Huizinga’s “Magic Circle” & Thoughts on Gameplay Information Feedback Loops

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens:

According to Huizinga, the consciousness of play as a separate and self-contained sphere is often reinforced by the pervasive tendency to enclose the players within a spatiotemporal frame, the so-called “magic circle”, which isolates their game from the more serious tasks of daily living. The separation often consists in a literal physical precinct: a chessboard, ring, arena, field, stadium, stage, altar, etc. There are also sharp temporal boundaries, a clear beginning and an end, which clearly mark the game off as a temporary interruption of ordinary life. The game unfolds within a temporarily closed world. Moreover, the existence of the magic circle is closely related to the existence of artificial rules or conventions that hold only within this enclosure.

There is No Magic Circle (in Video Games):

Video games have no magic circle, but board games do. The difference between these two media is, essentially, one of reaction and proaction.

… I want to address Huizinga’s famed “magic circle.” Recent scholarship agrees (seemingly unilaterally) that the magic circle is porous at best.

… I propose that we should view the magic circle as the information feedback loop maintained by the players of a board game. The magic circle implies that something special and distinct from ordinary reality is occurring during a game. When we play a board game this is exactly what happens: the objects we play with are imbued with a special significance. Paper money is “worth” something, flat discs can “jump” over each other, placing a token in a certain place earns “points.” The meaning and information we attach to these objects belongs to the other half of the information feedback loop, a loop drawn between the players-as-players and players-as-processors. This loop is the magic circle, a circle that transforms random cubes of wood into bits of information that we are then somehow able to act upon in a meaningful way.

With video games the feedback loop is fundamentally different. We do not need to attach any special meaning to Mario, the computer provides it for us. We see and interact with the objects in a video game without any special manipulation of our own cognitive processes. There is no magic circle here, only reaction to a state that is just partially under our control.