The Frame Game

author: Lotte Biesheuvel

When I started my education at the Willem the Kooning Academie, I never heard of the term social design. But now four years later as a graduate I call myself a social designer and researcher. For my gradation thesis and project I asked myself the question: How do I stimulate awareness among news consumers between 18 and 45 years regarding framing in new media?

In previous research I developed an action scheme about how the process of awareness works. The action scheme is based on the planned behaviour theory of Fishbein and Azjen and on different gamification techniques.

Behaviour exists of three 3 components; perceived behavioural control, propositional attitude, perception of the social norm. These three components form the behavioural intention that leads to behaviour. If you’re able to influence these you can influence behaviour.

Regular behaviour can be found in perceived behavioural control, when you do something more often you’re sure you’re capable of doing it. The perception of the social norm has much to do with the communication or the common practice in your environment. Propositional attitude is very mutable and hard to measure but when a person cares a lot about something his or her propositional attitude will be very strong towards that. Based on this, I have divided the process of awareness in five steps.

Step 1 : New perspectives. Access to new and transparent information. Step 2 : Experiencing the value of this information and creating a new frame with this information. This new frame won’t be the same for everyone because everyone has their own unique frame as well. Step 3 : Applying this new frame Step 4 : The reflection on the experience of the application of this new frame. You reflect if this experience is positive or negative en how this can be of further influence in your daily life. Step 5 : The repetiotion of this appliciation. You apply this in your daily living habits. You get an intrinsic reward because you did a discovery and you have more knowledge. This will motivate to repeat step 1.

In previous projects I discovered new perspectives and reflection are the two most important parts of this process. They have the most impact on awareness.

Designing this action scheme and using it as my own tool is not the thing that defines me as a social designer. The intention of the tool is to change behaviour in a structural way, is one of the things that defines me as social designer.

The framing experience

When I started this project I soon discovered that if I wanted people to experience framing in newsmedia I should explore the source of framing. And that it was important to comprehend the system of the newsmedia.

The news is omnipresent in our daily lives. We consume it from early morning till evening, in all kinds of ways, via TV, newspapers, internet, telephones and radio. It determines what we talk about and how we view the world. Still, most people are not aware of the fact that the news isn’t a representation of the truth. That’s nothing new, Mark Twain mentioned this already in 1873: “it has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper”. The instant flow of information and quickness of the subjects don't help to challenge people to think about the complexness of the subjects in the news. Twitter, facebook and other opportunities to vent your opinion stimulate having explicitit opinions immediately.

Framing is a form of priming, a form of unintentional influence. The human brain is a very associative network. For example, a person who sees the word "round" will be slightly faster to recognize the word "ball." This happens because round and ball are closely associated in memory. For instance when newsmedia talk about refugees, the words they use have a lot of negative connotations. And so these will be closely associated in memory. And this has a lot of influence on a persons judgemental skills. If the newsconsumer is aware of framing in newsmedia, he'll be more critical towards the significance of the news. And he'll might develop a more nuanced opinion about complex issues.

News is subject to framing, because of the many different steps between ‘the happening’ and the publication, the different people that are involved in every step and the goals everyone of these people pursue:It often starts with an eye witness. Within the process towards publication, he is the one the closest to the incident but nevertheless he experiences it from it’s own perspective. He’ll probably know some of the background of the happening but most of the time not all of it. He’ll respond very intuitive at the incident. The reporter which is a local journalist will research the incident, talk to eye witnesses and try to figure out the cause. He’s in contact with the correspondent. The correspondent usually isn’t anywhere close to the incident, he could even be working from a neighboring country. His job is to research the background of the incident and place it in a clarifying context. He reports to the editorial room of the news service he’s working for. The editorial room doesn’t only get information from the correspondent but also from different press agency’s and social media. The arrival of social media causes that an incident can be online long before it has reached the media, and can also be used in the final publication. Often the opinion of a social media user gets used as the public opinion. Which can lead to a new and different perspective. The editorial room has to make decisions concerning the publication by means of other news channels, public opinions and other events occurring that same day. They also have to take in account that they have to sell the story to their readers. The writer of the editorial room has to make sure the story is the right amount of words and consider the intentions of the editorial room. Also the headline should be catchy and attract a lot of readers. Briefly before the publication the editor in chief does a final review to check if their need to be small adjustments in the publication or it needs to be rewritten. Sometimes there isn’t enough space for the publication due to other important news and the publication needs to be shortened. A lot of information gets lost in this process due to framing. By understanding the process it gets clear how framing can happen. It happens conscious and unconscious. The eye witness, reporter and correspondent are unconsciously framing the incident, their mental representations simplifications and interpretations influence the way they cover the incident and how they communicate it. The editorial room, the writer and the editor in chief are consciously framing the incident by deliberately simplifying it and manoeuvring it deliberately towards the wishes of the news consumer.

When completely understanding the way newsmedia works I was able to simplify these systems. The simplified systems seemed to be a perfect base for a game. By experiencing the system through a game, the players are able to feel how difficult it is to avoid framing. 

When I developed these simplified newsmedia systems into a game I constantly put my work up to test. As soon as I had a first version of the game, I organised a game night with my friends where I asked them to play the game and be as critical as possible on the game system, the subject-matter and the playfullnes. I learned that I still had to kill a lot of darlings, especially concerning design matter. But that the players understood and experienced the main issue the game addresses.

Designing a game is something very different from designing a poster for instance. It much more about designing a working system everybody understands but also designing an experience that’s unique for each individual. So visual aesthetics were none of my concerns in designing the game, until the very end. By collecting the players feedback after each test version I was able to fine tune the game repeatedly. Creating the project isn’t possible without the cooperation of the target group. And this is another thing that defines me as a social designer.

I developed The Frame Game, a game which offers these new perspectives and reflection. In the game people play a part of the press-process and this way they discover how framing works. It’s loosely based on a children's game, where the players whisper a sentence in each others ear and at the last player ends up with a complete different sentence then the start sentence. In The Frame Game the players each get a different role, from eye witness to editor in chief. The eye witness experiences an incident (a short video), and passes this on to reporter and so on till the editor in chief presents the publication. Each player has its own information and knows exactly what to do.

After testing the game a couple of times, and the fine tuning was more about the design details I started collecting the publications. Each group played with the same incident but with different editorial rooms. Interesting enough all the publications are very different in tone of voice, some of them are very accurate according the given information where others are very exaggerated. The game itself creates new perspectives and insights for the players, they experience how easily words can be twisted, how interpretations mislead and how editorial rooms have to make decisions. The reflection follows self evident because the group always consist of more than 5 players who will share their feelings on the game and will connect this to the real world. To stimulate this the game is played with the an incident that has a lot of connection with recent incidents. The game is played with a video and information of the Rodney King Riots, happened in 1993. Players don't recognize the video as part of the Rodney King Riots, but at the end of the game they make the connection between this game, the Riots in 1993 and recent events.

Next steps of the Frame Game

The prototype of the Frame Game was very successful and received a lot of recognition. The reactions of the players were very enthusiast and they said it opened their eyes in certain ways. The research paper got a nomination for the WdKA research prize and the Frame Game won the ‘Drempelprijs’ for best graduation work in the Social Practices.

The Frame Game seems to make a good fit in the social science education at high schools. Currently I’m working with Marieke Veere Vonk as Studio Ace of Hearts (Harten Aas), and we’re testing the Frame Game at high schools. Already we learned that playing the Game in a classroom requires different side conditions such as more extensive explanation. We’re hoping to find a financier or a publisher to make the Frame Game available for the public.

We’re also looking into options to give the Frame Game a digital component, so it’s easier to play and even more focused on the present newsmedia environment.