Magic Circle

Neste artigo, tencionamos abordar uma das características presentes em certas atividades lúdicas, em particular os videogames, que é a agência. Mais especificamente, buscamos relacionar a agência nos videogames à possibilidade que ela possui de mobilizar experiências estéticas em seus jogadores. Em prol de lograr nossos objetivos neste artigo, primeiramente nos debruçamos sobre o conceito de agência, tomando como referencial teórico autores enquadrados no campo dos game studies. Em seguida, partimos para a formulação da relação entre agência e experiência estética, esta última com base na filosofia pragmatista. Por fim, ilustramos nossos argumentos com exemplos concretos de possibilidade de mobilização de experiências estéticas através da agência em determinados games.

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, the vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

Entropia Universe (EU) is a science-fiction themed massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), with a real-cash economy. The cash economy means that players can deposit and withdraw money from the game, at a fixed exchange rate of US$1 to 10 Project Entropia Dollars (PED). This study explores the impacts of this monetisation on the collective lifeworlds of players. The study focuses on online sociality, culturally located ontologies, understandings of virtual monies, and the experience of being in a multiplayer game-world. The primary methods of investigation are participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and the discursive analysis of Entropia related forums, websites, and player created media. The study applies postphenomenological, ludological, and economic theory, in conjunction with cyberethnographic research methods, in order to analyse experiences of being in this digital capitalist space. The resultant ethnography draws together data gathered during a y...

In this paper we present Vancouver Maneuver, a game for mobile devices using Augmented Reality software to create a cooperative board game experience. Utilizing principles from both digital and analogue board game design, a hybrid game design approach is proposed in order to identify applicable mechanics. By doing so we combine the physical and social aspects of co-located tabletop gaming with the computing power and aesthetics of digital games.

This paper is concerned with challenges and solutions related to the use of smartphones as a location-based mobile gaming (LBMG) platform. We present here a summary of our experiences from building a feature-rich story-driven LBMG for the Android platform. The game uses location, handset orientation and marker-less augmented reality to support its core mechanics, which in turn support a strong story line.

The tasks of Comparative Studies: dealing with the widespread narrativity Comparative Studies were born under the banner of transmediality. In the inaugural lecture of the French Literature course he held at the University of Marseille in 1830, Jean-Jacques Ampère established the genesis of the discipline by stating that «C'est de l'histoire comparative des arts et de la littérature chez tous le peuples que doit sortir la philosophie de la littérature et des arts» (Ampère, 1830, 8). Alongside literature, in an inflexible syntagm, the other arts are mentioned as well, in an aesthetic circumscription that does not envisage hierarchies of value between the verbal text and the further configurations of textuality. This equal conception of the media cosmos is particularly urgent in the «narrarchie» (Salmon, 2007) that we inhabit today, an epistemic era during which the tale has become a logic of power and a source of scientific truth. The text is detonated in a polymorphic proliferation that abandons the verbal component and welcomes new forms of expressionaudiovisual in particular-, as Barthes himself reminded us in the famous opening of Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits:

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, the vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

RESUMO Este estudo objetiva, por meio da pesquisa bibliográfica e do relato etnográfico, discutir o conceito de fronteira no âmbito dos larps (live action role play) desenvolvidos por palestinos e executados em países como Brasil e Finlândia, além do próprio Estado da Palestina, seja por meio de registros escritos por outros participantes, seja por meio de reflexões a partir da participação. Ainda que seja um artigo do campo da Comunicação, buscamos um quadro teórico interdisciplinar, com particular destaque para Mircea Eliade (Ciência da Religião), Carl Jung, Jacob Moreno e Donald Winnicott (Psicologia), Johan Huizinga (Ludologia), no âmbito de melhor abraçar a complexidade do tema. Dentre os achados de nosso percurso, destacamos que o larp poderia ser visto como um entre-lugar transitório, um espaço de diálogo entre o eu e o outro, entre o imaginário e o concreto, entre o subjetivo e o objetivo. Por conta disso, evidencia-se um ambiente que favorece o surgimento de processos comunicacionais entre os participantes.

Este trabalho propõe uma discussão sobre o círculo mágico, conceito bastante debatido nos últimos anos no âmbito dos jogos em geral, e em particular dos videogames. Através de um diálogo com autores dos game studies, como Johan Huizinga e Katie Salen e Eric Zimmerman, assim como com autores da psicologia cognitiva que discutem a questão da atenção, argumentamos que o círculo mágico, ao invés de separar ficção e realidade – conforme defendido por diversos autores – funciona como uma estrutura cognitiva de mediação, cuja existência ocorre de formas diferenciadas e gradativas, de acordo com a operação de processos imersivos e atencionais entre jogador e dispositivo tecnológico, neste caso o videogame.

This article deals with establishing and discussing the concept of magic circleoften present in game studies-and ponder the possible relations with the concept of liminality, worked in cultural anthropology from the rites of passage standpoint in Van Gennep and Victor Turner and with the concept of transitional phenomenon by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Towards that, we seek references in studies of the respective areas of knowledge, in order to reflect on the experience of play. The establishment of the relationship between the concepts mentioned-magic circle, liminality, transitional phenomenon-takes a step forward on the path that seeks to answer what play is and its relevance in contemporary life. Thus, given the large access to digital games today, this article provides a relevant contribution to Communication studies.

In this paper we present Vancouver Maneuver, a game for mobile devices using Augmented Reality software to create a cooperative board game experience. Utilizing principles from both digital and analogue board game design, a hybrid game design approach is proposed in order to identify applicable mechanics. By doing so we combine the physical and social aspects of co-located tabletop gaming with the computing power and aesthetics of digital games.

Tento článek vznikl v rámci projektu Specifického vysokoškolského výzkumu Institutu politologických studií Fakulty sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy, č. 260 461/2017, „Zájmy, moc a instituce v politickém rozhodování“.Using the case of the LARP One HundredYears of Solitude, based on the book by Gabriel García Márquez, this article presents the process of the game’s formation by mapping interactions leading to the constitution and upkeep of the game reality. In the description of the game’s development as a temporary autonomous network, special emphasis is put on the rise of the game’s agency. The process of LARP’s evolution is presented as a chronological action, beginning in the moment when the game is too weak to be autonomous, and follows the process of recruiting mediators as a necessary precursor to the players’ connection into the game’s network. Furthermore, the process of the players taking over recruitment activity is presented, followed by the final stage, when the game and...

In this paper we explore how mobile devices and co-location in mobile contexts contribute social play in game design, addressing the limited understanding of social interactivity in mobile games. Using the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework, we code four games illustrating effective use of mobile, social, and colocated elements. Subsequently, we analyse and discuss this data to identify generalisability in these games. In our discussion we identify how these findings address game design problems of designing collaborative games. Furthermore, we contribute to theory of designing for social play from the perspectives of co-located mobile contexts in game design by identifying how mobility: (1) affords co-locating with other players in public spaces, (2) supports physical interactions using spatial context and players bodies, extending games beyond their formal system, (3) supports asymmetric design with information and interaction. Finally we contribute the concept of a pocket magic circle, a particular magic circle, to support a focus on game design leveraging these intersecting properties.

Intermediality can be defined as the phenomenon in which a work of art appropriates the linguistic resources of two or more media, resulting in something that is potentially new and initially difficult to classify. The understanding of this exchange can be useful to authors who seek to overcome the traditional limits of a particular language, art form or medium. This paper sought to investigate the bibliography on this subject to primarily understand how games present themselves as a complex form of media and then draw parallels that can initiate a bridge between the intermediality theory and the study of contemporary interactive media. For this purpose, the electronic game Final Fantasy VII (1997) and its spin-offs were analyzed and from them, examples of how intermediality is applied to the franchise. Through this brief analysis, it becomes clear how videogames have the ability to absorb other media, referencing, transposing and combining them to

El metajuego y la subversión de la narrativa tradicional en The Stanley Parable Laksmy Irigoyen Regueiro * RESUMEN: The Stanley Parable es un ejemplo magistral de metajuego, por medio del cual se realiza una reflexión paródica sobre el lenguaje videolúdico y su diferencia con la narrativa tradicional. Con este artículo se pretende llevar a cabo una aproximación al tema central de este título-el metajuego y la interactividad del jugador-, partiendo para ello de la teoría de los frames ontológicos y de la constitución del Círculo Mágico a través de estos. De esta manera, comprobaremos como se produce un constante cambio de marco de realidad por medio de la voz del Narrador, mediante lo cual podemos observar la dicotomía jugador/personaje, marcada por la agencia.

Intermediality can be defined as the phenomenon in which a work of art appropriates the linguistic resources of two or more media, resulting in something that is potentially new and initially difficult to classify. The understanding of this exchange can be useful to authors who seek to overcome the traditional limits of a particular language, art form or medium. This paper sought to investigate the bibliography on this subject to primarily understand how games present themselves as a complex form of media and then draw parallels that can initiate a bridge between the intermediality theory and the study of contemporary interactive media. For this purpose, the electronic game Final Fantasy VII (1997) and its spin-offs were analyzed and from them, examples of how intermediality is applied to the franchise. Through this brief analysis, it becomes clear how videogames have the ability to absorb other media, referencing, transposing and combining them to

Intermediality can be defined as the phenomenon in which a work of art appropriates the linguistic resources of two or more media, resulting in something that is potentially new and initially difficult to classify. The understanding of this exchange can be useful to authors who seek to overcome the traditional limits of a particular language, art form or medium. This paper sought to investigate the bibliography on this subject to primarily understand how games present themselves as a complex form of media and then draw parallels that can initiate a bridge between the intermediality theory and the study of contemporary interactive media. For this purpose, the electronic game Final Fantasy VII (1997) and its spin-offs were analyzed and from them, examples of how intermediality is applied to the franchise. Through this brief analysis, it becomes clear how videogames have the ability to absorb other media, referencing, transposing and combining them to

Approaching poker in terms of storytelling, both the stories told about the game and the stories told within the game, this chapter works to establish a connection between poker and fictionality, connecting poker with the (i) construction of alternate realities (bluff) and (ii) reading in the attempts of players to reconcile these divergent possible storyworlds with the actual world. In making this argument the chapter will draw on, and explicate, possible worlds theory as inflected through the work of narrative theory (Doležel 1998; Ryan 2006; Walton 1990), work on counterfactual narratives (Dannenberg 2008; Dohrn 2009), and work on fictionality/make believe (Vaihinger 2001; Walsh 2007; Walton 1990).

Principles for organizing and making use of a laboratory with material computing resources are articulated. This laboratory, the Trope Tank, is a facility for teaching, research, and creative collaboration and offers hardware (in working condition and set up for use) from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including videogame systems, home computers, and an arcade cabinet. To aid in investigating the material history of texts, the lab has a small 19th century letterpress, a typewriter, a print terminal, and dot-matrix printers. Other resources include controllers, peripherals, manuals, books, and software on physical media. These resources are used for teaching, loaned for local exhibitions and presentations, and accessed by researchers and artists. The space is primarily a laboratory (rather than a library, studio, or museum), so materials are organized by platform and intended use. Textual information about the historical contexts of the available systems, and resources are set up to allow easy operation, and even casual use, by researchers, teachers, students, and artists.

There is an interesting category of digital games particularly challenging consumer electronics: pervasive games. On the one hand, pervasive games appear extremely promising for purposes such as learning and for encouraging players to engage in healthy outdoor activities. They widen the horizon of games content by direct access to reality. On the other hand, a larger number of pervasive games failed badly bearing abundant evidence for the need of better understanding the essentials of pervasive games and of the experience in playing them. The authors have developed not only a single pervasive game concept, but a whole family of concepts quite suitable for systematically challenging consumer electronics aiming at a wide spectrum of effects ranging from amusement to game-based learning.

Pervasive games form a problematic digital games category. On the one hand, they appear extremely promising for purposes such as learning and for encouraging players to engage in healthy outdoor activities. They widen the horizon of game contents by direct access to reality. On the other hand, a larger number of pervasive games failed badly bearing abundant evidence for the need of better understanding the essentials of pervasive games and of the experiences in playing pervasively. Hierarchies of pervasive games reveal strengths and weaknesses of those games and allow for partially ordering pervasive games. Storyboarding is an appropriate technology for the representation of several essentials characterizing experiences of game play. ALIENS ON THE BUS is some novel pervasive game to illuminate the reach of the storyboarding approach to games classification.

Mundos virtuais e identidade social: processos de formação e mediação através da lógica do jogo Resumo: O presente artigo pretende discutir o processo de formação de identidades sociais online nos 'mundos virtuais'-nossa hipótese é a de que a presença do que Salen e Zimmerman (2003) chamam de 'círculo mágico' exerça uma força mediadora que singulariza o processo de criação de identidades sociais, de modo a tornar tal particularização algo digno de atenção pelos estudos da cibercultura.

Popular online computer games, like World of Warcraft, are full-fledged virtual worlds brimming with ancient religious narratives, mystical worldviews and magical powers. Nevertheless, they are rarely discussed in sociological debates about religion. Online gaming may temporarily invoke a 'willing suspension of disbelief' but it can, given the fictitious nature of the text, never counter the secularization or disenchantment of Western culture. In this essay it is argued that the emphasis on (dis)belief in sociology creates a blind spot for 'play' as an important epistemological strategy to engage with religion. The ambivalent and transgressive nature of play, it is demonstrated, provides the opportunity for young players of World of Warcraft to experience spirituality without necessarily believing in supernatural claims; to fully immerse themselves in the 'magic circle' without conversion to a pre-defined set of beliefs and to freely experiment with religious narratives without becoming a true believer.

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. The whereabouts of play There is a certain agreement in the study of various aspects of media when it comes to considering the spheres of work and play. As Yee (2006) has coherently pointed out, these activities remain conceptualized as separate poles of the same dichotomy. Such framing has received wide support, along the course of history, figuring also in the ideas of some of the classic game theorists: Huizinga (1955) and Caillois (2001), for instance, believed that in order to play a game, the individual has to consciously step outside 'normal life' (Huizinga 1955) and voluntarily engage in an activity considered 'not serious'-suppressing both time and space. This place in space and time in which the play activity happens received a thorough theoretical treatment-and a proper terminology-when Salen and Zimmerman (2004) published their treatise on the general analysis and development of the constitutive processes of the game. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) inspired by a passage in Huizinga's classic Homo Ludens utilize the term the 'magic circle' to identify and describe where the essence of play is located. According to the authors: Although the magic circle is merely one of the examples in Huizinga's list of 'play-grounds,' the term is used here as shorthand for the idea of a special place in time and space created by a game. The fact that the magic circle is

Agon, alea, mimicry, ilinx: the four types of game/play distinguished by Roger Caillois (1958/2001) have become classic terms in game studies. Now Artur Skweres is aiming at introducing Caillois’ concepts to film studies, and he is proposing two new categories to deepen his analysis: óneiros and pragma. This small book is definitely not a systematic treatise but it can still offer fresh conceptual and theoretical insights to game studies scholars.

Mundos virtuais e identidade social: processos de formação e mediação através da lógica do jogo Resumo: O presente artigo pretende discutir o processo de formação de identidades sociais online nos 'mundos virtuais'-nossa hipótese é a de que a presença do que Salen e Zimmerman (2003) chamam de 'círculo mágico' exerça uma força mediadora que singulariza o processo de criação de identidades sociais, de modo a tornar tal particularização algo digno de atenção pelos estudos da cibercultura.

Twin particle projector cannons (PPCs) fizz with electricity. Jets of energised lightning pulse forward, crashing into the centre torso of my prized Mech, 1 a 'Hatchetman' HCT-3F. A brief silence holds before an ominous 'pop' and a burst of fire as the torso crumbles. I wait to hear from my star pilot and veteran of many campaigns, Stumpy, her characteristic Southern drawl a welcome balm to frequent tense encounters. Finally, Stumpy breaks radio silence. She emits a final, agonised scream as the entire Mech falls to an inglorious, incandescent demise, exploding upon the ground. Sitting now in shock, index fingers angrily scratching eyebrows, I move furiously through the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface. That shouldn't have happened. I scan the 'Armor' and 'Structure' numbers of my deceased Mech; I ponder the likely hit percentage of such a shot; I briefly consider the enemy AI is cheating. "No… the developer is cheating!" my interior monologue self-corrects. I turn to Google for solace, typing in the search bar "Battletech ridiculous AI shots". The top hit is a Steam forum thread for the game, "AI aimbot?". The opening post affirms my suspicions, yet is quickly rebutted by others, "RNG (random number generator) hates you!". Calmer now, I flick four fingers across my MacBook Pro trackpad, a gesture that switches between applications, and I am back in the game. "Maybe I can reload the save?" I briefly consider, before remembering I had selected the 'Iron Man' option at the start of the campaign, a feature that allows only one save file, 1 A large, pilotable robot, from the Japanese term 'Meka', itself a modification of the Japanese loanword 'mekanikaru', from the English 'mechanical'.

O presente trabalho busca explorar os debates presidenciais de 2014 no Twitter, através das métricas de Análise de Redes Sociais. Buscamos analisar e discutir como os candidatos apareceram nas conversações estabelecidas pelos atores utilizando as hashtags oficiais em dois debates presidenciais. Utilizamos, para esta discussão, as métricas de centralidade eigenvector, betweeness e grau.

Intermediality can be defined as the phenomenon in which a work of art appropriates the linguistic resources of two or more media, resulting in something that is potentially new and initially difficult to classify. The understanding of this exchange can be useful to authors who seek to overcome the traditional limits of a particular language, art form or medium. This paper sought to investigate the bibliography on this subject to primarily understand how games present themselves as a complex form of media and then draw parallels that can initiate a bridge between the intermediality theory and the study of contemporary interactive media. For this purpose, the electronic game Final Fantasy VII (1997) and its spin-offs were analyzed and from them, examples of how intermediality is applied to the franchise. Through this brief analysis, it becomes clear how videogames have the ability to absorb other media, referencing, transposing and combining them to a vast framework of linguistic resources that the game developer can use to design new experiences.

When playing video games, there is a certain amount of information and sensory stimuli that players need to process, interpret, and act upon in order to play the game successfully. This can vary from simple visual cues to complex systems of, for example, mathematical, literary, or ludic functions, which requires different amounts of attentional resources to be understood correctly. To process these there is a variation in cognition from the focused deep attention, a cognitive mode to process few but large pieces of complex information, to the more frantic hyper attention, a mode to process large amounts of small pieces of simple information. This thesis takes a close look on the cognitive modes apparent in playing the video game: World of Warcraft.

This article explores the world-building activities of players of the tabletop game Blood Bowl—a game that parodies American Football within a fantasy setting. It utilizes a ritual framework to focus on players’ activities relating to the considerable amount of luck inherent to the game. Based on fieldwork and survey data, it interprets players’ rituals and other actions as an effort to enact a particular social space, a “magic circle,” where enjoyable risk-taking and “edgework” take place. This social space is then analyzed within the Mary Douglas-derived theory of sociocultural viability (cultural theory). Using the theory’s typology, Blood Bowl tournaments can be characterized as individualist–hierarchy hybrid institutions. The article contributes by offering cultural theory as a tool for analyzing and comparing risk-taking behavior in diverse social contexts. The worlds built through Blood Bowl play are both analyzable and comparable with those integral to other social institutions, with cultural theory’s social solidarities ubiquitous. The article thus innovates by linking literatures on leisure and gaming with broader social theory.

We discuss how instructors and game-design students, for whom playing games for fun makes up a significant part of their self-definitions, made sense of transformations in perceptions of games, play and work during socialization into professional games-related careers. Our data come from 6 weeks of field research and 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted at a local tertiary institution (LTI) offering bachelor's degrees in game design in Singapore. We interviewed 10 students-3 female, 7 male-ranging from freshman to seniors as well as 4 male game design instructors with the intent of comparing the perspectives and experiences of both novices and veterans. While games scholars have investigated the boundaries between play and work through structural concepts such as "the magic circle" and through political-economic concepts such as "playbor," we explore how the social-psychological concepts of "social identity" and "role identity" together provide unique insights into the meanings of play and work for game-design students, and the consequences of those meanings. We found that instructors spent significant time and effort not only teaching students how to design games, but how to become designers. We also found that game-design students learned to construct social and role identities which enabled them to renegotiate their relationship to games and to function within the expectations of the professional game-designer role.

В статье на примере неиммерсивных игр (тамагочи, дигимонов, Pokémon Go, первазивных игр) рассматривается предложенное Й. Хейзингой понятие магического круга, то есть границы между игрой и не-игрой. Неиммерсивные медиа рассчитаны на особый режим потребления: пользователь делит внимание между несколькими медиа и занятиями, что приводит к тесному переплетению вымышленного мира и повседневной жизни. Явления такого рода позволяют исследователям компьютерных игр критиковать понятие магического круга, описывая его как проницаемую или подверженную разрывам границу. Анализ литературы показывает, что эта интерпретация является следствием ошибочного понимания Й. Хейзинги, а также теории фреймов. Различение игры и не-игры в неиммерсивных играх сохраняется, однако, за счет своей временной структуры они, подобно ритуалу, придают новые смыслы повседневной жизни. Легенды, стоящие за тамагочи и дигимонами, позволяют предположить, что неиммерсивные игры воспроизводят миф о киберпространстве как гибриде, стирающем разницу между воображаемым и матeриальным. Граница, таким образом, уничтожается в этом акте самоосмысления только символически.

This article, drawing on the example of non-immersive games (Tamagochi, Digimon, Pokémon Go, pervasive games) discusses the notion of magic circle, coined by J. Huizinga, which means a boundary between the game and non-game. Non-immersive media are intended for a special mode of consumption: users split their attention between several media and activities. As a result, the fictional world and everyday life become closely intervened. Such phenomena encourage game studies scholars to criticize the notion of magic circle: they describe it as a boundary that is permeable or easily broken. A critical reading shows that this interpretation is driven by misunderstanding J. Huizinga as well as the frame theory. In non-immersive games, the difference between the game and non-game is not lost. However, their time structure allows them to assign new meanings to the everyday life, like rituals do. The legends behind Tamagochi and Digimon suggests that non-immersive games reproduce the myth of cyberspace as a hybrid that blurs out the distinction between the reality and fantasy. In this self-reflective act, the boundary is broken only symbolically.

Este artigo discute o fenômeno de power creep no card game digital Hearthstone (Blizzard, 2012), problematizando-o a partir das perspectivas da midiatização, serialização e capitalismo tardio. O objetivo central é politizar a questão, apontando para os imbricamentos da indústria cultural contemporânea com as perspectivas epistemológicas e ontológicas do jogo enquanto chave interpretativa. Nesse sentido, empreendemos o esforço de revisar algumas teorias da midiatização, observando em particular o conceito nos videogames a partir da serialização. Partimos para uma análise empírica exploratória de relatos de jogadores profissionais no YouTube, revelando discursos que nos ajudam a localizar a agência do capitalismo tardio a partir da serialização e da midiatização. Por fim, reforçamos a necessidade de contemplar os pontos desvelados pela pesquisa na compreensão da indústria contemporânea do entretenimento, bem como a necessidade de (re)pensar os entendimentos particulares sobre jogos digitais e suas culturas.

Recent advances in the technologies of virtual and augmented reality give a rise to discussions of legal problems both in serious and seemingly unserious contexts. As for the serious, one may recall a case of 2019 where a British soldier was charged after “going rogue” in virtual combat simulation. As for the seemingly unserious, a good example is hype about Pokémon Go back in 2016 and discussions around possibility of legal qualification of placing virtual pokémons into representations of real spaces. A sophisticated reader can also trace the core of this discussion back to the issues of virtual property and virtual law in 2000-s, which are also absolutely relevant. However, now it becomes apparent that the problem underlying particular legal collisions is extremely broader. In terms of J. Baudrillard, we live in a new [postmodern] world full of simulacra. At the same time, the classic legal institutions are not ready to give up, and this results, metaphorically speaking, in two parallel worlds – the one of “old-fashioned” tangible reality where what we perceive as law exists and operates, often implying threat of coercion, and the one of “deceptive” media reality where we can easily be misled by simulacra. Hence, from the standpoint of legal theory and philosophy, the problem of finding a line between “real” and “virtual” worlds actually can be interpreted as a problem of certain new limits of law. Such limits can conventionally be called as the “semantic” ones because here we speak about different realities, re-created in our minds by concepts, and we navigate between these “worlds” by means of switching between the conceptual fields and connections of signs and meanings, as opposed to the case where we switch between various legal systems by means of travelling through different territories. If we follow this approach, many other cases may supplement the practical examples of legal collisions that relate to virtual worlds and virtual property, as long as they involve some kind of simulacra. In this sense, to summarize, the core idea of this paper is that most of the legal collisions  that are conventionally related to “virtual reality”, in fact, imply a broader problem that can be re-conceptualized as the problem of legal significance of the artifacts of media reality, or the “attitude” of law to various simulacra. Hence, the problem of the “magic circle” pertaining e.g. to the online multiplayer games context in general and to virtual property in particular actually is just a tip of the iceberg. A good example of the broader field would be the problems of applying Internet content restriction rules which exist in modern Russia to imaginary, humorous and other “unserious” contexts (or, better to say, this is the question of how to define when the context is “serious enough” for the purposes of law and when it is not). If we look into this problem from the standpoint of legal interpretation or application of law, it appears that it can be explained by means of H.L.A. Hart’s idea of “core” and “penumbra” (also, this problem also naturally is the problem of absurdity and common sense in law). Artifacts of media reality are somewhere in the penumbra. It is required then both for theoretical and practical purposes to find a way to connect those artifacts which are not simulacra, to the core meaning of certain concept-word used in the respective legal text, or to explain why this is not the case. In the end, what is suggested in this paper, is to employ a two-tier test comprising of the “criterion of reality” and the “criterion of seriousness”, based on the notion of generalized symbolic media from the field of sociology (in the latest interpretation by S. Abrutyn). An object of social relationship can have legal significance in case it has “socio-currency value”, i.e. it serves as an external referent of value of certain generalized symbolic medium and as such has this kind of intersubjective value. The “criterion of reality” is satisfied when an artifact of media reality has functional correspondence to the core meaning of a concept-word used in the respective legal text (so that it formally falls within the scope of a legal concept-word), this is a formal criterion. The “criterion of seriousness” is satisfied when an artifact of media reality by itself is an external referent of value and has “socio-currency value" (so that it would not be absurd by default to apply law to it), this is a substantial criterion. If both criteria are satisfied, then it is a kind of “easy case” where there is no absurdity at all. If just one of the criteria is satisfied, it is a case requiring “balancing” or “weighing” of values. If both criteria are not satisfied (just as when, in most cases, you engage in “interaction” with non-player characters of videogames, but not in all cases, to be fair), it would be absurd to consider the object of the corresponding relationship to be of legal significance in this particular aspect. Ultimately, this reasoning could be correlated with and translated into the formal language of legal argumentation.

Johan Huizinga’s concept of the ‘magic circle’ – a space that is separate from the reality of the world outside of a game/play - was applied to digital games by Salen and Zimmerman, and it has since been debated and re-evaluated to this day. The line between the game world and the real world is becoming increasingly permeable, so much so that the definitions of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ stand to be reconsidered in the context of technological possibilities. This study aims to examine the extent of the magic circle, and how it affects the treatment and perception of agency, control, and morality in games and fiction across three mediums – a science fiction short story named I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967) by Harlan Ellison, a 1995 videogame of the same name, and “USS Callister”, a TV episode about such a
game, from Black Mirror (2017). The short story is about five humans trapped inside a ‘mastercomputer’, tortured to death but never allowed to die. The videogame follows the same storyline but allows for a multitude of subplots and bizarre deviations. The TV episode is about a prodigal coder who designs an immersive gaming experience but in his own
version of it, he creates characters out of his co-workers by collecting their DNA, and by giving them an independent consciousness inside the game, he tortures them without letting them escape or die. How does a dystopic text get adapted into a game that gets adapted onto
screen? This work will show how Ellison’s text itself often becomes like a game, and that game gets written into a screenplay for the episode, becoming text again. Adaptations in new media like videogames and TV episodes get exposed to challenges and representative problems, revealing slippages and inconsistencies across all the works. I will study the variations in the representation of sexuality, women, and female agency across the three primary texts – issues that will contribute to the understanding of agency and control in this context and also to that of gender representation in science fiction and videogames.  An
episode like USS Callister does far more than taking the story of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and presenting it on the screen. It contextualises the marginalisation that takes place in the science fiction and videogame scenarios.  It heightens and then subverts the problematic strands of the plot in a grand irony. While both in the story and in the game, the figure behind the torture is a faceless technology called AM, in the episode the torturer has a human face, that of the office nerd – Robert Daly. Ironically, in the end it is the artificial intelligence that he had created, which takes over both his real and virtual existence – he is left stuck in the game, immersed, and defeated by characters who seemingly didn’t even exist without him. There is no way to know what actually happens to Daly next. This ending echoes both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where man’s creation takes over the creator, as well as Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, where the fate of the Boy hangs in limbo – no one knows if he has actually shot himself or if it’s a pretence, a part of ‘play’. This dissertation argues that the magic circle is ultimately a fickle inter-relationship between the game world and the real world by questioning the limit of agency and control, showing how the game world can exist in literature and on screen as well, not strictly in games.

The brigand Procrustes dispatched his victims by stretching or trimming their bodies in order that they be made to fit his bed. Considered as a scientific theory, McLuhan's four "laws of media" risk violating communications research in a dangerously Procrustean manner. Conceived as an exploratory probe, however, this "tetrad" can provide illuminating insights into the social and psychological effects of individual technologies. Applied to digital games, the tetrad reveals the particular ways in which this distinctive cultural form enhances diverse modes of play, obsolesces traditional television viewing, retrieves lost means of participation, and reverses into pervasive and persistent play. The tetrad helps, in short, to situate digital games within the broader technological and cultural environment of which they are a part.

Os estudos de jogos eletrônicos (em inglês,  game studies) ganham cada vez mais espaço nas pesquisas  em Ciências da Comunicação, especialmente na área  de Cibercultura; contudo, acreditamos que parece haver uma falta de pensamento mais reflexivo sobre este objeto. Assim, este presente trabalho procura estabelecer um lugar dos games na Comunicação,  a  partir da resolução de três questionamentos de fundo ontológico e epistemológico: a) O que são os games?  b) Os jogos eletrônicos podem ser considerados como mídia? c) Quais seriam as contribuições do estudo de games para a área da Comunicação e da Cibercultura?

This book presents the story of a unique collection of 140 manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ that was sold for a fantastic sum within the clandestine channels of the German book trade in the early eighteenth century. The book will interpret this collection from two angles – as an artefact of the early modern book market as well as the longue-durée tradition of Western learned magic –, thus taking a new stance towards scribal texts that are often regarded as eccentric, peripheral, or marginal. The study is structured by the apparent exceptionality, scarcity, and illegality of the collection, and provides chapters on clandestine activities in European book markets, questions of censorship regimes and efficiency, the use manuscripts in an age of print, and the history of learned magic in early modern Europe. As the collection has survived till this day in Leipzig University Library, the book provides a critical edition of the 1710 selling catalogue, which includes a brief content analysis of all extant manuscripts. The study will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety of fields, such as early modern book history, the history of magic, cultural history, the sociology of religion, or the study of Western esotericism.

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“This is a tremendously valuable contribution to the study of a pivotal period in the development of modern magic. Undoubtedly, it will become a standard point of reference not only in understanding Enlightenment magic, but also the transmission and transformation of medieval and renaissance traditions. It is also a highly useful bibliographic tool. On that ground alone, no library of modern magic traditions should be without it.” (Frank Klaassen, Associate Professor of History, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and President of Societas Magica)

“This book will provide a valuable resource for the increasing number of scholars working in the field of post-medieval literary magic.” (Owen Davies, Professor of History, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Art of Inclusion – an Examination of the Circle is the master thesis of the artist Åsa Maria Hedberg. It retells the process of an examination of the circle, used as a conceptual and visual tool in two public art acts: IMPRINT and IMPRESSION. The purpose of the study is to understand the characteristics and effects of the circle when used in participatory art of the artist. The study also aims to position the artist within the field of participatory art and artists of today.

The use of the circle is found to inform the art of the author-artist when her art works conceptually touches upon the subject matter of inclusion/exclusion. The socio-political aspect of openness of the circles of societies to any newcomer, will be an increasingly important future topic for artists to take on and engage in.

As a parallel, the international art world is another circle that includes and excludes. The artist learns from her participants and will find her way in.