"Getting on the same page" - How participants' reading aloud from an interactive tabletop facilitates joint game participation

This paper addresses how adult participants in a multiparty serious game-activity (ORBIT project, see Sunnen et al. 2018) at an interactive tabletop (ITT) use reading aloud (Heuser et al. 2020) to co-facilitate joint accessibility to interactionally relevant text information about the unfamiliar game they are engaging in. These so called ‘written informings’ displayed on the horizontal interface are designed to serve as a game-manual. Since the activity is new to the participants, they rely on these informings in order to jointly accomplish the game.
We consider participants’ reading aloud as an interactional practice for participating in the interaction and getting each other ‘on the same page’. By verbalizing and thereby also emphasizing specific (parts of the) text at a specific point in the interaction, participants make written informings from the ITT interactionally relevant and mutually accessible within the group.