Playframes

“Pearce’s work is a masterpiece of analysis and assessment of how play can easily be fused, mixed, and placed in the blender of both politics and culture to generate unexpected outcomes that leave everyone confused—if not angry.”
–American Journal of Play

“This book asks a question that is fundamental to game design—’How do we know we are playing?’—and considers a range of answers. [Pearce’s] analysis makes the case that it is very important for us to understand these distinctions and delineate the boundaries because if we cannot, we encounter “the severe and deadly consequences of playframe misalignment.’”
—Choice

“Building on Bateson and Goffman, Pearce shows how cosplay and larps, the whole digital package, make playing and gaming central to twenty-first-century personal, social, and political life.”
—Richard Schechner, editor of TDR: The Drama Review; theater director; author of Performance Studies: An Introduction

“Celia Pearce brings her essential voice to core questions about metacommunication: How do we know if we are playing in a world where play and reality are blurred in so many ways?”
—Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

“Using sophisticated media theory, Playframes unpacks the events of January 6th in unexpected, deeply interesting ways. Like an intriguing game, this text puzzles, provokes, enchants, and clarifies. It is a page turner, a rare treat in a thoroughly academic book.”
—Bonnie A. Nardi, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine; coauthor of Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism

“Required reading for our times! With her notion of ‘playframes,’ Pearce provides a hermeneutic key to open and interrogate the fraught space between fiction and fact, games and the larger political order.”
—William Uricchio, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Media Studies, MIT; author of Collective Wisdom

Celia Pearce is the author of Communities of Play (MIT Press) and IndieCade: A History. Her award-winning game designs include Virtual Adventures and eBee, an electronic quilt game, which won the 2017 award for Most Innovative Board Game at the Boston Festival of Independent Games. She is also a cofounder of IndieCade and Co-Executive Director of the Playable Theatre Project.

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