goffman and play

Performance and Erving Goffman—

1. The distinction of two modes of communication - expressions we give and expressions we give off.

The expressions we give is the concretely intended and conscious form of expression, as epitomized by verbal communications using language. Expressions we give off is the non-verbal, presumably unintentional, form of communication that is not concretely expressed in speech but nevertheless have efficacy in communicating, consciously or unconsciously, some things about the person expressing it. It is important to keep in mind that, while expressions we give is always intentional, expressions we give off does not necessarily have to be unintentional in turn and, in fact, people are capable of manipulating them as well. 

We present a social Front that is related to our job, our caste, our gender, our social class

First there is the setting

Then there is the personal front divided into appearance and behavior

The effective front is one that has coherence, a unity of appearance, behavior, and setting so that the meaning of the performance is clear. Goffman uses the example of the Mandarin in the Chinese city

Yet eh front is also “a collective representation” and when a social actor takes on a role “the front has already been established for it.”

Social fronts are employed in hospital in keeping of the ranks between drs, nurse, anaestologists, etc, especially quite often the tasks involved are overlapping. Social fronts reassert the credentialism of the larger culture. We perform our advanced degrees as well as our social inheritances.

Dylan uses the setting of the hotel room to perform his role as petulant artist; Kennedy uses the meeting hall to perform the incoming President. A role he redefines and uses his telegenics to extend his image.

Dramatic realization

Example of the baseball umpire. He will emphatically call a strike even though there may be a moment in which he discerned if it was a strike or a ball. Violonist, prize fighters, and others whose work is in public are given to dramatic realization making sure that their tasks are visible, readable. But it “involves more than merely make invisible costs visible.” Favors expression over action.

We all know people who do little work but call attention to how hard they are working—they make a show of it. Projecting competency rather than inhabiting it.

Idealization

Performance “will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society.”

A performance highlights the common official values of the society – and in this, has aspects of ceremony. That of Brahmins in India who has obligations to show grace and purety (but gamble and drink privately). WASPs at debutante balls or auction houses versus at a family dinner.

p.38—Goffman argues “the ignorant, shiftless, happy go-lucky manner” of blacks in the South is a put on, used in interactions with whites.

But Goffman fails to see “whiteness as performance”

Similarly he is quick to point out the american college girl “play down their intelligence” when in the presence of datable boys. But does not see the idealized beformance deployed by college boys that plays up their intelligence or athleticism. That is the male gender performance is unmarked just as white cultural performance is unmarked by Goffman.

He also sees the beggar begging (what we now call homeless) as a public performance of abjection but the “scenes that beggars stage seem to have declined in dramatic merit.” Surely these performances of destitution in U.S. cities has intensified.

Maintenance of Expressive Control

Example he uses

Minimal unmeant gestures or verbal gaffes that are inconsistent with the social front

A false front is also possible through Misrepresentation—an unauthorized performance, a masquerade.

Certain kinds of drag performance reveal themselves as drag; others atttempt realness

There are gradations of misreprentations. And as in the law, intent matters.

For Goffman” to be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.” A status “is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherence,, embellished, and well articulated.” Its not a material thing.

Caillois

With bataille, and othes started college de sociologie, (leiris was part of this) wayward social scientist influenced by surrealist movement—but had broke with it in part because the surrealist lauded the individual not the collective—interested in the sacred, the sacrilege, ritual.

Agon—the debate between antagonist and protagonist posed before the chorus, contest. Important for the Nietzschean left—the contestation of ideas as generative. Crista Acompora

Alea—aleatory (structuring chance in the creative process) from latin word for dice

Ilinx—vertigo, perception-changing, urge toward disequilibrium, a voluptuous panic

From Greek word for whirlpool. The joy/risk in losing balance. Suspension of inevitability

Mimicry—imaginative role-play, make-believe (as if). Examples remarkably include insects. “inspire fear in others”

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia—camouflaging, chameleon-like behavior; phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety.

Of Mimicry and Man-- Homi Bhaba—the menace of colonial mimicry; its threat (and imbedded hostility) to the colonial endeavor to have the native imitate the ruler.

Children imitating adults (repeating their words)

Jean Rouch Les Maitres Fous

Paris is Burning—

Mimicry and Ilinx rely upn distinctive performances of the body in their execution. Agon relies upon distinctive training; virtuosity, strength, strategy. Alea perhaps a separation from the event, a faith in its outcome.

Paidia to ludus—games placed on a continuum from chaos to order, from improvisation to rules, from impulse to calculation, uncontrollable fantasy to discipline. From throwing rocks to baseball.

Cf the distinction between regulative and constitutive in Searle’s speech act theory—though he is referring to events in language he uses examples from sport/games –american football/chess are constitutive—the rules create the game vs regulative where the rules regulate behavor that pre-exists ie eating—every human being that can eats but regulative rules govern the process (use of various cutlery, hands, etc) or driving a car where the legal rules, signaling, stopping, are regulative.

My favorite line: on kite-flying—“the player accomplishes a kind of auscultation upon the sky from afar.” Auscultation is form of diagnosis that involves listening to the organs of the body—didn’t think of kite flying in that way more about the proximal and the distal—a distance conquering – but the idea of projecting presence is there.

For Caillois certain combinations of agon alea ilinx and mimicry are possible :

Horse racing—for the jockeys (and the horses) there is agon

As part of the spectacle, the audience simulates behavior; for the better there is alea (if not also agon, related to betting and horses/jockeys)

There are also forbidden relationships between the categories—vertigo (ilinx) destroys –or neuralizes-- agon (skill). So are simulation (mimicry) and alea. If one submits to alea, there is no opportunity to deceive chance by way of disguise. You come as you are.

But combinations of alea and vertigo are possible as are agon and mimicry. Games of chance can provoke elation and ecstasy (as well as misery) . Competition are always already spectacle, and by nature necessitate a form of restored behavior. This is me at a basketball game acting like everyone else there.

In play and games, agon and alea are regulated by rules; mimicry and ilinx enlist improvisation, which is not subjugated to regulation.

In agon, the player relies on will, in alea she renounces it. In mimicry the awareness of make-believe is presupposed, while vertigo erases awareness.

(however in possession like and ecstatic states vertigo and mimicry is on the level of the unconscious. For caillois it is in the realm of the sacred.

The pursuit of chance and vertigo is not generative, creating nothing that can be developed.

Agon and alea, which can be seen as opposite (the latter dependent upon fate/beyond the self, the former dependent upon skill and determination hence the self) combination favors one.

Similarly in mimicry and ilinx—even as mimicry involves expertise and rehearsal and ilinx privileges spontaneity  and submission, they combine—in artmaking. Games of simulation lead to the arts of the spectacle. Energized by vertigo. But the status/myth of the  troubled artist is perhaps related to the countervailing forces of ecstasy and anxiety embedded in the taxonomy of play.

Playing and reality winnicott cf freud fort/da

A theory of play and fantasy – Bateson --- the playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote that which is denoted by the bite.”

Dogs etc, spin the bottle,

Play enframes, spatially, creates zones of generative activity where statements are paradoxical  and metacommunicative, and neither true nor false, but govern the activity within the frame.

Jenkins—narratology vs ludology

Game designers create spaces not stories. They are narrative architects:

1.     not all game tell stories

2.     some games aspires to narrative

3.     narrative analysis is not prescriptive (it doesn’t redesign the game)

4.     experience is not reducible to story

narratologist don’t suffer from “cinema envy”  if there are stories, those stories illustrate and define the contours of the space itself.

Games fit into a tradition of spatial stories—hero’s odysseys, quest myths, travel narratives, picareques, science fiction, stories that eschew character development and are pre-occupied with world-making.

Voyage to Purilia—Elmer Rice

Suggesting that games in terms of narrativity in space may owe more to the subgenres of the novel than to film

“Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least four ways”

1.     spatial stories evoke pre-existing narrative associations

2.     provide a staging ground for narrative

3.     embed narrative information within mise-en-scene

4.     provide resources for emergent narratives

But spatial stories are held together be a telos. By a destination and a sense of progression. If gaming involves mapping, it also involves journey.

Accordian structures—some moment/places offer possibilities for expansion, others are restricted

Distinction between plot and story. The story can involve a past of characters.

McKenzie—Jenkins middle ground is slanted toward narratology – it emphasizes story and game stories as disctinct (though he uses film and literature) rather than an emphasis upon event or experience (or player performance)

Juul Game Time

There is the time that it takes to play the game -- playtime

There is the experience of time within the game – gametime.

Further there is event-time –the time of events happening in the game world in realtime games.

To play a game is to interact with the game state. The game state is the state of the game at the given time.

To play a game is to create maps (ie space) by way of the relationship between playtime (the duration of playing a game)  and event time. Mapping is a projection onto the game world. “the process of claiming that what the player does is also something in event-time; a projection of the play-time onto event-time.”

One acts in an actual world and a fictive world simultaneously but temporally in two different realms. This activity creates space.

Analogy plot/story  the player not the designer creates space; by way of mapping which is the relationship between two temporal realities. The interaction of temporal realities is that which gives the game dimensionality; it is that which provides depth to flat surfaces.

Flow is mental state of enjoyment when immersed in an activity, which also creates the experience of subjective time.

Hours condense; minutes become elastic

Cc Williams, and broadcasting

In a game a state of flow is related to difficulty and virtuosity, and progression avoiding repetition and frustration (Juul, suggested that frustration can also be motivating)

Play as Communication
PLAY / FRAME
what is true here
----------------
\ is not true \
\ here \
\ \
----------------
play / fantasy
through play and fantasy, the child gains an identity. by
pretending to be another, one learns how to become one's self.
through fantasy, one begins to define reality. the playground is
a laboratory of self-exploration. games are serious work.

play is
a concept and a word in all languages--Huizanga.
the concept's diverse significations are usually covered by two
or more distinct terms. In English, we have play, game,
contest--each term contesting for primacy in our lexicon.
What are the various meanings signified by the word "play"?

Homo Ludens
Huizinga asserted that the human is a playing animal and that
play is a universal feature of how human beings express and
communicate. Huizinga: " Play is a thing by itself. The playconcept
as such is of a higher order than seriousness. For
seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well
include seriousness."
Play is serious business as well as frivolity. Seriousness is
always stern. The work of play is always communicative.
Children remember this; adults forget.
Huizinga privileged the ludic (playfulness) impulse. Almost as if
it is encoded in our DNA.

All statements within this frame
are untrue.
I love you
I hate you

-------------------------
\ ALL STATEMENTS WITHIN \
\ THIS FRAME ARE UNTRUE \
\ I LOVE YOU \
\ I HATE YOU \
--------------------------
play/not play
this is play
this is a map--an actor in love on the stage lies and tells the true in the same moment.
play creates a frame around
itself--it defines space--it creates its own map, distinct from the territory
this is not play
this is a territory




the nip vs the bite
Bateson;"The playful nip denotes the bite but it does not denote
what would be denoted by the bite."
thus in play if A = B and B = C, it does not mean that A = C. the
playful nip is not the same as the bite, even though they share
a signification. in play, a simulated punch at the schoolyard is
not a real punch.

A frame is metacommunicative. It
is communication about
communication. What is true
inside the frame may not be true
outside it. A message within a
frame gives the receiver
instructions on how to act within
the frame.




frames
Every communicative message
defines the set of messages
about which it communicates --
Bateson



figure/ground
the ground is as important as
the
figure.

Caillois

Ludus (structured) to paidia (loose spontaneous)

Caillois argues that we may understand the complexity of games by referring to four play forms and two types of play. The four forms are:

• Agon, or competition. E.g. Chess is an almost purely agon game.
• Alea, or chance. E.g. Playing a slot machine is an almost purely alea game.
• Mimicry, or mimesis, or role playing. acting
• Ilinx (Greek for "whirlpool"), or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller coasters, children spinning until they fall down