Ervingiad I - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

After finding the application of his frame analysis model in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy to be very insightful, and subsequently that most of his books were reasonably priced in the second hand market, I went on a bit of an Erving Goffman shopping spree, and got 11 of his works, which I plan on reading in mostly chronological order, then posting some impressions.

First up is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's an attempt to analyze social interaction through metaphors informed by theater. The main idea is that any personal interaction is a finite, limited exchange of data which is supposed to express much a larger body of information. For example, your twenty minute experience at a clothing store is supposed to inform you that you were served by a professional and got fitting clothes at reasonable prices. Twenty minutes are not enough time for you to really perform research on the person or people helping you, make comparisons with other establishments, or evaluate the quality of what you bought. Instead, you were subjected to 20 minutes of a performance, a presentation, of competence, selection, and purchase, that left you with the impression that this is the information you received. In order to do this, the salesperson, their colleagues, and the entire environment were designed and have practiced to create the performance that gives you this impression, aside from - and possibly instead of - actually learning the competence and providing a good price.

From this starting point, Goffman builds up an elaborate theoretical framework: a team of people works together to manage impressions for an audience in a certain front stage, they have a back stage in which to do work that is necessary for the performance, from which the audience is excluded, and in which team members have conversations which establish that they are a team and united in their oppositional relationship with the audience, although the latter do collaborate sometimes to maintain the performance, especially in front of outsiders to the performance itself. The existence of colleagues - members of other teams who perform similar roles there - and other unusual team and audience members further complicate the model.

I think that frame analysis, which he developed later, streamlined this model, or reconfigured it to not feel as layered and sometimes contradictory as it reads. Nevertheless, even in this early study there are a lot of points that resonate with me. Having been in various situations where I was "performing" in this manner - for example, when working in retail - I can recognize a lot of the elements of his model as lived realities. It's interesting to see the way feeling the need to maintain this performance in front of outsiders might make people who are in other contexts antagonistic collaborate with each other. Also, on a very personal level, I've always struggled with getting into and then maintaining the discretion of staying in the backroom, that is required, beyond technical competence, to be a productive member of a team, and it puts some less than stellar experiences I've had in context.

This relatively short book is very readable. I strongly recommend it if anything here sounded interesting. Aside from more elaboration on these points, and a more thorough presentation of the model, with many examples from field work, other studies, and fiction, he makes frequent references to unpublished research by his University of Chicago colleagues, which might otherwise be hard to gain access to.

Character persistence between scenes

Many years ago, I belonged to an amateur theater ensemble. Our regular activities involved acting exercises, like rehearsing dialogue, improvising, and reacting to each other. In addition, about once a year or two, the group worked on a complete amateur production, in a real theater, with a paying audience. I took part in two of these.

In the first production, I played a bit part, a character who didn't really go through much change. During the course of the performance, I did have to know my entrance and exit cues, which meant keeping track of where in the script the play was, and I did have to remember the lines relevant to each scene I was in, but otherwise, my character stayed pretty much the same, so delivering my lines was just a matter of keeping a single persona going, and reacting to other characters as they changed - or like mine, remained static.

The second production, on the other hand, involved some development: my character gained confidence from scene to scene, became more and more comfortable with himself, until his final appearance, where he comes back to face his parents, expressing rage at something they did during scenes from which he was absent. This meant that I had to develop a narrative for him that continued offstage. The audience wouldn't see those parts, and possibly wouldn't care about their details, but if I wanted to deliver my lines and react to the other characters properly, I had to maintain this changing element from one scene to another, even through scenes in which I did not participate. So I wrote down narratives to patch my character between scenes, which continued this development, and recited them to myself from memory as I waited for my cues, trying to time my internal monologue so that finishing it would coincide with my next entrance. I think I did a reasonable job. It was definitely more intense than my role in the first production.

In a table-top role-playing game, maintaining character persistence is not as difficult. If you're a player, while you do have a persistent character between sessions, or before and after a break, or before and after a segment where your character is not involved, a lot of change usually hasn't occurred - with the exception of end of adventure book-keeping, like leveling up, or skill improvement, or downtime activities. In the latter case, it's a matter of updating your character sheet at your leisure, to consult it as you start role-playing or otherwise participating in the game once more. At worst, you might need to ask questions, if you suddenly forget where your character ended last session, or is expected to be right now.

It's a bit trickier if you're the gamemaster, as you do need to keep on top of things, including the progress of non-player characters, factions in the world, other world events, and, of course, the PCs. In my campaign, I did find that writing down narratives of what happens between sessions, or in parallel to sessions, was helpful for me to keep myself current for session start. But, as with being a player, since game time isn't usually real time, you can pause, you can ask questions, you can be reminded of things you've forgotten, and rewrite recent "history" when things turn up wrong.