This article examines the relationship between the role component of players in gaming discourse and the ways it is verbally realized. The theses outlined in the work complement the linguo-personological theory of virtual identity by analyzing this concept within the framework of game communication. The relevance of this chosen direction is due to the underdevelopment of issues related to role determinism and verbal representation within gaming communities. The main focus is on the dependence of the choice of methods and strategies of speech behavior on the role affiliation of participants in game interaction. The subject of research is the verbal mechanisms of role representation of the linguistic identity in gaming discourse. The objective of the work is to identify and systematize typical role models of gaming personalities and the corresponding ways of speech behavior. The theoretical basis of the research consists of works by domestic and foreign authors in the field of language identity theory and discursive personalology, as well as in the analysis of virtual and gaming discourse. To achieve the aim set in the article, a large empirical database was collected through a systematic sampling method, consisting of examples of syntactic constructions during gaming and meta-gaming communication. Based on the obtained data, discursive and contextual analyses were carried out to identify typical patterns of player interaction in the discourse. The novelty of the study is expressed in the development of a categorical model of verbal role identification, based on the results obtained during the analysis of empirical materials. The compiled typology highlighted four main types of role integration: institutional, experiential, socio-communicative, and deviant. Each of the proposed categories includes corresponding communicative roles and examples of their verbal realization. The study established that role determinism has a direct impact on the choice of means of verbal interaction. Game communication is characterized by situational conditioning and polycentrism, which suggests the possibility of a single participant combining and changing role settings depending on the specific in-game situation and indicates the dynamic nature of game interaction. The results obtained may be used for further theoretical reflection on the phenomenon of gaming identity and gaming discourse, as well as for developing practical models for optimizing in-game communication.
Artem Valeryevich Khozov (Sun,) studied this question.