sheep negotiation: trade discourse in settlers of catan
with aaron presley, chi-hang lau and travis michael

"rather than using behavior as a basis for inferences to invisible mental events such as intentions, the distributed approach treats communicative interactions as, themselves, directly observable cognitive events" - christine johnson, ucsd

analyzed social meaning-making between players of the boardgame settlers of catan, in particular during their trade negotiations. by using cognitive ethnography methods we engaged in micro-level dynamics analysis, macro-level dynamics analysis, and historical analysis on how multiple players distribute semiotic resources in the context of trade. using these methods within a distributed cognition framework allowed us to discuss how meaning is made in the cognitive event captured in the video.

we defined the micro-analysis protocol and an ethnogram to provide a systematic, frame-by-frame video scoring system. we also analyzed the overall system-changes between players and player relations (macro-analysis) during the playing of the game. finally, player past experiences and the cultural development of boardgames as a whole were also considered in the ethnography.

we provided examples that indicate that the players exhibit mastery of multiple semiotic resources, coordination of artifacts, shared attention as well as shared representation throughout the course of the game. our analysis suggests that trade activity does not belong in a vacuum, but immediate context is continually constructed, in which there are multiple configural system transformations. the conditional relevance and meaning is defined by the immediate contextual properties coupled with continued personal learning in the interactions within the dynamical social system and use of cognitive artifacts.