The Gamified Eye:
Refraction Tests as a conversational professional practice
Brian Due & Johan Trærup
We consider from a EMCA Multimodal perspective(e.g. Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011) the optometrist-customer interaction in eyeglass shops during the deployment of refraction tests. We build on existing literature in this field (Gibson et al, 2011; Vom Lehn et al., 2013; Webb et al., 2013a; 2013b).
In order to sell the right corrective lenses, the optometrist needs to measure the customer’s eyesight in an objective and reliable manner. This is done with the refraction test during which the customer is asked to read out letters from a chart while looking through different lenses placed before her eyes.
We show how the optometrists’ use of assessments during refraction testsaffects the procedure and hence the reliable responses from the customer. We find that some optometrists– probably unintentionally - add ‘gamification’ elements(Hunter, 2011) to the test, thereby “encouraging” the customers to do as good as possible by reading out correct letters, even though the truth might be that the letters are rather blurry for the customer. We show this through the analysis of several examples with a focus on how customers and employeesco-ordinately andinteractionallyco-construct the test as a game.
The paper is based on more than 400 hours of video recordings from five different Danish eye glass shops.
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