Sebastian Deterding: Frame games - Using Frame Analysis for studying the distinction of real and mediated experience in video games
From Pygmalion to the Columbine high school shootings, the fear of mixing up reality and medium has accompanied occidental culture. The threat of “mixups” is usually connected to the degree of sensory realism of a medium, Presence Research being the most recent and sophisticated take in this direction. However, the question how people distinguish real and mediated experience in everyday life and what exactly (practically and experientially) “mixing up” entails, are again left unresolved. Interactionist sociology has put these questions center stage, the most detailed endeavour remaining Erving Goffman’s 1974 Frame Analysis. To solve the everyday question “What is going on here?”, we use frames, cultural schemata which orient perception and action. This notion has been variously appropriated in the anthropology of play and ritual, in media genre theory and perceived reality research. This paper hopes to show that frame analysis supplies a rich and robust theory and methodology for analysing the everyday distinction between real and mediated experiences, a topic most relevant to the anthropological study of e.g. Internet experience, video games or Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. Including findings of Presence Research and taking video games as its test case, it proposes a model for the cultural origins and reproduction of frames for mediated experiences in virtual environments.