Abstract
Dialogic interaction is a distinctive feature of Animal Crossing (AC), a social simulation video game developed by Nintendo. The language content that the player encounters is estimated to be “wider than all of the Harry Potter books combined” (Dai, 2020: 5) and is key to the goal of player immersion set forth by the game. Yet, little attention has been paid to it from a discourse analytical perspective. This paper examines lexical patterns and phraseology in AC dialogues with a view to investigate how social identities are constructed in the language used. The analysis, based on a corpus of dialogues transcribed by fans of the game, relies on corpus-linguistics methodologies and can be framed within the context of ludolinguistics, a growing subdiscipline of discourse studies (Heritage 2020). The study shows that emotional lexis is used to create an active and often heated interaction between player and non-player characters (NPCs). Even though NPCs are minimally characterized in terms of gender, age, or social status, the collocational analysis of “I” and “you” highlights two opposite personalities interacting in the dialogues: type A, lexically represented as extroverted, dynamic, and active, and type B, represented as kind, hesitant, and passive. The interaction observed appears therefore to reflect an asymmetric relation, aimed at involving the player, in which one character dominates and emotionally prevails on the other. Preliminary findings encourage to collect larger samples of AC dialogues in order to make more generalizable claims about how discourses around social identities are reproduced. References Dai, K. 2020. Multi-Context Dependent Natural Text Generation for More Robust NPC Dialogue. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard College. Heritage, F. 2020. Applying corpus linguistics to videogame data: Exploring the representation of gender in videogames at a lexical level. Game Studies, 20 (3). http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/heritage_frazer