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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The magic circle is a concept taken from Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens and is used to describe the bounded spaces where play occurs separate from everyday life. The magic circle has also been taken up by the field of game studies to provide a formal definition of play and games. However, using the magic circle in this way has created a defense for toxic and predatory behavior on the part of players, developers, and publishers through the deployment of phrases such as “it’s just a game.”
These presentations push back against the idea of games as separate through the application of affect theory. Our application of affect theory to the examination and analysis of games and play foreground the embodied experiences of play that emerge through digital and analog games in ways that disenchant, blur, and negate the idea of games as closed and bounded spaces. Our collective projects present affective relationships in games as an alternative to the magic circle that allow us to imagine games as spaces of possibility that are held accountable to the broader lived and cultural experiences of players.
Disenchanting the Magic Circle
Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle”—a phrase used off-handedly to describe the ability of the human mind to demarcate locations such as the playground or the courthouse in which specific rules applied—entraps digital and analog game design with the promise of safety from outside influence. This fantasy ensnares those caught within it with the undue weight of the phrase “it’s just a game,” when faced with toxic, abusive behavior and also justifies rampant microtransaction-based economies that drain players of mental health and funds. The magic circle, then, acts more like a gate, allowing certain elements of reality in (patriarchal capitalism, toxic masculinity, playbour, racism, sexism, homo/transphobia) and forcing others (disabled, queer, non-White, non-Western, not “one of the boys”) out. While there remains no miracle cure for these issues in game design, moving away from the magic circle’s conception of a purely virtual world will at least dispel the notion that games are somehow exempt from reality.
I argue that game creators should look to affect theory if we are to replace the magic circle with a more just design framework. Drawing from Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms and Aubrey Anable’s Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect, this paper posits that games—be they played on a PS5 or in the theater of the mind—are an innately physical experience, embodied in the movements of players’ bodies and expressed through sweat, tears, and the electrochemical reactions of the mind. Affect theory thus emphasizes the interconnectedness of the people who make and play games while retaining awareness of how games reflect and perpetuate the world around us.
BLURRING FRAMES IN THE BOUNDARY SPACE OF SAFE ROOMS
Starting in the early survival horror genre video games, such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and The Evil Within series, safe rooms are constructed as an in-game space where players can gain a momentary suspension from the fictional time of the game. In terms of the game narrative, these spaces pose no potential threat to the protagonist, yet they do produce a sense of suspension where players can reflect on their character’s vitality, strength, and other qualities that may affect their gameplay. This suspension however goes beyond the fictional narrative of the game, as ıt produces a liminary threshold between the real and virtual. I argue that this seemingly secondary mechanical extension creates a highly discursive, uncanny space that disrupts the continuity of the magic circle through the blurring of the player frame, character frame, and even personal frame by situating the safe room as the middle ground (Bateson).
For a horror game to be successful, Bernard Perron asserts that the players must temporarily distance themselves from the game experience to create the feeling of thrill in the suspense of fictional narrative (76). While this thinking is true, the distancing of experiences must be finite, meaning the spaces such as saferooms, condition players in an emotionally intimate state that bridges the worlds of real and the fiction by the display of meta-game of objects, conversation with the characters, and exploration of spaces. The safe rooms hence, give a boundary space for players to be both self aware of their progress in-game, character’s remembrance of the story, as well as being physically conscious of their emotional state while breaking down the magic circle that attempts to separate once distinct worlds.
We Don’t Need no Stinking Magic Cricle: Reframing Huizinga’s play spirit as affective orientation through queer phenomenology
The concept of the Magic Circle, taken from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, has been a convenient way to describe the separation of games and play from the activities of everyday life and is a foundational concept for much of the field of game studies. However, the existence and necessity of the magic circle has been denounced by scholars such as Mia Consalvo and Tara Fickle by identifying the harmful real world effects of the Magic Circle’s framing of games as separate enclosed spaces. On the other hand, there have been attempts to resuscitate the magic circle by framing it as a permeable space that governs specific behaviors. Ironically, Huizinga’s discussion of the magic circle is limited and brief despite the disproportionately large impact it has had on the field of game studies. In his reading of Homo Ludens, Peter Mcdonald argues that overly formalist interpretations work misses the key point of Huizinga’s work and instead suggests that play should be viewed as a phenomenological experience described by an affective element which Huizinga terms the “play spirit."
Taking cues from McDonald, this paper positions play as a phenomenological experience and examines analog games like Catherine Stippell’s Nyctophobia and Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons and Dragons through the lens of Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. This approach foregrounds how games function within affective networks to orient players towards the play experience and offers an alternative framework for examining games as diagrams of possibility rather than bounded spaces.
Not Just a Game: Disenchanting, Blurring, and Breaking the Magic Circle
The magic circle is a concept taken from Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens and is used to describe the bounded spaces where play occurs separate from everyday life. The magic circle has also been taken up by the field of game studies to provide a formal definition of play and games. However, using the magic circle in this way has created a defense for toxic and predatory behavior on the part of players, developers, and publishers through the deployment of phrases such as “it’s just a game.”
These presentations push back against the idea of games as separate through the application of affect theory. Our application of affect theory to the examination and analysis of games and play foreground the embodied experiences of play that emerge through digital and analog games in ways that disenchant, blur, and negate the idea of games as closed and bounded spaces. Our collective projects present affective relationships in games as an alternative to the magic circle that allow us to imagine games as spaces of possibility that are held accountable to the broader lived and cultural experiences of players.
Disenchanting the Magic Circle
Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle”—a phrase used off-handedly to describe the ability of the human mind to demarcate locations such as the playground or the courthouse in which specific rules applied—entraps digital and analog game design with the promise of safety from outside influence. This fantasy ensnares those caught within it with the undue weight of the phrase “it’s just a game,” when faced with toxic, abusive behavior and also justifies rampant microtransaction-based economies that drain players of mental health and funds. The magic circle, then, acts more like a gate, allowing certain elements of reality in (patriarchal capitalism, toxic masculinity, playbour, racism, sexism, homo/transphobia) and forcing others (disabled, queer, non-White, non-Western, not “one of the boys”) out. While there remains no miracle cure for these issues in game design, moving away from the magic circle’s conception of a purely virtual world will at least dispel the notion that games are somehow exempt from reality.
I argue that game creators should look to affect theory if we are to replace the magic circle with a more just design framework. Drawing from Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms and Aubrey Anable’s Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect, this paper posits that games—be they played on a PS5 or in the theater of the mind—are an innately physical experience, embodied in the movements of players’ bodies and expressed through sweat, tears, and the electrochemical reactions of the mind. Affect theory thus emphasizes the interconnectedness of the people who make and play games while retaining awareness of how games reflect and perpetuate the world around us.
BLURRING FRAMES IN THE BOUNDARY SPACE OF SAFE ROOMS
Starting in the early survival horror genre video games, such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and The Evil Within series, safe rooms are constructed as an in-game space where players can gain a momentary suspension from the fictional time of the game. In terms of the game narrative, these spaces pose no potential threat to the protagonist, yet they do produce a sense of suspension where players can reflect on their character’s vitality, strength, and other qualities that may affect their gameplay. This suspension however goes beyond the fictional narrative of the game, as ıt produces a liminary threshold between the real and virtual. I argue that this seemingly secondary mechanical extension creates a highly discursive, uncanny space that disrupts the continuity of the magic circle through the blurring of the player frame, character frame, and even personal frame by situating the safe room as the middle ground (Bateson).
For a horror game to be successful, Bernard Perron asserts that the players must temporarily distance themselves from the game experience to create the feeling of thrill in the suspense of fictional narrative (76). While this thinking is true, the distancing of experiences must be finite, meaning the spaces such as saferooms, condition players in an emotionally intimate state that bridges the worlds of real and the fiction by the display of meta-game of objects, conversation with the characters, and exploration of spaces. The safe rooms hence, give a boundary space for players to be both self aware of their progress in-game, character’s remembrance of the story, as well as being physically conscious of their emotional state while breaking down the magic circle that attempts to separate once distinct worlds.
We Don’t Need no Stinking Magic Cricle: Reframing Huizinga’s play spirit as affective orientation through queer phenomenology
The concept of the Magic Circle, taken from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, has been a convenient way to describe the separation of games and play from the activities of everyday life and is a foundational concept for much of the field of game studies. However, the existence and necessity of the magic circle has been denounced by scholars such as Mia Consalvo and Tara Fickle by identifying the harmful real world effects of the Magic Circle’s framing of games as separate enclosed spaces. On the other hand, there have been attempts to resuscitate the magic circle by framing it as a permeable space that governs specific behaviors. Ironically, Huizinga’s discussion of the magic circle is limited and brief despite the disproportionately large impact it has had on the field of game studies. In his reading of Homo Ludens, Peter Mcdonald argues that overly formalist interpretations work misses the key point of Huizinga’s work and instead suggests that play should be viewed as a phenomenological experience described by an affective element which Huizinga terms the “play spirit."
Taking cues from McDonald, this paper positions play as a phenomenological experience and examines analog games like Catherine Stippell’s Nyctophobia and Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons and Dragons through the lens of Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. This approach foregrounds how games function within affective networks to orient players towards the play experience and offers an alternative framework for examining games as diagrams of possibility rather than bounded spaces.
Bio
Jack Murray is currently a PhD student in the Texts and Technology program at the University of Central Florida. He received his Masters of Arts in Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication and B.S. in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Jack’s current research is focused on the intersection of analog and digital games, the affective potential of games, and the relationship between games and computing technology.
Cameron Irby is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas in the College of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications and has an MA in English from the University of Louisiana—Monroe. His forthcoming dissertation Escape Plan: Reimagining Escapist Media interrogates discourses around media use and “escapism” during the COVID-19 pandemic and delves into the stories, communities, and (fan)fictions that gave comfort to us in these unprecedented times.
Atanur Andic is a Ph.D. candidate in the program of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas where he is currently working in the Fashioning Circuits Lab. Atanur did his Master’s Degree in Communication Studies at Kadir Has University. His prior education and practice is oriented towards Visual Communication Design. His scholarly interests are videoludic horror, electronic literature, and critical media studies.