Fast Talking, Fast Shooting: Text Chat in an Online First-Person Game

How actively do users chat, with whom, about what, and how coherently, when they are shooting enemies and dodging bullets in a fast-paced virtual gaming environment? This paper reports on a study of public text chat in BZFlag, an open source capture-the-flag game in which user avatars are tanks. Chat data were analyzed using methods of content and discourse analysis, including analyzing the coherence of extended conversations. The findings reveal that public chat is used actively in BZFlag, primarily to react to and negotiate game play, and that extended conversations occur intermittently and are surprisingly coherent. Implications are discussed for multitasking, classifying multiplayer online games, and enhancing the chatability, or chat usability, of first-person shooter game designs.