A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis of the Impact of Impoliteness and Aggressive Language in Violent Online Games on the Players

Abstract

This study attempted to discover and analyse the impact of violent online games on the players’ language and behavior as well as how these expressions might harm, intimidate, and damage others’ face. It is worth mentioning that online games become the young’s playground where they interact with others and may adopt a certain type of language and behavior.  As players engage in a competitive fight of characters, they use certain communicative styles to express their feelings and emotions, including impolite expressions. Hence, this paper looked into these expressions, their responses to those expressions, and the reasons behind them. In addition, this study identified whether there is any impact in choosing these impolite expressions. Moreover, these violent gaming can provide a good field of investigation because impoliteness is widely occurring in such situations, through which people from various cultures, ages and genders come in contact to fight each other, be uncivil, and criticize and damage the other’s face. Moreover, these games may even encourage certain harmful impolite terminology and aggressive behavior to inter the players ‘repertoire and become the language of everyday use. In gathering the data, impolite expressions were collected by participating in some battles involving abusive and impolite words. Based on the results obtained, the study reached some conclusions that Culpeper’s (2005) and Spencer-Oatey’s (2002 and 2005) models are applicable in the context of violent online games. There is a big tendency that young people adopt and use various impolite expressions according to their gender and their relations for many reasons. In addition, it is widely recognized that most players have limited politeness competence and directly reply to others’ impolite language with hostility. Finally yet importantly, positive impoliteness strategies are used more than the other models, whereas quality of face was the most damaged one in Spencer-Oatey model.