Negotiating the Sharedness of Activities and Stances in Social Virtual Reality: Alignment and Affiliation in the Activity of Throwing Darts at a Co-Participant

Abstract Social virtual realities (SVR) as new arenas for online social interaction have been demonstrated to involve behaviors where users can experiment with embodiments and actions that exceed the capabilities of the physical human bodies and even norms of interpersonal interactions. In this study, we explore participants’ engagement in one such activity, throwing darts towards a co-participant’s avatar character in the context of SVR. We analyze a 16-minute video-recorded case from a quasi-experimental setting where two participants explore the SVR environment Rec Room together. We direct specific focus on the dart-throwing activity that occurs during the case. Using the method of multimodal conversation analysis, our study attends to the accomplishment of this activity as well as the changes and alterations in it, through the two facets of human cooperation, alignment and affiliation . The case reveals how the audible and embodied resources afforded by the avatars and the SVR setting work—or do not work—in the negotiation of the level of sharedness of the activity as well as the stances the participants indicate towards the activity. We show how the participants may jointly participate in the activity on the level of action (i.e., in terms of alignment) while having diverging emotional stances towards it (i.e., in terms of affiliation). Based on these observations, we discuss the possibilities of distinguishing between these two facets of human cooperation in the context of SVR and how they help to understand experimentative user interactions in these environments in general.