The Game Frame: Systemizing a Goffmanian Approach to Video Game Theory

Sebastian Deterding's paper argues that Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974) offers a valid and underused sociological theory for understanding play, games, and video games. Written as an extended abstract for the DiGRA 2009 conference, it responds to a recent shift in game studies away from formal game properties toward the people and social contexts that interact with games. The paper positions Goffman's framework against the long-dominant "magic circle" metaphor, which many scholars now regard as a social construct but have not explained mechanistically. Deterding's central proposal is to treat the video game as a social frame, a convention of mutual expectations stabilized through metacommunication, joint attention, interpretation, and action among participants.

The paper's main argument unfolds in four steps: it summarizes Goffman's key tenets on play and games, compares frame analysis with alternatives, surveys the existing literature that has applied Goffman to game studies across domains such as the magic circle, child's play, media literacy, pervasive games, and alternate reality games, and identifies future applications. Deterding claims that the frame model handles border cases that trouble the magic circle, including games-within-games, metalepses, alternate reality games, and pervasive games, and that it can explain how the game/non-game boundary is socially reproduced rather than merely asserted. He also challenges Thomas Malaby's view that play and games are distinct, arguing instead that games are a culturally derived "upkeying" of a pre-human frame of play, drawing on Bateson and evolutionary psychology.

The paper's scope is theoretical and conceptual rather than empirical; it relies on a literature review and argument rather than survey data or sampling. Its contribution lies in four qualities it attributes to frame analysis: a principled treatment of metacommunicative "brackets," the nesting and layering of frames, the ability to add or subtract frames situationally, and the capacity to model fabrications that cause participants to misunderstand the real frame. The author acknowledges limitations of the approach in the full work, though the extended abstract emphasizes its advantages in relation to competing sociological and anthropological perspectives.