figure 5) reveals that over the timeline of the episode, whenever killing was occurring, there were synchronously ongoing language and actions that were of the everyday sort, that afforded multiple values realizing, that could be supported by an L2 instructor, and that frequently involved shifts of perspective and caring acts. This is definitely not what many non-gamers would imagine happens in an ostensibly “violent” role-playing adventure video game like WoW.

4.4 Multi-scalar values realization

We next look in detail at a single CP that involves both Killing and Caring. This is one of the typical CPs that demonstrated players’ strong heterarchical values realizing across overlapping timescales. We look at each of four nested projects and discuss how players engage in languaging to coordinate during a 67.5 second period of play. Figure 6 demonstrates all the keywords assigned to this CP. Using the analytic concept of nested CPs and sub-nested CPs, and the concept of situation transcending practice (STP), we will reveal how the action agendas of killing and caring were accomplished.

Fig. 6 Keywords assigned to CP illustrated in Figures 7A-H.

This CP (Figures 7A–H) was initiated by the player Gwo's report of his imminent death as a Harvest Reaper overcame him. On the timescale of the episode CAT (of players in a guild leveling their avatars), both Gwo and Sev realized the value of Helping others. In the first nested CP (Figures 7A–C), Gwo reported in Line 1: OK, I'm dying here almost. After letting others know his fate, realizing the value of Taking care of self, he chose to wait quietly during almost the entire remaining part of the project (0:21:05.9—0:22:03.5), allowing the others to continue with the Hops quest, thereby coacting without language for a brief time.

Fig. 7 (A–C) Nested CP1 of Lovol Responding to Gwo's Reporting of his Death.

The other players Sev, Lovol and Jil, the instructor, all oriented to Gwo's report of death, responding in different ways to realize the caring value of Noticing others’ condition. Sev sought to confirm whether Gwo actually died, since she apparently didn't see the corpse of his avatar at first (see Figure 7A in Nested CP1). Lovol, who had been killed himself by Defias bandits just seconds earlier, responded to Gwo with language (Lines 6, 9) and action (Line 10) in rapid sequence to realize the overarching value of Helping others. Lovol assured and informed the less experienced players, Jil and Sev, that he could revive Gwo (because he was a priest/healer, a character class with the ability to bring fallen players back to life) (Line 6). This CA of Distributing gameplay knowledge serves as a sub-nested project, and also as an STP that supports the main CP of Lovol helping Gwo.

After reviving himself (Taking care of self), Lovol ran to Gwo, ignoring that he aggravated a Harvest Reaper as he did so (Figure 7C and Line 10). Lovol's choice of avatar, player role as a healer, and name (the palindrome pronounced as “Love All”), initiated certain trajectories for participation in game play that opened up affordances for helping others in very specific ways, requiring specific game knowledge, skills and languaging that are perceptually salient in this nested CP and evident across the timescale of this episode as well as throughout the 15-week academic course.

In Nested CP2 (Figure 7D) Jil and Sev continued to pursue game goals of the overarching CA of leveling and the more immediate timescale of the ongoing Hops quest. After hearing that Lovol would revive Gwo, Jil and Sev's actions were directed toward looting the kill. Sev looted a Harvest Reaper and found the last hops she needed, Reporting her actions to the others to let them know she had finished the quest and simultaneously Coordinating actions in anticipation of making the next group move.

Fig. 7 (D) Nested CP2 of Jil and Sev's Individual Action in Questing.

In Nested CP3 (Figures 7E–F), Sev assisted Lovol in fighting off another Defias bandit. Telling Lovol to run away to save himself, she realized the values of Noticing others’ condition and Helping others, while communicating with her language and actions that she was confident that she could finish the enemy off on her own. Even in this short exchange, Sev's engagement with many of the game's core values (achieving goals, working together, being a strong player) is clear. She also demonstrated her alignment with the values of collaborative group play and community that underpinned the WoW course, and across multiple scalar levels, she realized the value of leadership (as defined by Leading others) through languaging in a way that honored the conventions of L2 discourse while effectively putting herself in an agentic position. She did not merely follow linguistic rules and patterns, she acted pragmatically in order to coordinate others while indicating concern for their well-being.

Fig. 7 (E–F) Nested CP3 of Lovol and Sev came to rescue Gwo by fighting the Harvest Reaper.

In the final CP (Figures 7G–H), Sev's initial CA of asking about the other players’ health in Line 19, “Oh, one is alive let's go there. Is everybody healthy?” (Noticing other players’ condition) was a move toward assessing the group's readiness to go on together while perpetuating her role of Leading others. At this moment, Gwo enacted the value of Having fun by choosing to remind the group, in an amusing way, that they seemed to have forgotten about his lifeless state, “Ummmm, someone is dead” (Line 20). The laughter that ensued reveals a unique affordance in WoW for players in coaction that we identified as realizing the value of Enduring suffering together. Even in a situation as grim as death, coaction created a sense of sharing in that fate together, and being able to laugh in the face of suffering was a welcome affordance for community building. Telling a joke in the context of an L2 situation requires skilled linguistic action, and Gwo accomplished this in an embodied and memorable way that relied on his orienting to the other players and being in coaction with them.

Fig. 7 (G–H) Nested CP4 on Laughing Away Death

6.1 Game affordances for coaction and multiple values realizing

Quests are among the most valuable WoW affordances to exploit when we consider adopting this or similar games as L2 learning environments, because questing can promote in group play an immediate sense of “we”, a need for coordinated effort, communication and coaction. Quests are motivating because they reward the player with experience points, useable items and gold in the game, and the social capital generated by helping friends and other players. They are also important in engaging players with the backstory of the game, and giving players reasons to take various roles and venture into new and unknown areas. In the process of orienting to quest missions and tasks in reading and carrying out quest assignments, players create a shared history, form future goals, become participants in the culture of WoW, and extend their friendships with players they know in their real lives.

Are the types of CPs and CAs that are required and routinely practiced in WoW relevant to L2 learners’ needs and values-realizing outside of WoW? In fact, many of the same action-oriented dialogs are likely to be found in ESL textbooks, presented and practiced in the form of task-based activities, i.e., initiating or responding to questions, seeking help, negotiating meaning of unfamiliar words, expressing need, asking for or providing locative information, apologizing, and greeting and leave taking forms of talk. In WoW gameplay, however, these languaging activities arise organically, in the natural course and contexts of questing and virtual world exploration. Unlike most task-based activities in classrooms, gameplay activities have determinate game-changing outcomes and recalcitrant characteristics of reality (materiality of game artifacts and settings) that invite realistic participation and attitude in comparison to make-believe role-plays (Velleman, Reference Velleman2008). Combined with the mobility of the avatar, these afford both exploratory and performatory actions (Reed, Reference Reed1996), which further develop players’ ability to anticipate and act adaptively in future situations (Zheng, Reference Zheng2012).

On the other hand, certain CPs involve collectivized effort that is tied to game objectives or a quest, for example, coordinating, reporting on actions, distributing (gameplay) knowledge, and asking about others’ perspective. Some of these CPs and CAs may be less likely to be found in classroom practice or texts; however, we argue that they are essential languaging skills for coaction. Moreover, they are essential skills for participating in diverse settings where collaboration, information sharing and multiple perspective taking are valued, that is, in most academic, professional, and/or multicultural CoPs.

6.2 Affordances for languaging and agency

Player/avatar coaction in WoW provides a new arena for languaging, one that can be less threatening and in which different aspects of identity can be explored and created. WoW's open-ended design allows players to define their own trajectories for learning, achievement, and participation; this is experienced as the co-agency of the player and avatar. This benefits language development because of the empowerment of authorship (Wegner & Sparrow, Reference Wegner and Sparrow2007) and because these experiences are likely to be more personally meaningful than those in which a learner has no sense of influence or control. The co-transformation of player and avatar through gameplay is a complex, creative process in which language plays a central role.

6.3 Designing affordances for participation in L2 networks

Recognizing the variety of affordances for language pick-up through coaction available in WoW and other digital games has implications for both instruction and design of learning environments. We propose that L2 instruction should go beyond a learner-centered approach to leverage the affordances for values realizing through learner participation in L2 social networks that can be linked to MMOG play. Collaborative play that engages coaction in-game also builds social capital among players in the real world. Playfulness, certainly a social value in the game, affords experimentation in language and action that is relatively risk-free. Gameplay can be thought of in terms of cultural immersion that includes picking up the native discourse of game language. Instruction should support L2 learners in engaging and cooperating with diverse others. The instructor's role is to manage the dynamics of gameplay and languaging, promote meaning-making and coaction by tuning attention to distributed resources, multiple perspectives and shared goals, and helping learners recognize how gameplay experiences reflect and transform real-life languaging practices, learning, and values realizing as they participate in new and extended L2 communities.