My latest work explores board game interactions as a rich site for studying communication and socialization. Recently, board games have made a comeback as an effort to resist and retaliate against the tech-dominated culture today. With trends like social media detox and anti-technology movements, people are searching for more social activities that allow them to connect with one another. My research takes a close look at interpersonal communication during board game play among young adults in Hong Kong and the United States. I use multimodal discourse analysis to investigate how participants navigate the blurred boundaries between “play” and “non-play” by focusing on essential activities such as negotiating rules, managing misunderstandings, and evoking different domains of knowledge. By analyzing both verbal communication—like turn-taking and contextualization cues—and non-verbal cues—such as eye gaze and gestures—I uncover how players employ a range of linguistic and multimodal strategies to engage with one another. These interactions not only influence their gaming experiences but also contribute to their identity formation and social bonding, illustrating the powerful role of play in shaping social relationships. My research explores game play as a world building activity where diverse participants bring together their bodies, life experiences, and knowledge into the game to create shared social experience.

 

In addition to my work on board games, I also have interest in research about language and identity with a particular emphasis on intercultural miscommunication and experiences of underrepresented groups. I have explored narratives of migrant workers in Hong Kong, highlighting their encounters of both repression and empowerment within diaspora communities and the identity construction of university students from different cultural backgrounds in Hong Kong through focus group discussions.