Frames at Play

Scholarship in educational research has argued games are promising learning tools because players take on fictional identities and roles to build new knowledge and skills. Analyzing usability data from a detective game about research ethics called Murky Misconduct, this paper argues that players use situated and overlapping “interpretive frames” (Bateson, 1972) to formulate responses to in-game controversies. Drawing on data sourced from “think-aloud” verbal reports, this paper argues that player-testers, who are graduate students in STEM disciplines, take up shifting interpretive frames as they confront in-game controversies related to research ethics.