Fun in a Different Way: Rhythms of Engagement and Non-Immersive Play Agendas

Nick Mizer's essay argues that non-immersive play is a legitimate and valuable mode of tabletop role-playing rather than a design flaw or a failure of the gaming experience. Drawing on fieldwork across the United States, including observations at Gary Con and interviews with players in the New York Red Box community, Mizer contends that many gamers seek enjoyment through shifting attention among the frames of play rather than through sustained absorption in the fiction. The essay proposes that the frequent movement between in-character, rules-based, and out-of-character social frames can itself be a pleasurable object of play.

To build this case, Mizer draws on Erving Goffman's concept of frames and Gary Fine's three-frame model of role-playing (social, game, and fiction). He critiques the scholarly and gaming preference for immersion, citing Daniel Mackay's argument that games lacking strong emotional identification with characters serve disciplinary functions, and offers an alternative grounded in Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre and Michael Saler's notion of "disenchanted enchantment." Non-immersive gamers, in this account, keep awareness of the means of enchantment rather than being lost in illusion.

The essay's central empirical example is a session run by Ernie Gygax, in which the author charted alternation between exploration and combat. Exploration compressed roughly ten minutes of in-game time into about one minute of real time, while combat reversed this relationship. The alternating pattern accelerated over the evening, which Mizer interprets as a rhythm that builds momentum, comparable to a musical accelerando. He notes that this analysis rests on a single session and that other forms of divided attention, such as steady maintenance of multiple frames, deserve study on their own terms.