Politeness and Insult in Computer Games – From a Pragmatic Point of View

In line with the principle of technological determinism, the linguistic context of computer games influences the (linguistic) behaviour of millions of active gamers. This makes it important to explore gamer communication thoroughly with respect to politeness, too. Indeed, the communication of gamers during games may also affect the users’ off-game communicative situations. The international literature suggests that the quasi-anonymity of online communication and the lack or weakness of sanction make it ruder than offline communication: it involves a higher number of insults or offensive personal remarks. The paper looks at this issue, in particular by a pragmatic – politeness-centred – investigation of a particular kind of online insults. The corpus of analysis is provided by “taunts”, i.e. inbuilt instructions triggering “mocking” remarks of League of Legends (LoL), a multiple-participant online arena game. The authors interpret in-game insults in the framework of speech act theory, the Cooperative Principle (conversational and politeness maxims), face threatening, and a matrix of aims and functions. The paper wishes to be a contribution to cyberpragmatics, a pragmatically-oriented branch of Internet linguistics.