“This is like an RPG where you pick up friends along the way”

Abstract

This chapter examines how Millennial friends in their late twenties appropriate texts from video games they have played to serve particular social interactive functions in their everyday face-to-face conversations. Speakers use references to the video games Papers, Please, The Oregon Trail, Minecraft, and Role Playing Games (RPGS) to shift the epistemic territories of conversations when they encounter interactional dilemmas. These epistemic shifts simultaneously rekey formerly problematic talk (on topics like rent, money, and injuries) to lighter, humorous talk, reframing these issues as being part of a lived video game experience. Overlapping game frames are laminated upon real-life frames and are strengthened by embedded frames containing constructed dialogue. This chapter contributes to understanding how epistemic shifts relying on intertextual ties can shift frames during interactional dilemmas in everyday conversation, which is ultimately conducive to group identity construction.