Metagaming and multiactivity: How board game players deal with progressivity

Games are ostensibly a special mode of interaction in which the ordinary rules and expectations of everyday life are temporarily put on hold. However, little research has examined how players themselves treat actions as being inside or outside of the game during their actual gameplay. This paper presents an analysis of face-to-face gameplay interactions in order to theorize, from players’ perspectives, a basis for categorizing activities as “outside”/“inside” the game, and what players treat as “metagaming” in situ. We use conversation analysis to inspect the multimodal ways in which gamers manage the complexities of multiple activities in the interactive context of tabletop board games. We show how players orient to the game’s ongoing progress while managing other concurrent activities.