Hearthstone deep dive: when game studies meets linguistics

In this episode we take a close look at the online collectible card game 'Hearthstone', which is part of Blizzard Entertainment's 'Warcraft' franchise, and three research papers which study the game in relation to language and communication. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe cover topics including:

• Humour, puns, and wordplay in Hearthstone;
• Linguistic differences between rule texts and flavour texts;
• The functions and forms of keywords and card names;
• Localization, with a focus on the use of Kanji in Japanese;
• Communicative affordances and limitations of the in-game emote system;
• Players' perceptions of "bad manners";
• Qualitative versus quantitative research approaches and the obstacles of research cultures;

Contains some strong (and other types of) language.

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Resources:

Arjoranta, J., & Siitonen, M. (2018). Why do players misuse emotes in Hearthstone? Negotiating the use of communicative affordances in an online multiplayer game. Game Studies, 18(2). Available here: https://gamestudies.org/1802/articles/arjoranta_siitonen.

Jacquin, J., & Xanthos, A. (2021). Evolution of linguistic complexity in Hearthstone: a resource and an example in linguistic game studies. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36(4), 907-918. Available here: https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_FA8B6BCC9CA2.P001/REF.pdf

Robertson, W. (2020). Unspeakable puns: kanji-dependent wordplay as a localization strategy in Japanese. Perspectives, 28(4), 606-624. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2018.1548628.

'German translations messy since last update', forum thread: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/hearthstone/t/german-translations-messy-since-last-update/126281.

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