1 Avatars & interaction in gaming: Dysfunctional Interaction or a Practice of Players1

In Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) you act and react on other players avatars in ways that resembles face-to-face interaction. At the same time, the avatar-interaction is restricted in the technological-embedded environment. Research indicates problems concerning interaction inside these worlds, namely whether the systems resemble ordinary human face-to-face interaction in an adequate way. The assumed insufficient avatar-mediating interaction apparatus is in this paper used as a thinking tool. As a point of departure MMORPG’s is seen as having a history of social life, one that has created specific domains and discursive practices. Examples of avatar in-game text chat from initial research on a Role-Playing (RP) server in World of Warcraft (WoW) are used to illustrate such domain. This indicates that the textual interaction system built-in has done language expressions utterly crucial to be able to interact with other avatars and to know how to act in a competent way to others utterances. In relation with face-to-face interaction, avatar-to-avatar interaction in a RP server is done with the heritage of RP which demands competence of framing the interaction activity such as both in-game issues and RP could coexistence to let the other person now what you are doing here and now, a so called metaframing activity. Thus, the avatar interaction is not foremost seen as an insufficient environment for interaction, but instead as a domain in itself. Keywords