Marva West Tan Lecture Series: Celia Pearce

Source: https://cms.uchicago.edu/marva-west-tan-lecture-series-celia-pearce Parent: https://cms.uchicago.edu/news-events/events

October 16, 2025 | 4:00PM

Cobb 307

About the Lecture (from her website)

Playframes builds on the work of Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman to take a deep dive into Bateson's primary question: How do we know we're playing? In this book, Celia Pearce addresses this question by building a comprehensive theory of the specific mechanisms that metacommunicate the message “this is play.” This “big tent” approach covers a broad swath of playframes, ranging from theme parks to cosplay, board and video games, and sports, and describes how spatial and temporal frames, as well as artifacts such as costumes and uniforms, toys, and sports equipment, let us know when a play activity is underway.

Pearce teases out distinctions between ritual and play activities, including social practices in which they merge or are indistinguishable, as well as incidents of frame breach or misalignment, where participants' perception of “what is going on” diverges. These principles are illustrated with a series of four topical studies that explore various scenarios in which play and non-play contexts are juxtaposed or blurred. These span from delightful (fan convention cosplay and simulated and virtual weddings) to confusing (virtual currency and bitcoin) to dangerous. Building on recent research, the book culminates with an in-depth analysis of the gaming roots of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and argues that playframe breach and deliberate misalignment were the major contributing factors.

About the Speaker (from her website)

Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, researcher, curator and Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University, as well as co-founder of IndieCade, the international festival of independent games. She is considered one of the early pioneers of virtual worlds studies, and is credited with the discovery of “online game refugees,” documented in her book Communities of Play(MIT 2009). She also conducted several parallel groundbreaking studies, including one of the first reports on Baby Boomer Gamers, and early contributions in the areas of player-created content, socially situated avatar identity, diversity in virtual worlds, and the first (and still only) comprehensive multi-world study of non-game virtual world demographics and play patterns. She is also co-author of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton 2012), which is about to go into its second printing. Her award-winning games include the theme park attraction Virtual Adventures, which received the first DICE (then Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences) Award for Best VR in 1995, and eBee, an eTextile quilt-based game, designed with Gillian Smith, Jeanie Choi and Isabella Carlson, which received the award for most innovative tabletop game at Boston Festival of Independent Games in 2016. Her games have also appeared at the Smithsonian Museum, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, CHI and SIGGRAPH, Different Games, and the Incubate festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. Her recent work has focused on interactive theatre as the co-founder of Playable Theatre and co-creator with Nick O’Leary and Dacha Theatre, (F)UNFAIR, which premiered in Seattle in July of 2022.