Problem This Solves
When writers place a game inside a fictional world, they face a structural decision: should the game fade into the texture of the world, or should it drive the story forward? Without a vocabulary for this choice, fictional games end up in an analytical blind spot -- critics either fixate on plot-central games and ignore background ones, or treat all fictional games as equivalent.
Gualeni and Fassone adapt Gestalt psychology's ground/figure distinction (via McLuhan's Understanding Media) to give analysts and creators a precise tool for understanding the narrative role of any fictional game. This also prevents the mistake of dismissing background games as unimportant. Ground games do essential worldbuilding work, establishing what Suvin calls a "feedback oscillation" between familiarity and unfamiliarity that makes fictional worlds feel inhabited and credible.
Key Principle
Fictional games operate at two levels of narrative prominence. Ground games sit in the background, contributing to worldbuilding atmosphere -- they make a fictional world feel vibrant by signaling familiar values and aspirations through unfamiliar ludic forms. They are often variants of classic games (chess, poker, card games) enhanced with futuristic or fantastical elements.
Figure games occupy the narrative foreground, serving two main functions: (a) as social instruments that maintain or subvert the status quo, or (b) as contexts for indirect characterization of fictional characters. The distinction is not about quality or importance but about function within the fiction.
Good Examples
Ground -- Dejarik (Star Wars): The holographic board game glimpsed briefly aboard the Millennium Falcon. It is never central to the plot but makes the Star Wars universe feel lived-in. It signals that leisure, strategy, and competition exist in this galaxy, grounding the world in recognizable human behavior despite alien trappings.
Ground -- Fizzbin (Star Trek): A card game Kirk invents on the spot. It appears fleetingly, contributes to comedic worldbuilding, and reinforces the improvisational, adventurous tone of the series. Its rules are deliberately absurd -- fictional incompleteness as humor.
Figure (social instrument) -- The games in The Hunger Games and The Running Man are focal narrative engines. They compress and expose the power structures of their dystopian societies, functioning as synecdoches for oppressive regimes. The game IS the story.
Figure (characterization) -- Domination in Never Say Never Again (1983), where the Bond villain's approach to the game indirectly reveals his personality, ambitions, and relationship to power.
Bad Examples
Treating Dejarik as a failed game design because it lacks complete rules. As a ground game, its purpose is atmospheric -- demanding full specification misunderstands its function entirely.
Analyzing The Hunger Games solely as a game-design concept without recognizing its figure function as an ideological and narrative instrument. The game's meaning is inseparable from its sociopolitical role in the fiction.
Assuming ground games are always trivial. Stars and Comets (Andre Norton) is a background game, but it still signals values and aspirations of its fictional culture, contributing meaningfully to worldbuilding. Ground games establish the texture against which figure games become legible.
Key Quotes
"Unlike actual games, fictional games are neither formally complete nor teleologically crisp for the fiction appreciator. Instead, they are typically presented in ways that are deliberately vague and incomplete." -- Gualeni and Fassone, Chapter 1
"games whose rule-structures codify the ideological structures of the society that produced them, making visible those higher-level structures in all their artificiality and -- often -- their cruel arbitrariness" -- Daniel Vella, Foreword
Rules of Thumb
- Ask first: does this fictional game primarily establish atmosphere (ground) or drive plot and character (figure)?
- Ground games are often variants of familiar real-world games enhanced with futuristic or fantastical elements
- Figure games typically serve one of two purposes: (a) social instrument reflecting or challenging the status quo, or (b) context for indirect characterization
- A fictional game can shift from ground to figure as a narrative develops -- prominence is not permanently fixed
- Background games are not less important; they establish the worldbuilding texture that makes figure games meaningful
- When creating fictional games, consider whether you need ground (atmosphere, texture, verisimilitude) or figure (plot, theme, character revelation) -- or strategically deploy both
Related References
- Fictional Games: The Core Framework -- Foundational definitions of fictional games and the four sources of unplayability
- Fictional Games and Ideology -- Figure games often serve ideological functions; ground games carry implicit ideology through their structures
- Fictional Games as Utopian Devices -- Figure games that subvert the status quo function as utopian devices