Awkward Annie:: Impacts of Playing on the Edge of Social Norms

Effective interpersonal and cross-cultural communication relies on pragmatics – knowing what to say to whom, and under what circumstances. Nevertheless, pragmatics is generally absent from formal second language instruction. The current effort describes a game designed to assess people's pragmatic ability. In the game, Awkward Annie, players are asked to intentionally select the most inappropriate things to say within conversations (i.e., be inappropriate and see what happens). Thus, players are able to escape from reality by being inappropriate. This work presents a between-subjects study designed to evaluate this twist using two versions of the game (selecting inappropriate versus appropriate responses). Participants in both conditions experienced the same content, but were provided with different goals (be inappropriate, be appropriate). The results indicate that users enjoyed both versions of game equally but performed better within the appropriate version of the game.