Gary Alan Fine, “Frames and Games”

“fantasy gaming as a social world, a universe of discourse” (181)

“human beings reside in finite worlds of meaning” (181)

“individuals are skilled in juggling these worlds” (181)

“social worlds … constitut[e] frames of experience” (181)

“frames of experience may be conscious. Unlike dreams or madness, these worlds have a logical structure, recognizable as parallel to the mundane world” (182)

“people easily slip into and out of engrossment” (183)

“Frames succeed each other with remarkable rapidity” (183)

“people slip and slide among frames” (183)

Fine cares about “the extent to which different frames of experience are stable, and the relations among the framed selves of the individual” (183)

“fantasy games produce a ‘make-believe’ world set apart from the everyday world” (183)

“particpants implicitly agree to ‘bracket’ the world outside the game” (183)

“Yet ultimately all events are grounded in the physical world” (183)

“The rules of the game and the meaning of these rules imbue the game with its meaning” (184)

“Games, through the transformation of events embedded in natural interaction, constitute world-building activities” (184)

“frames are embedded within frames, and the structure of these framing devices, either keyings or fabrications, may be complex” (185)

“the ‘primary framework,’ the commonsense understandings that people have of the real world” (186)

“the game context; they are players whose actions are governed by a complicated set of rules and constraints” (186)

“players not only manipulate characters; they are characters” (186)

Glaser and Strauss (1964): “four structural types of awareness contexts” (187)

  • open
  • closed
  • suspicion
  • pretense

Fine is interested about awareness contexts between a single self’s frames (i.e., between player and character)

“characteristic of framing is the pretense awareness context[]” (188)

“the existence of frames outside of primary frameworks depends on the individual’s being willing to assume an unawareness of his other selves” (188)

“The character is supposed to operate under the constraints of a closed awareness context with regard to his animator, although this of course is a pretense” (188)

Some “problematic components of awareness contexts” (188):

  • “Character awareness of person reality” (188) [external to game]
  • “Character awareness of player reality” (189) [internal to game but external to character]
  • “Player unawareness of character reality” (192)
  • “Awareness context of the referee” (193)

“The task of self-presentation does not merely involve manifesting an appropriate and coherent identity, but also involves concealing those other identities that are either incompatible or differently keyed” (196)

“Frames have different levels of stability” (196)

“The extent of frame switching can be seen as a function of engrossment” (196)

“one should [also] consider the effect of the voluntary nature of the frame and the ‘fun’ that is embedded in it” (196)

“Voluntary frames … are more likely to be rapidly keyed than are mandatory frames” (196)

“The search for fun also leads to players’ ‘toying’ with their play” (197)

There can be “difficulty in determining which frame of reference to use to respond to an event” (200)

“frames are not merely a shared individual schema that is triggered by the objective properties of a situation; rather, they are part of a dynamic consensus that can be bracketed, altered, or restored through the collective action of the participants” (204)


Game

  • Gorogoa