Framing and Playing

“The cake is a lie.” This reminds me of the use of “(All statements within this frame are untrue. I love you. I hate you.)” in Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” The cake is not a lie! Or is it? You never actually get the cake… Was the cake for you? Is the cake a lie? I’m also pretty sure GLaDOS also loves us and hates us and neither of these statements are true. The wording sets up an ironic and perhaps unintended dynamic comparison to Epimenides’ paradox.

Bateson discusses metacommunication, the exchange of signals that carry messages, in regards to the almighty “This is play,” which really means, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.”

When I was a little kid, my dad came home with something hidden under his jacket for my younger brother and I—a puppy! Yay! Only it turned out this puppy was a mix of wolf and Siberian Husky (mostly wolf), and play easily turned into real actions. She’d nip playfully sometimes, and at others turn play into a conflict of dominance. I solved this by biting her on the back of the neck during one of these play sessions turned alpha tests, and she didn’t ever bite me again. My brother, who was maybe five at the time, wasn’t as wild as me, and he almost got mauled. Yeah, we didn’t have a wolf anymore after that.

This serves to say that play fits into this paradigm of metacommunication and complexity of signals beyond our basic mood-signals, a sort of practice or testing of where we stand with one another at any given time.

In “Frames and Games,” Gary Alan Fine adds to this with: “… human beings reside in finite worlds of meaning, and individuals are skilled in juggling these worlds” (579). He pulls from Goffman’s idea that social worlds constitute frames of experience. To pull this to games and this immersion in fantasy of play, then, “In fantasy gaming the relationship between the meaning of an action within the game and the natural interaction is closer” (581).

This form of framing is mostly relevant for role-playing games, where the game world is the dominant reason for playing, players must deal with the game context, and players not only manipulate characters, but they are characters. This is the case even moreso for games that aren’t determined by the game system, but by a game master in real time where suspension of disbelief and immersion is essential to keep the players “in character,” or as Fine says, “down-keyed” rather than “up-keyed.” Certainly game designers can be compared to a game master, but the situation is much different when the game world exists visually (often in 3D).

The challenge, then, is to be your character when still balancing the different frames of the game world and your own knowledge of, for example, physics or history. I tried tabletop role-playing a few times, and here’s where I’d blow it. It’s easy for me to get immersed in a MMO chatbox and all the 3D graphics and even go to the length of running live events or writing stories about my characters in a message board (yes, I’m a freakin’ geek), but I can’t do it as easily in-person without any visual or audio representation of the game space. There might be concept sketches, or a game rule book with drawings of weapons and other objects, but the immersion flies out the window for me when I hear the game master’s voice telling us we’re out in the woods at night and there are some sounds around our campsite. Either that, or I’m just not as interested in the fantasy/medieval mishmash time period, but would be able to get more interested in something post-apocalyptic or futuristic, where my sense of reality has to be further skewed.

Then again, maybe I’m just prone to constantly remind myself—hey, this isn’t real. And give a good bite on the back of the neck just to prove that point and move on.