One of the few concepts from Games Studies that has escaped into the general atmosphere of people talking about it normally is the idea of the magic circle. The magic circle is an idea mentioned once in the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, which, much like other off-handed comments made by people focusing elsewhere, wound up becoming something that the games studies world spun off into a great big mess of noise, hi there Wittgenstein thanks for making ‘defining game’ into an academic sporting event.
But the magic circle ostensibly, as developed later by Roger Caillois (somewhat, even if he thought Huizinga was a bit stinky) and kind of elaborated on further by Ian Bogost (kinda?) is the notion that a game exists in a space created apart from the general real world; that the beginning of and experience of playing a game involves engaging in a shared separation of reality that everyone involved recognises and accepts has nothing to do with reality and can be therefore, a place for anything to happen.
I’ve talked in the past about how Caillois is kind of a big weirdo, which is a way to divert the conversation away from the fact the dude was a racist and a misogynist and also kind of an asshole even to white dudes as well. In any given conversation about academics from the 1950s it’s not exactly interesting to point out that they were racists and misogynists, you can usually instead direct attention to the few who were exceptions to this trend and that is interesting in and of itself.
In this case, though, Caillois’ vision of games is not atypical for a particular vision of games studies: He sees the games as being disconnected from reality. He also believed them to be unproductive and uncreative; a game by definition could not have a byproduct that was useful or had value. In Caillois’ mind, a game could not ‘create anything of value.’
I’ve been thinking about Caillois as I read CLR James Beyond A Boundary, a dense book full of historical accounting of the experience of playing cricket and playing being a fan of cricket, during a time in which Colonial England offered very few routes for advancement for black people in the West Indies. One of those routes for a limited number of people was cricket. You could use cricket to advance, to position yourself, but, James writes, there’s always material conditions that hold you back. The best black player couldn’t replace an acceptable white player, and the best black player was the lightest-skinned one.
The book has this phrase, early on: Before I knew of politics, I had learned it all from cricket. It’s a history full of reflections on the way that the empire treated its games as this neutral space where everyone adhered to the same rules so everyone got treated the same even as James accounts incident after incident after incident where that was simply not true – there’s even an instance where Australia, another subservient component of the empire, but also, crucially, one presented as whiter, is shown as being positioned as yes, lesser to England, but still very much the white one in a contest against Trinidad.
Australia set a truly eyewatering target of 600. The response came roaring back as the first two batsmen scored over 200 runs. To say that this was a simple value-neutral exchange between parties and that there was no interface of the system of the empire asserting over people is to pretend that people’s feelings don’t matter when they’re engaged with a game; that drive and agency and alertness and all the elements of human exchange are present in the human to be observed, to play the game, but which also, crucially, do not actually exist, because they would make the interplay of the game objects meaningful outside of the game as well.
I have only read excerpts from Games Black Girls Play, which describes a whole range of ways that there are things that I, a white guy, have been taught are inherent to black people but as it turns out are things that the black community being observed practice, through games, and valorise, through good execution in those games. There is no magic circle for these people, in this situation; the real oppressions of the real world melt in to the edges. When a man was shot for trespassing on a country club without realising it because he was playing Pokemon Go, you’re not going to be shocked to hear that it wasn’t a white guy.
Since I started on Games Studies, one thing I’ve often argued with in Man, Play And Games is the position that ‘games are uncreative,’ that they cannot create any value. To me, the idea of mandela patterns and playful meditation experiences which can leave you with an artistic product struck me as fundamentally against this idea; either they’re not games or they’re not creative, or Caillois’ idea doesn’t work.
The thing I didn’t really consider there though is that my immediate, easy and convenient example of a playful experience that has a creative output was something from a non-white cultural space. And that’s not to say ‘western games are like this, eastern games are like that.’ It’s more that if you approach games from the perspective of the magic circle, and assume that idea works, you have to start shaping things you see in order to make them collaborate with that idea; they are part of the conversation.
And look, the magic circle is not an idea with zero explanatory power. It’s absolutely an idea you can use to describe the way that when you’re in a game, you can tell you care about something and then after the game is over, that thing has no value to you. It’s not like once the game is over you have a reason to care about having a five of clubs. I think that this can be handled by Suits’ idea of a lusury attitude, but the magic circle is a term that can be connected to ideas of theatrics and narrative design.
But it’s kinda hard, when you sit the distinct difference in who gets to be aloof and who has to be involved alongside one another to not see that the Magic Circle is just another way to describe privilege.
Oh and Caillois hated clowns, obligatory mention.
EDIT: hi Polygon!
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