General Politeness and Impoliteness in Mobile Gaming Communication

Mobile gaming communication is a rapidly growing field of research that explores the ways in which people interact while playing mobile games. This study examines Traveler’s strategies to convey politeness and impoliteness in mobile game interaction between Traveler and Paimon in Genshin Impact. A descriptive qualitative method was used to identify the politeness strategies in the dialogues. Indonesian utterances were obtained from the voice-over of the Traveler copied from HoyoLab. The dataset comprised 60 conversations between the Traveler and Paimon, which were then collected, classified, and analyzed based on Leech’s (2014), politeness principle with conversation maxims. The results revealed that both characters employed politeness and impoliteness strategies. The politeness strategies were utilized to assign positive values to the speakers and to soften the expression of negative values to take away value from the speakers. In contrast, the impoliteness strategies involved camaraderie, language, and humor in maintaining the characters’ relationship.