This chapter applies principles outlined in previous chapters, especially Chapter 4 Videogame Talk, to understand group written interaction between Ethan Gamer and his fans, as visible on a public YouTube Minecraft gaming session. Unlike games such as FIFA where game objectives and points scoring dominate, Minecraft involves building digital environments, similar to Lego. The game software facilitates both written and spoken talk for the collaborative achievement of game activities, though survival and progression through levels are objectives in most Minecraft contexts. Analysis indicates that affiliative social talk, including reciprocal greetings, positive evaluations and smiley emoticons deployed by game participants promote a supportive gaming environment while also modeling prosocial affiliative gaming behaviours. Teamwork and problem-solving behaviours which scaffold game participants in their game play are also enacted frequently and reciprocally in text chat. These include requests or offers of assistance and advice giving related to the game-in-progress, including coordination of defensive actions as a result of a threat, which may require collaborative team work to progress the game. Both Ethan Gamer’s voice interaction and the group chat interactions promote a supportive prosocial environment which can be shared with all participants, including YouTube viewers.

Part of a wider study of family interaction, this chapter focuses on the interactional competence of a person living with dementia and some ways in which her independence is facilitated, and personhood validated, by her interlocutors. Drawing on a corpus of 15 hours of naturally occurring conversation, the study investigates the interactional practices of a woman diagnosed with dementia (Dana) in conversation with a variety of interlocutors including family caregivers, teenage grandchildren and community service providers. This chapter examines sequences of advice-giving, shared reminiscence and occasions of confusion. Dana first draws on a lifetime of expertise as a waitress to advise her granddaughter who has recently begun her first job; second, in a sequence of reminiscence, conversational partners describe a shared experience that Dana is able to assess and engage with despite potentially being unable to remember the details for herself; finally, the analysis shows how the actions of probing and testing can lead to interactional breakdown and confusion, but then note how Dana is able to recover from the situation by moving to a familiar topic and claiming epistemic authority.