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Framing Play
It is time to climb out of the rabbit hole. Next stop: a concept that is critical to an understanding of play and meaning, the cognitive frame, which comes to us from the field of psychology. Taken most generally, a cognitive frame is a way of organizing how we look at the world. Cognitive frames create contexts for interpretation and affect how we make sense of things. In the story of Alice, for example, there are several frames at work. The cognitive frame "fairy tale" encourages us to see Alice's adventures as both fantastical and instructive. Carroll employs the cognitive frames of "game" and "play" throughout the story, to communicate that Wonderland is a space separate from reality, one where special rules abound. If you first had to read Alice in Wonderland for an English class, perhaps the cognitive frame of "exam" or "essay" shaped your interpretation and experience of the book. The idea of a cognitive frame closely mirrors the concept of the magic circle. As a player steps in and out of a game, he or she is crossing that boundary, or frame, which defines the game in time and space. The cognitive frame is a concept connected to the question of the "reality" of a game, of the relationship between the artificial world of the game and the "real life" contexts that it intersects. Additionally, a game's frame is responsible not only for the unusual relationship between the game and the outside world, but also for many of the internal mechanisms and experiences of game play.
How does the concept of the cognitive frame fit into a discussion of play and meaning? Anthropologist Gregory Bateson notes that, "play occurs within a delimited psychological frame, a spatial and temporal bounding of a set of interactive messages."[6] The frame of a game communicates that those contained within it are "playing" and that the space of play is separate in some way from that of the real world. A shove inside a game of Capture the Flag, for example, does not mean what it would normally mean outside the context of the game. Players engaged in play suspend the rules of everyday life when play begins. They then regulate their behavior according to a set of rules that operates only as long as the play frame is in force. We can understand play as a system of behaviors (with associated meanings) that get framed in particular ways, marked off and bound by rules regarding space, time, meaning, and consequentiality. Players acting within the frame of the game do so according to rules and the contexts that determine the meaning of those actions. But play has an additional function that helps shape how we communicate and make meaning, embodied in the act of metacommunication.
[6]Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy. " In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972) , p. 191.
