Codeswitching in a Korean online game

[Stephen C. Rea]

Hello all, 

I am hoping that some of you might be able to help point me in the direction of some resources that would be relevant to a piece of ethnographic data that I collected during my dissertation fieldwork. I work on South Korean online gaming culture and conducted participant observation in an online game called "Lineage II." While I was participating in a particular "raid"--i.e. a collaborative game activity oriented around passing through a virtual dungeon and slaying a powerful monster--one of the members of the raiding party typed the number "100" into the party chat channel. I was initially confused as to what "100" denoted in this context, but one of my informants explained to me that it meant "[go] back." The logic behind this, as I understood it, is that "100" is written as "백" in Sino-Korean. For those of you who don't speak Korean, 백 is pronounced like "baek," which sounds similar to the English word "back." Thus, in the context of the specific raid--which often involves party members giving directions to other members--"100" becomes a sort of shorthand for something like "뒤에 가요" ("go back"), admonishing another party member to reverse direction with his or her game character. Over the course of my fieldwork and playing this raid many more times, "100" was used in several instances, but it was not always used. 

I think that this situation resonates with issues around codeswitching and deixis, certainly, but there are also some other things going on (for lack of a better phrase) including orthography, sound symbolism, and interlingual homophones. Does anything come to mind immediately about a similar situation, or are there any articles/books--recent or not--that I should absolutely look to for comparison? If so, please reply to this message, or to srea at uci.edu. Thanks in advance for your help!