It’s a game, but it’s also Mighty Boards and friends sharing an evening. They shape who we are as players, how we approach a gaming session, and what we feel while we’re playing. All of these can be transformed in the context of the game, but they don’t go away. On the one hand, we bring ourselves – our troubles, our desires, our character, our memories, our mood on a particular day, how we feel about the people around us at the table – into a game. To suggest that they are isolated behind a magic circle – cut off from all the other practices, habits, interests, emotions and thoughts making up our lives – is a distortion that downplays the richness of meaning that games can come to have for us, as games researchers have pointed out. Put like that, the idea is absurd – after all, if it were the case, why would anyone play games? For many of us, playing games is a big, and meaningful, part of our lives. The magic circle has been broken.Īnd yet, this concept shouldn’t be misunderstood to mean that there is no relation between games and the rest of our lives – that our ‘real’ lives have no effect on our engagement with games, and that playing games has no impact on the rest of our lives. Tensions might be high as you’re about to make a decisive move that could turn the tide of the game – but if you get a phone call about an emergency involving a family member, you very quickly lose interest in pursuing your strategies and winning the game. The victories we’ve won leave us no richer. The characters we were playing dissipate into thin air. The pieces – whose position on the board was of such crucial importance just minutes earlier – are casually gathered up and thrown back into the box. Conversely, once the game is over, these things are no longer important to us. While we’re engaged with the game, we do care deeply, even passionately, about achieving our goals, scoring the most points, winning, or completing our adventure. When we sit down around a table, lay all the pieces out on the board and begin to play, we do get the sense of a new world being conjured up in front of our eyes. ![]() The idea of the magic circle wouldn’t have caught on if it didn’t speak to something deeply true about our experience of games. “To play a game means entering a magic circle” – it means leaving the concerns, responsibilities and meanings of our ‘real’ life behind and taking on a new set of concerns, responsibilities and meanings that only come to exist through the magic of the game. Some decades later – in theirt 2003 book Rules of Play – Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman take this suggestion and develop the idea of the magic circle in the form it has become popularized. These borders of play contain a different reality, in which things have meanings that don’t exist in the outside world. Play, Huizinga tells us, usually has fixed borders – we step onto a clearly demarcated field to play a sport, for example, and the moments a game begins and ends are also usually beyond dispute. Huizinga’s understanding of play is based on the idea that, in play, we step into an ‘other reality’ that stands apart from the ‘seriousness’ of everyday life. ![]() The Magic Circle, John William Waterhouse (1886) ![]() Its argument that play is at the core of many of the pursuits of human civilization – from art to law, war and religion – is obviously appealing to those of us who are personally invested in games and gaming. The book itself is a fascinating, wide-ranging and influential – if occasionally eccentric – study on the importance of play in human culture. The first usage of the term in the context of play is often attributed to the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga, in his 1938 book Homo Ludens. ![]() The idea of the ‘magic circle’ isn’t a complicated one, at first glance. Whenever we fall back on the idea that “it’s just a game,” we’re using a concept that has come to be known as the magic circle of play. Maybe a game that depicted historical events hit a bit too close to someone’s heritage. Or your annoying friend keeps bringing up her glorious victory over you, even after a couple of weeks have passed. How many times have you heard – or even said – the phrase, “It’s just a game”? Perhaps a fellow player, someone you thought was your best friend, believes you shouldn’t be upset about his betraying you and robbing you of the victory that was within your grasp.
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