Face and figuration in RPG play

William J. White

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This article employs a perspective that sees issues of face (i.e., social identity and connection) and figure (i.e., meaning and metaphor) as fundamental features of communication in order to examine a snippet of actual play from a game called Spirit of the Century, run and recorded by the author at a gaming convention for an "actual play" podcast. The in-depth exploration of this moment of play underscores the multiplicity of frames within a role-playing game and the sophistication with which players negotiate these frames for both diegetic and metacommunicative purposes. The implications of this analysis for game design are briefly sketched.