Framing Games

Annika Waern's "Framing Games," presented at DiGRA Nordic 2012, is a conceptual and theoretical work that seeks an essential, permissive definition of games capable of bridging digital and non-digital game studies. Drawing on Frasca's view of games as systems and on accounts of play as human activity, the paper proposes that a game is a game-like system whose primary purpose is to be played. Play, in this account, is paratelic, motivated by intrinsic experience rather than external ends, and socioculturally bounded, voluntary and set apart from ordinary life.

A central argument is that play depends on a socially agreed re-signification of actions, a process traced through the work of Huizinga, Bateson, and Vygotsky. The author favors defining games through explicit rules and goals rather than through fixed prohibitive rules, as proposed by Myers, and rejects the notion that games must stand in opposition to the real. Instead, the fictional quality of games is located in the socio-cultural frame rather than in the game system itself. The resulting framework separates core requirements, namely paratelic motivation, re-signification, explicit rules, and goals, from more peripheral and flexible features.

The paper's conclusion is that games are systems of rules, goals, and opposition designed to be played for intrinsic reasons, with actions re-signified within the play context. Bordering phenomena such as sports, role-play therapy, sandbox play, and dangerous or pervasive activities share some but not all of these traits, and a comparative table charts these relationships. The author finds no telic, re-signified activities lacking rules, and argues that the field's core research question concerns the interrelationship between system structure and play. This justifies a deliberately broad analytical scope. The work contains no empirical or industry data, its contribution lying in definitional and theoretical clarification.