Theory Time: Magic Circle of Play

Culliope here, resident Academic TTRPG Nerd, with the second article in an occasional series about TTRPG theory. My first article was We’re All Fine Here, which was about how sociologist Gary Alan Fine discovered RPG players think in three ways at once while playing and how that works in practice. Welcome and prepared to get schooled. – Maryanne 

If you play TTRPGs, you likely played pretend as a child. Let’s go back to those times and think a little more about how pretend play works. To the outside observer, a child might be carrying a stick between their legs and wearing a napkin around their neck as they jog around the backyard, but to the pretender(s), they are brave cowpokes protecting herds of cattle in the wild west, astride a noble steed. The player(s) know that they are using sticks and napkins, but choose to assign an alternative value that forwards the plot of the pretend game.

In a famous example of this phenomenon, here is a page from the classic children’s book Eloise, written by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hillary Knight. The red lines represent the imaginative play as Eloise pretends she is in a terrible disaster at sea while bathing. The book is full of illustrated representations of a child’s play.

Alternatively, let’s think about a board game such as chess, Stratego, or Battleship. The pieces of plastic (or something nicer if you are fancy) have no inherent value. However, when people sit down to play the game, there is a shared agreement that, within the bounds of the game, the little piece that looks kind of like a castle tower is now a rook, and has very specific value and movements. Or, that the little chip with the bomb on it “destroys” other pieces, or that the plastic gridded square represents an ocean, the small models represent giant battleships, and the red pegs represent hits. There is a concept that game researchers use to describe this phenomenon.

In 1938, Johan Huizinga introduced “The Magic Circle” to describe places where special events happen that have their own behaviors, customs, traditions, and rules. Huizinga posited that courtrooms, sports fields, churches, and play spaces all were examples of this magic circle – once you entered the boundaries of this “space,” you were now part of something apart from the everyday experience. 2003’s Rules of Play: Fundamentals of Game Design by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman brought this idea back into focus in gaming and are responsible for its wider use today. The magic circle is the boundary between the real world and the game world. This can be utilized to describe MMOs, board games, TTRPGs, Pokémon Go, traditional video games, etc. There are rules, customs, victories, defeats, terminology, and expectations of players within the magic circle that may be very different from everyday life.

The idea of the magic circle is important because it describes something that we have all experienced. When you are in the midst of playing a game, there is at least a partial detachment from the day-to-day reality in lieu of the strategy and fiction of the game. This is evident when people are hugging when a goal ties up the game, or excited when they finally “captured” Snorelax, or feel victorious when they begin riding a stick that represents a wild stallion in-game. We all know on some level that these things do not have a reality-based meaning to them, but within the magic circle, we can assign an agreed-upon value that goes beyond the mundane, that is separate from that reality. 

Each magic circle is a tiny bounded reality with rules and norms of its own that allow for escape, companionship, imagination, and triumph contained within, but separated from, the normal reality. Only in the magic circle of play would it be considered kind of normal to hear that someone burned a car because the Red Sox won, or wore a fake cheese on their head to express their love of a football team. Within a TTRPG, this magic circle contains the aspects of both a strategic game and a shared fiction. Numbers on dice represent narrative decisions, and a meme we see a week later might remind us of something we shared with the party in our fictional experiences together. There is a game system-based insider talk – crit hit, d20s, metagaming, artificer, NPC, game master/dungeon master/keeper, etc., party wipe, etc. There is likely also fiction-specific insider talk based on the progress of the shared fiction. 

Of course, the magic circle is not a real space, and as such, is not an impermeable fortress. It is influenced by culture, player(s) real-life experiences, and remembered through lenses that are impacted by later events. Real-life economics influence pay-to-play games, the monetary value of items or characters, and scheduling can be a real influence on narrative! Because games have beginnings, middles, and ends, each magic circle is a small independent reality that allows us to come back time and time again, if we choose, and maintain or change that reality. 

When we return to the boundaries of the magic circle week after week to play a TTRPG with friends, or come back to a familiar game system or setting, we are inviting ourselves back home into the magic circle, where numbers on dice are more than numbers, and anything within the bounds of the shared reality could happen!

References:

Huizinga, Johan. 1938. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric. 2003. Rules of Play: Game design fundamentals. Chapter 9. MIT Press. https://gamifique.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/1-rules-of-play-game-design-fundamentals.pdf

Thompson, K. (1983). Eloise: a book for precocious grown ups. Simon and Schuster.