In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition ( PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad’s notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players’ bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.
This study explores the efficacy of keystroke logging as a method to qualitatively investigate the synchronous processes of discursive interaction through mobile devices as individuals go about their everyday lives. Heeding cautions from Boase (2013) concerning software variability across mobile technologies, as well as challenges from Ørmen and Thorhauge (2015) to use log data for qualitative research, our study offers one such methodological roadmap for observing—from the software side—the complex entanglements of humans and mobile technologies as they engage in mediated discourse. Our study draws upon keystroke analysis from the tradition of writing process research (Leijten & van Waes, 2013; Wengelin, 2006), as well as posthumanist methodologies for observing cybernetic interactions (Giddings, 2014), and extends Farman’s (2012) argument that asynchronous forms of mobile communication, such as text messaging, are performatively synchronous, since interlocutors are pulled toward embodied copresence via the mediated space. In doing so, we present a preliminary study of methods for directly observing how discursive processes manifest in-the-moment as a complex flow between human, machinic, and spatial components in a network assemblage.
This study examines how text-based mobile communication practices are performatively constructed as individuals compose messages key-by-key on virtual keyboards, and how these synchronous performances (Mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. New York, NY: Routledge) reflect the iterative process of constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships. In doing so, this study reports on keystroke-logging analysis (see Writ. Commun. 30, 358–392) in order to observe how participants (N = 10) composed text as part of everyday mobile communication for the period of one week, subsequently producing 179,996 individual keystroke log-file records. Participants used LogKey, a virtual keyboard application made exclusively for this study to run on the Android mobile operating system. Analysis of keystroke log-file data suggest that timing processes of composing text-messages may differ as participants messaged with different categories of interlocutors, composed on different communication applications, and composed paralinguistic features—such as variants of Lol and Haha Thurlow and Brown, (Discourse Anal. Online, 2003, 1, 1); Tagg, (Discourse of text messaging. 2012, Bloomsbury, UK)—at different turn-taking positions. This evidence suggests that keystroke-logging methods may contribute to understanding of how individuals manage interpersonal relationships in real-time (Please reply! the replying norm in adolescent SMS communication,” in The inside text: social, cultural and design perspectives on SMS. (Norwell, MA: Springer), 53–73); (Beyond genre: closings and relational work in texting,” in Digital discourse: language in the new media. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 67–85), and suggests future direction for methodologically studying linguistic performances as part of text-based mobile communication.
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