Abstract
This research examines chatlogs from the first two weeks of The Elders Scrolls Online, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, analyzing the posts via statistical methods that demonstrate that grammatical correctness and message length relate to both the response rate of queries and the perceived ethos of respondents. Rhetorical style, reflected in message length and grammatical correctness, appears to play a role in the relative responsiveness to queries. Guild recruitment messages represented the most formal entries in our dataset, and requests for assistance were proportionally more grammatically correct than answers to those queries. Our findings suggest that players read the rhetorical situation of requesting information as distinct from various other types of interactions they might have in chat; also, measures of grammar and word count, when compared against a message’s topic, demonstrate critical awareness of audience and purpose, particularly when engaging in a highly persuasive rhetorical task.
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Sierra, W., Eyman, D. (2021). Ethos and Interaction in The Elder Scrolls Online. In: Colby, R., Johnson, M.S., Shultz Colby, R. (eds) The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63311-0_13
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