title: Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games
creator: Jara Soto, David
subject: ddc-100
subject: 100 Philosophy
subject: ddc-150
subject: 150 Psychology
subject: ddc-300
subject: 300 Social sciences
subject: ddc-700
subject: 700 The arts
subject: ddc-792
subject: 792 Stage presentations
subject: ddc-793
subject: 793 Indoor games and amusements
subject: ddc-800
subject: 800 Literature and rhetoric
description: The dissertation discusses the use and impact of “literary” framing (as by Werner Wolf) in generating and negotiating fictional spaces, narratives and meanings within the medium of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). In a second step, the text describes some of the specific and most salient framing features and strategies used by players during game sessions. By analyzing these through actual gameplay it is possible to identify the ‘transceptional’ border (Bunia) between reality and fiction to be the constitutive moment of role-play where players are both aware of, and immersed in, the fiction they collaboratively construct. Finally, the dissertation adapts Wolf’s theoretical framework in order to discuss and analyze the often overlooked category of “storytelling” TRPGs - one that, as the text argues, rather than focusing on narrative as such, aims at creating gameplay texts with heightened aesthetic and literary value while also enabling players to experience particular forms of immersion and deep emotional involvement. In the conclusion, the dissertation proposes re-conceptualizing literary framing as a defining characteristic of the fictional practice in general across media. In this regard, the dissertation argues, TRPGs reveal how framings are used and adapted in order to enable a specific mode of human interaction which is based on the figuration of emotional complexes via fictional “masks.”
date: 2021
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29454/7/David_Jara_Dissertation_2021.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00029454
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-294548
identifier:   Jara Soto, David  (2021) Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29454/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng