“The game is rigged”: framing real life metaphorically in the TV epic The Wire

1 Introduction

The present study aims to analyze the “context-induced metaphorical creativity” (Kövecses 2010; Kövecses 2015) involved in the unfolding of the generic-level game metaphor in two culture-specific scenarios of chess conceptualized as drug business, and vice versa, in the Home Box Office (hereafter HBO) show The Wire (2002–2008). The TV epic is based on real police reports, and broaches the issue of the mechanisms of illegal drug trade which constitutes a sub-universe anchored geographically mainly in the poor districts of the post-industrial city of Baltimore, which is left to the residents’ devices by local politics. It sets out the interconnection of the systems of drug trafficking, police departments, court, organized labor, media, public school, and local policy, as well as the similar structure upon which all those systems are built. ^[1] Every system has its own rules made and sustained by those who are able to “play” them right, while those who cannot fall “out of the game.”

The series was created by the former police reporter David Simon and comprises 60 episodes over five seasons, each season introducing a different setting of Baltimore and showing how these systems are interwoven by illegal drug trade. In this sense, the “wire” not only refers to the telecommunicative connection line which the police team requests in the first season and finally, after a long bureaucratic process, receives, but it also provides a key metaphor for the different worlds the protagonists live in, which are kept together by this overarching dirty business. Moreover, the wire sets up the image schema of a circle that guides the main plot, which itself can be conceived in terms of a source-path-goal schema (Armbrust 2016: 86). Thus, finally, the plot evolves to the same status quo we had in the beginning, showing that police officers and drug dealers may be replaced, but the institutions stay the same.

Even though some critics emphasize the novelistic style of the show, contrary to most novels, it does not depict institutions mostly from the perspective and experiences of major characters, but tends to focus on the functioning of the institutions themselves and on how being a part of this system affects the everyday life of each character (Mittell 2009). Therefore, the documentary-style and journalistic filming, reflected by the camera positions and movements that try to capture the scene as the visual observation of a bystander, suggests an analogy of the show with investigative journalism sustained by the occasional use of closed-circuit television, which allows the audience to participate in the scene (Ravenscroft 2013).

We will start by outlining the theoretical and methodological framework, which basically originates in three current developments of conceptual metaphor theory (hereafter CMT), namely, (a) the early as well as recent work on cultural variety (Holland and Quinn 1987; Quinn 1991; Palmer 1996; Kövecses 2005; Shore 1996; Sharifian 2003; Sharifian 2015); (b) the latest work by Kövecses (2010; Kövecses 2015) on contextual creativity; and (c) studies related to multimodality in gesture (Cienki and Müller 2008; Müller and Cienki 2009) as well as in media, especially film (Forceville 1996; Forceville 2006; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). As opposed to the main representatives of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) primarily interested in the overarching universally embodied schemas, in the third section we will ask the extent to which the game metaphor, which serves as a background model of the TV epic, shapes the context of the protagonists’ lives, and is itself shaped by their lives and thereby constituted bidirectionally. On this general level of analysis, we will first present the game metaphor as a generic-level metaphor which has already turned out to be a key model for the American culture, as several studies have revealed. Based on those insights, we will briefly show the importance of the game metaphor as the superordinate metaphor which multimodally frames the TV epic in many different ways, and has also been discussed in literature on the show. Then we will micro-analytically introduce two specific multimodal “metaphorical scenarios” (Musolff 2003) where the game chess takes on special importance in the conceptualization of drug business in both directions: as source and target. In both scenarios, multimodal factors come into play as well to create a dynamic metaphorical scenario which shows the complex interconnection of the contextual frames. Finally, in theoretical terms, we look at the theoretical insights the study provides for future research with regard to the interplay of conventionalized and context-induced metaphors.

2 Theoretical and methodological framework

By taking the philosophical position of experientialism and embodied realism, CMT (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987) departs from the guiding principles of cognitive linguistics that (a) semantic structures are based on conceptual structures which arise from bodily experience, and (b) that meaning representation is encyclopedic in nature by serving as points of access to repositories of knowledge which are related to a specific conceptual domain. Based on those assumptions, CMT has laid the foundations for the cognitive linguistic research on our bodily anchored metaphorical talk about the world by revealing the cross-domain mapping of a set of correspondences, which is established between an already known source domain and a still unformed target domain in our underlying conceptual system. Besides the theory’s successful proliferation, it not only has been an object of criticism, but also has itself undergone different stages of advancements. Let us take a closer look especially at recent theoretical developments which are relevant for our empirical concerns in this paper.

One aspect often criticized pertains to the limited interest in the individual-corporal level of metaphor analysis since Lakoff and Johnson seem to strictly follow the unidirectional way from conceptual metaphor to linguistic expression, whereas cognition and language should be conceived as interacting bidirectionally instead of marginalizing the linguistic performance and its communicative functions in arriving at an aporetic concept of non-discursive conventionalization (Linz 2004: 256–257). As a consequence of this objection, over the last years, more process-oriented approaches have been established where metaphor is understood in terms of its dialogic nature, e.g. as a process of “talking-and-thinking” (Cameron 2007: 110), as opposed to the idealized, static version of the first generation: “Metaphor, whether conceptual or linguistic, from the discourse dynamics perspective, becomes processual, emergent, and open to change” (Cameron et al. 2009: 67).

The growing focus on the dynamic aspect of metaphor has gained special interest in the field of cultural variation and was first systemized by Kövecses (2005). However, Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013) shows that this interest can be seen as a “culture renaissance” of the culture topic because during the first stage of CMT, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) still drew their attention to the cultural impact of metaphor as reflected, e.g. in their analysis of metaphors in Western cultures like time is money. At that time, surrounding research fields were also very productive and discussions had already started, as the work of Holland and Quinn (1987) about cultural models proved. But later, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) started to direct their attention exclusively to psycholinguistic and neural evidence due to new experimental possibilities, heralding a new stage of “culture oblivion.” This let other researchers like Gibbs, ^[2] Yu ^[3] and Kövecses ^[4] to rediscover culture as a dynamic topic prominent in current research. Concurrently, Gary Palmer (1996) published his book Cultural Linguistics, which constitutes the cornerstones for the new correspondent research field originating from cognitive linguistics.

Palmer (1996) brings together studies in anthropological linguistics to integrate them into a cognitive-linguistic framework by transferring the idea of “imagery-based verbal symbols” and the encyclopedic view of cognitive linguistics to the cultural world since linguistic imagery has to be seen as largely defined by culture being the accumulated knowledge of the community, that is, cognitive models, schemas, scenarios, categorization, conceptual networks, including world views (Palmer 1996: 290). Building on those first works, Sharifian (2003; Sharifian 2015) attempts to establish an appropriate framework for cultural linguistics replacing Palmer’s “imagery” with “conceptualization” (Sharifian 2015: 474), and incorporates the concepts of “distributed cognition,” “distributed knowledge,” as well as “distributed representation” as a basis for his “model of cultural cognition.” Thus, in this dynamic version, cultural cognition embraces the cultural knowledge that emerges from the interaction between members of a cultural group across time and space. Among the cultural conceptualizations are schemas, prototypes, cultural categories, and metaphors.

We will illustrate the dynamic and holistic character of those conceptualizations which go beyond linguistic means through some examples:

1. Cultural models: The cultural model of marriage as a journey (Holland and Quinn 1987) is called “propositional model” by Quinn (1991) and should not be confused with conceptual metaphor. For her, metaphors reflect such propositional and therefore cultural models, and do not constitute them as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson: “I will be arguing that metaphors, far from constituting understanding, are ordinarily selected to fit a pre-existing and culturally shared model” (Quinn 1991: 60).

2. Metaphors: Bradd Shore (1996: 312) applies the concept of “instituted models” to nonverbal realizations of metaphors in their cultural context and conceives them as acting bidirectionally: They form the cultural group and are formed by them. For him, a domain might be realized or materialized in a social-physical sense, that is, as an object, institution, action, event or state, such as in the realization of the metaphor important is central in the case of seating arrangements.

3. Schemas: Geurts (2003) concludes his studies about the proprioceptive and kinesthetic schemas with the Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in south-eastern Ghana by revealing the balance schema to be of crucial importance in this culture, in contrast to an absence of the Occidental idea of the five senses.

4. Categorization: Sharifian (2015) gives the example of linguistic marking of cultural categories such as “Aboriginal people and human spirits,” “flowers and fruits,” “offensive weapons,” etc., by noun classifiers in Australian Aboriginal languages, or pronouns to mark generation level and relationships.

Recently, Kövecses (2010; Kövecses 2015) has combined the culture- and discourse-oriented approaches in his context-sensitive grounding of metaphorical creativity. His starting point is now no longer the entrenched conceptual metaphor but the intersubjective context with its sphere of shared attention, as well as the larger context which involves, in addition to the interlocutors, the circumstances under which an utterance is made: who interacts with whom, when and where, why the communication takes place, and what it is about. Those are the driving forces for the construction of meaning, which now has to be seen as a dynamic and creative process that interacts with the more or less conventional meaning of symbols based on embodied experience (Kövecses 2015: x–xi). Kövecses conceives the contexts as frames that are nested within one another, such that the physical setting as the outermost frame includes the social frame, which in turn includes the cultural frame, while in the innermost frame we find the speaker/conceptualizer, the hearer/conceptualizer, and the topic, as well as the flow of discourse, functioning as the immediate linguistic context, or context in the sense of Langacker’s (2008: 281) “current discourse space” as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

Frames of contexts (Kövecses 2015: 71).

As Kövecses shows with regard to the cultural context, which will be most important for the present study, the pivotal point, for example, frequently has nothing to do with the existence or absence of a basic conceptual metaphor in one cultural group as compared to another, but rather with questions related to the degree of conventionalization and elaboration of the vocabulary, different preferences concerning the salience of concepts, different “experiential foci,” different forms of framing of the same concept, “differential cognitive styles,” as well as different preferences regarding metaphor or metonymy which is reflected in the vocabulary (Kövecses 2015: 26–29).

One aspect less regarded in Kövecses’ still linguistically oriented context approach is the multimodality of metaphors, which, as we have seen, has already been considered in the field of cultural linguistics, and needs to be conceived as an important input in a context-oriented approach. Basically, two main theoretical strands can be observed as developing in this research area: primarily, the recent, upcoming work on metaphor and gesture which is dedicated to the fine-grained analysis of online production of multimodal metaphors, originating particularly in the works of Cienki and Müller (Cienki and Müller 2008; Müller and Cienki 2009). One important contribution of metaphor gesture studies to cognitive metaphor theory lies in the support provided through the visible acting out of gestures for the indication of the existence of conceptual metaphors, discouraging the argument of the linguistic circularity as evidence for the existence of conceptual structures guiding cognition (Murphy 1996). This is shown in the analysis of verbo-gestural metaphors, which brings to light that seemingly dead verbal metaphors may still be processed actively (Cienki and Müller 2008). That is to say, a conceptual metaphor can be more or less “frozen” or “thawed,” more or less “asleep” or “awake.” In order to understand this activation process in a better way, it may be helpful to take a closer look at one crucial categorization established by Müller and Cienki (2009): They draw a distinction between “monomodal” and “multimodal metaphors.” While the “monomodal metaphors” only occur on one level – frequently, exclusively on the linguistic but not on the gestural level – source and target of the multimodal metaphors are predominantly represented in different modes co-expressively, frequently by the use of the same source and target domains in the two modalities. They name those metaphors “verbo-gestural metaphors.”

The second field of research is related to what Forceville and Urios-Aparisis (2009: 5) have called “cognitive semiotics” or “multimodal discourse” analysis. The area of research studies ranges from comic strips and cartoons to advertising, video games, music, and film. This includes irrevocably leaving the grounds of the static and entrenched metaphors because “the A is B formula disguises the dynamic nature of metaphor” (Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009: 12) when it comes to integrating the whole scenario of a scene. However, the finding of multimodal manifestations of conceptual metaphors probes the validity of CMT the same way as gestures do, even though it needs a dynamic reformulation. Forceville (1996) was one of the first who coined the term “multimodal metaphor” to refer to metaphors whose “target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes” (Forceville 2006: 384) of representation, or when its targets and/or source “are cued in more than one mode simultaneously” (Forceville 2006: 384). One subtype of the multimodal metaphor is the “verbo-pictorial metaphor,” whose source is visually represented while the target is verbally represented, or vice versa (Forceville 1996). This metaphor will become important for the following analysis.

3 Analysis

3.2 The context-induced metaphor chess game is drug business

Let us take a closer look at the following sequence in which two drug dealers, ^[7] Bodie and Wallace, who generally pass the whole day in their district where the drug business is done, play a game of checkers with chess pieces. D’Angelo Barksdale, the young boss of the crew members, passes by, urges that they learn the real game of chess, and begins to explain the rules. D’Angelo holds up the chess pieces, each at a time, to explain their roles by leaning on Bodie and Wallace’s existing understanding of the Barksdale operation:

(1)

01	D’Angelo:	Now look, check it. It’s simple, it’s simple. See this? ((kisses the king)) This the king pin, alright? He the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game, but he trying to get your king, too, so you gotta protect it. Now the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ‘cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, alright? ((shows moves of the king)) But he ain’t got no hustle. But ((moves the opened right hand, palm down, in clockwise circles over the pieces; Figure 2)) the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back, and they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.
02	Bodie:	Like your uncle.
03	D’Angelo:	Yeah, like my uncle.
04	Wallace:	((laughs))
05	D’Angelo:	You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fierce. She move anyway she want, as far as she want, and she ((roughly throws other team’s piece off the board)) is the go-get-shit-done piece.
06	Wallace:	Remind me of Stringer.
07	Bodie:	((laughs))
08	D’Angelo:	And this over here is the castle. It’s like the stash, he move like this and like this ((shows moves of the castle)).
09	Wallace:	Dog, stash don’t move, man.
10	D’Angelo:	Come on, yo, think: how many times we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right, to protect it.
11	Bodie:	True, true, he right. Alright, what about them little ballheaded bitches right here?
12	D’Angelo:	These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers, they move like this ((shows moves of pawns)), one space forward only, except when they fight, and is like or like this, and they like the front lines. They be out in the field;
13	Wallace:	So, how do you get to be the king?
14	D’Angelo:	It ain’t like that. See, the king stay the king, alright? Anything stay who he is, except for the pawns. Now if a pawn make it all the way down to the other dude’s side ((roughly throws other team’s piece off the board; Figure 3)), he get to be queen. Like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves.
15	Bodie:	Alright, so, if I make it to the other end, I win?
16	D’Angelo:	If you catch the other dude’s king and trap it, then you win.
17	Bodie:	Alright but if I make it to the end, I’m top dog.
18	D’Angelo:	No, yo, it ain’t like that. Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick, they be out the game early.
19	Bodie:	Unless they some smart ass pawns.

The metaphor here is developed interactively when D’Angelo, representing the smart drug dealer with high school education, notices that it would be easier to set up an analogy to their business to successfully transfer the rules of chess (turn 01). The use of metaphors and their mappings to elucidate the rules of participating in an organized system occurs in various instances of the show (Zborowsky 2010), but here, the metaphor takes an opposite direction. The scene starts with an extremely long shot, showing the deteriorated housing projects, as well as the yard where the drug trade is usually intense, but calm in this sequence. The camera travels with D’Angelo until he reaches Bodie and Wallace. During their conversation, the camera alternates from a three shot to medium close-ups on each of the characters from a neutral angle at an eye-level perspective. As D’Angelo shows the movement of each piece, the camera zooms in and reflects their movement.

In line with Kövecses (2010), we might call this specific metaphor a “context-induced metaphor.” At the same time, the metaphor can also be described as emerging in the discourse as a necessary device for understanding the chess rules (Cameron 2007). Thus, the mappings and corresponding inferences in Table 2 are set up as a “mini-narrative” (Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009: 12):

Table 2:

Source and target domains of chess is the barksdale drug business organization.

Source domain: drug business		Target domain: chess game
Avon Barksdale	→	King
Stringer Bell	→	Queen
Stash	→	Castle
Bodie, Wallace, Poot, etc.	→	Pawn
Life of a drug dealer	→	Game
The boss does not have any hustle, he has to be protected by the members of his organization	→	The king moves one space at a time, and has to be protected by the other pieces
The right hand of the boss is smart, fierce and gets things done	→	The queen moves any way she wants, as far as she wants
The soldier is killed quickly	→	The pawn is taken quickly
The soldier that climbs the drug trafficking ladder may become the right hand of the boss	→	A pawn that gets to the opposite end of the board may be traded for a queen (promotion)
Each member of the drug business stays with his own function through time, there’s no real possibility of social mobility for a soldier	→	Each piece stays with the same value throughout the game

Interestingly, although the game metaphor is the pervasive metaphor in this specific cultural environment, with respect to the present scenario, the use of drug business as a source to elaborate the target chess game has to be seen from the context of the participants’ perspective. By elaborating the “context-induced metaphor” (Kövecses 2015: 99) chess is the barksdale drug business organization, all contextual frames of the above discussed schema from Kövecses (2015) come to the fore: (i) the physical environment which is destroyed in many respects, i.e. the dwellings, institutions, homes and families; (ii) the social setting which is also inverted since adolescents are working in the drug business instead of going to school; (iii) the cultural context which is, on the one hand, related to American models such as reflected in game, competition and business, and, on the other hand, also coined by Black community topics and a long history of exclusion. Taken together, this results in drug business as the only way to survive, and shapes elements of hip-hop culture, visible especially in the music and clothing of the protagonists from the poor Black districts of Baltimore.

With regard to the memory and ideology of the group (Kövecses 2015: 59–60), the Barksdale’s generation of drug business and their philosophy play the overarching role and constitute the driving force of all interests and concerns: dealing drugs is the main professional activity. The local context is also of pivotal importance since the knowledge about the major entities in the discourse (D’Angelo knows about the educational limits of his co-workers and can set up a scenario with acquainted persons) as well as the immediate cultural context and the immediate social setting (the recent and actual events related to the drug business) become relevant in the unfolding of the metaphor. One image schema that also comes into play is the circle, manifested by the gesture D’Angelo makes, and manifested only monomodally on the visual plane (Müller and Cienki 2009), indicating that the chess pieces belong to the same group, and are therefore interconnected, holding closed boundaries (Figure 2, turn 01). At the same time, this also highlights on a microlevel the interconnection between the metaphors of game and the image schema of circle underlying the metaphor of the wire.

Figure 2:

Circle image schema (turn 01).

The effect on the audience is a striking point here since instead of using chess for understanding the drug trade, it is the drug trade which in turn provides an adequate source for understanding chess, as it is located in a reality normally out of Bodie and Wallace’s reach in their everyday life.

Likewise, drug business is conceptualized in terms of war, reflected in expressions like “they be out in the field” (turn 12), “in the front line” (turn 12), and “they get capped quick” (turn 18), although this mapping rather represents a fairly conventional metaphor (Table 3). Furthermore, the rough way in which D’Angelo moves the queen pin, throwing the opponent’s pieces off the board as he captures them, is one more manifestation of the war domain on the multimodal level (Figure 3, turn 14).

Figure 3:

D’Angelo shows how the queen pin fights (turn 14).

Table 3:

Source and target domains of drug business is war.

Source domain: war		Target domain: drug business
Soldier	→	Hierarchically low drug dealer
Fighting	→	Dealing drugs
Fighting field	→	Workplace
Front line	→	Riskier workplace
Being in the front line	→	Dealing as a hierarchically low drug dealer

Thus, we can see an interplay of conventional conceptual metaphors and metaphorical creativity induced by context. The interesting point is that the target is not only inverted in conventional terms, but also blended with the source, so that we should rather speak of an interaction of both domains as suggested by interaction approaches (see, e.g. Bühler 1982 [1934]; Stählin 1913; Richards 1965 [1936]; Black 1962; Fauconnier and Turner 2002). On a first level, chess serves as the target through the intellectually superior D’Angelo teaching the rules of chess to Wallace and Bodie; on a second level, chess as a source also provides better insights into the rules of drug business, which D’Angelo concurrently teaches as the superior on the job. Anderson analyzed the tautologies and allegories on the TV show The Wire, and described the bottom line of this scene as the following: “[D’Angelo] demystifies the intimidating game by leaning on Bodie and Wallace’s prior understandings of the Barksdale operation. In turn, the world of formal rules and roles in chess provides a more abstract perspective on their everyday lives in the mercurial game” (Anderson 2010: 377).

3.3 Second scene

The second scene depicts a dialogue between Detective McNulty and Bodie, in which the detective tries to convince Bodie to testify against the crew that controls the drug trade. ^[8] They are at Cylburn Arboretum, sitting on a bench in front of a lawn which resembles a grass field, being watched from above by a Lady Baltimore statue:

(2)

01	Bodie:	I ain’t no snitch.
02	McNulty:	I didn’t say you were.
03	Bodie:	I been doing this a long time. I ain’t never said nothing to no cop. I feel old. I been out there since I was 13. I ain’t never fucked up a count, never stole off a package, never did some shit that I wasn’t told to do. I been straight up. But what come back? Hmm? You’d think if I get jammed up on some shit, they’d be like, “Alright, yeah. Bodie been there. Bodie hang tough. We got his pay lawyer. We got a bail.” They want me to stand with them, right? But where the fuck they at when they supposed to be standing by us? I mean, when shit goes bad and there’s hell to pay, where they at? This game is rigged, man. We like the little bitches on a chessboard.
04	McNulty:	Pawns.
05	Bodie:	Yo, I’m not snitching on none of my boys, not my corner, and not no Barksdale people or what’s left of them. But Marlo… This nigger and his kind, man. They gotta fall. They gotta.
06	McNulty:	Well, for that to happen, somebody’s gotta step up.
07	Bodie:	I’ll do what I gotta. I don’t give a fuck. Just don’t ask me to live on my fucking knees, you know.
08	McNulty:	You’re a soldier, Bodie.
09	Bodie:	Hell, yeah.

This scene starts with a high-angle, extremely long shot from behind the Lady Baltimore statue displaying the entire lawn area with McNulty and Bodie being reduced to only miniature figures on the right-hand side of the area, thereby creating a “pictorial metaphor” (Forceville 1996) of the game since both seem to represent insignificant game players on a grass field, while the statue of Lady Baltimore seems to be a referee who watches and judges their game from above (Figure 4). The next shot shows McNulty and Bodie sharing a meal and initiating their talk, although each man sits at one end of the bench with a remarkable space between them, pointing to their respective participation in opposite teams, which is reinforced by the way in which the dialogue unfolds: the camera displays the talk from an eye level perspective, alternating between medium close-ups on each of the characters without showing both faces at the same time, thus increasing the effect of both characters pertaining to different worlds (Figure 5).

Figure 4:

McNulty and Bodie at the field.

Figure 5:

Close-ups.

In this dialogue, Bodie’s reference to the game metaphor is created by using the same metaphorical expression “This game is rigged” (turn 03) as Marla Daniels, the wife of Lieutenant Daniels, used on the second episode of the TV show. Lieutenant Daniels is responsible for the police operation to dismantle the Barksdale drug organization, and the use of this metaphor by his wife and Bodie sets up a parallel to both having replaceable roles as well as to being insignificant pawns or front-line soldiers in a war, as described by Anderson:

Ruthless and quick-witted, Bodie proves himself the quintessential “smart-ass pawn” and a deserving contender in the tournament. Instead, he remains an isolated pawn bereft of orderly advancement on a chessboard. Interpreting the game as a rigged match where he sees himself as one of the “little bitches on the chessboard” fuels Bodie’s disillusionment rather than expanded agency. (Anderson 2010: 384)

This metaphor of the chess game is reinforced by the context of the physical environment, as both McNulty and Bodie are barely discernible in the field in the first shot, but also underscored at the discourse level by the expression “We like the little bitches on a chessboard” (turn 03). So, the chess metaphor can be seen as recycling the previous discourse analyzed in the first scene (Kövecses 2015: 54–58) as now it is the drug business which is conceptualized in terms of the chess game.

4 Concluding remarks

The interplay of everyday drug business, politics and police work revealed that the underlying cognitive metaphor of game represents a culturally embedded model of reality which all participants of the TV show’s plot live by. However, their lives are interconnected with this metaphor to such a high degree that we can no longer maintain a mere unidirectionaliy of this metaphor as being simply the source of the conceptualization of abstract domains. Game in its literal as well as in its metaphorical sense is so strongly interwoven in everyday experiences that it has turned into a cognitive cultural model. The specific physical, social and cultural contexts, as well as the immediate multimodal interaction, contribute to its specific-level use and creativity. We showed how metaphor as a background cultural model (Holland and Quinn 1987; Sharifian 2003; Sharifian 2015), the concept of “context-induced metaphorical creativity” (Kövecses 2015), the multimodal aspects of metaphoric gestures (Cienki and Müller 2008; Müller and Cienki 2009), as well as the pictorial facets of metaphor (Forceville 1996; Forceville 2006) coming to the fore in the concrete unfolding of the metaphorical scenarios in the TV show might be appropriate ways of a deeper understanding of what is happening. At the same time, we saw that conceptual metaphor still comes into play as the war–chess mapping illustrated, although, in a multimodal scenario, it has to be understood rather as an interaction of domains.