The concept of magic circle: a critical reading

This article reviews the history of the concept of the magic circle, its criticism and the numerous other metaphors that have been used to capture the zone of play or the border that surrounds it, such as world, frame, bubble, net, screen, reality, membrane, zone, environment, or attitude. The various conceptions of social and mental borders are reviewed and separated from the sites where cultural residue of such borders is encountered. Finally, a model is forwarded where the psychological bubble of playfulness, the social contract of the magic circle and the spatial, temporal or productbased arena are separated.

As video games will always be defined by what the player is doing, Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron tackle the concept of gameplay in “In the Frame of the Magic Cycle: The Circle(s) of Gameplay.” Opposed to the spatial metaphor of Huizinga’s “magic circle” of gameplay, they conceptualize the partaking in a game as a cognitive frame, as an ongoing process. To cast off the implications of redundancy or stagnation contained in a circle, they resort instead to the figure of the spiral, which accounts for the gamer’s progression through the game. Their gamer- and gameplay-centric model features three interconnected spirals which represent the cycles gamers have to go through in order to answer gameplay, narrative, and interpretative questions, in both heuristic and hermeneutic fashion. They also underscore the fact that gamers cannot access a game’s algorithms directly and must instead construct an image of the game system, whose degree of fidelity towards the actual rules of the game may greatly vary (depending, for instance, if the gamer is playing to progress through the game, as opposed to playing to master the game mechanics).

Inspired by Herbert Marcuse's concept of playing as a non-repressed gratification of Eros, opposed to labor. I use Johan Huzinga's concept of playing in Homo Ludens (in which playing is coneptualized as the basis of human civilization and all social activities) to present an image of Jurgen Habermas' 'public sphere' as a sphere of playing. Then I examine whether or not this kind of public sphere can be recreated on the internet. My professor questioned the emphasis I put on the enclosed aspects of the "magic circle" in this paper. The enclosure involved in playing, the demarcation of a territory in which the rules hold effect, brings up a problem: if free civilization always begins in enclosure, how can we speak of a commons? Personally, I'm of the opinion that all commons function with a minimal degree of enclosure - for example, would Maine fishermen be so self-regulative if it were not for the economically valuable, precious, and localized nature of their product? That analogy is extremely limited, I suppose. But my point is that Huizinga's concept of playing may begin exclusively, but it "reverberates outward" after each game is over, so that spectators and players alike feel its civilizing effects. The aimless nature of playing (as described by both Marcuse and Huizinga) is both its civilizing power and its non-capitalist incentive.

Analog Game Studies, 2022

The concept of the magic circle in Game Studies, where it is deployed as a metaphor to discuss the boundaries of play, has been at times lauded as indispensable and at others maligned as defunct.1 Jaakko Stenros’ ‘defense’ of the magic circle expands its metaphorical utility to explain the psychological bubble created during gameplay, the social contracts that frame the action of gameplay and the demarcation of the sites or space of gameplay.2 As Eric Zimmerman clarifies, the magic circle is the “idea” that when games are played, new meanings are generated.3 This article builds on the understanding of this broad conception of the magic circle as a way of understanding the interactions, participation and meanings generated by games. However, I argue that the magic circle is not only a metaphor for understanding the boundaries of play; it is a technology that paradoxically erects and disturbs ontological divisions and a ritual technique that enacts ⎯ as do many forms of magic ⎯ a “reciprocal participation between people and things.”4 Drawing on speculative and animist philosophies, I seek to shift discussion away from anthropocentric ideas of play and consider, instead, the magic circle as a technology through which mutual participation and mutual immersion between “world” and “player” is revealed.

2013

Who are most efficient and effective learners you can think off? Children are, they need to learn a lot to be able to live independently and cope with daily life, and they learn mainly by play. In play exploration, trial and error in a safe environment is vital to educate knowledge, skills and behavior. Games are often being dismissed as “It’s only a game!” and not taken seriously as a strong pervasive tool to engage people and achieve more than “just” for fun only. To know, learn, investigate and prove how games can be properly used as an educational tool or for behavior change we need to investigate the context of a game thoroughly by using the Magic Game Circle as a model. Estimated 3 billion hours are spent playing weekly worldwide. Gaming is a fast growing industry, evolving from the entertainment industry there now is a serious growth of applied gaming companies and research and education on gaming is growing fast. Nowadays games are recognized en presented in museums and rega...

Observatorio (OBS*), 2009

2018

tecture, healthcare, private and public transport, education, refrigerator design or cultural and social processes. There seems to be no stopping the amazing and frightening spread of game mechanics. This book is a first step in exploring our role as people and players in this "new" overarching game world. Electronic games are the forerunners and mirrors, the playgrounds for all kind of experiments and combat zones for society. And at the same time they are leading the way for current and future technological and cultural progress. We may be able to learn from games how to design the future. But first there has to be the realization: We do exist, when we play, but we don't solely live in the game.

Cybertext Database. Retrieved August 25th, 2008

2021

Games are often intended to draw us so completely into a fictional world that we forget that there is a world outside of the game, however, forgetting ourselves in a game means we must come back to ourselves at the end, begging the question: who were we when we were playing? The conventional wisdom of the magic circle (Huizinga 1949) suggests that we press pause on our real lives when we enter a game space. Identity permeability in games, or bleed, (Stark 2012) suggests that there is no such pause button; that players lend their agency and identity to an in-game role, where that agency and identity is altered by the gameplay such that when the players return to themselves they are in some way changed. Bleed occurs when in-game learning is so effective that players experience that learning across two realities, evoking a shift in world view. This is where educational environments become necessary; providing context and community as players learn to re-think their out-of-game reality ...

This chapter considers the process of online social identity construction and how it is presented in virtual worlds – environments that although carrying a solid heritage of the pure online interaction tools, such as chat rooms, are still organized around a very specific logic, portraying objectives and structural repetition dynamics inherent to the game as a system. We posit that the presence of what is called the ‘magic circle’ by Salen and Zimmerman (2004) exerts a mediating power, not only by circling, limiting the game environment, but specially by transforming social identities formations processes, attaching it not only to the dynamics built in by the contact with technology – in the form of computer-mediated communication – but also in particular to the dynamics imprinted by the game structure present in such worlds.