Is the avatar considered as a participant by the players? A conversational analysis of multi-player videogames interactions

International audienceVideogame interactions show a rather complex participation framework: players interact with present or absent players in and out of the game, directly or by avatars. The avatar, as fictional character which a player embodies in the videogame, has a central position: it is only through him and his actions that the player can act in the game. We therefore propose to question in detail the place the players of videogames give to the avatars. We will focus particularly on the organization of turn-taking in a complex and dynamic activity (Mondada, 2013), in which the participants constantly address their co-players as well as the different avatars in the game played by themselves. The space itself is constantly changing because the game goes on constantly. Our study is based on a collection of extracts from four French videogame interactions. The analysis revealed a particular form of turn-taking in videogame interactions (Colón de Carvajal, 2011; Piirainen-Marsh & Tainio, 2009), where the switch of turns of speech is highly dependent on the actions in the virtual world of the videogame. Thus, we have identified four forms of exchange as if a turn or action (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004) is addressed to: a) a player, b) an avatar, c) a player and his avatar together, and d) an unclear referent