Welcome to The Magic Circle — a blog about games and game design. My name is Andrew Fischer. I’m a college dropout who has somehow tricked people into paying me to make games for the last decade. Over the years I’ve done a lot of reading and writing about game design, mostly just for my own edification. I put together this blog as a place to start collecting that writing, and to act as a devlog for any of my (non-NDAed) projects. Hopefully someone out there finds this information interesting or helpful, and I can trick a few more people into thinking I know what I’m talking about.

As game design has become more discussed and studied over the years, a layer of jargon has started to stratify over the language used to talk about games. It’s messy. One person’s “negative feedback loop” is another person’s “rubber banding” or another’s “catchup mechanic.” In an attempt to wrestle this haphazard collection of jargon into something you might be able to call a “disciplinary vocabulary,” a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time discussing, studying, and standardizing the use of these terms. So I’m going to freeload on their hard work. The first kind of article I’m going to be playing around with are these Game Design Principle posts. They will discuss one principle used in game design theory, give examples of it in action, and point to some of those sources I freeloaded off of in case you want to read more. For this inaugural post, I’m going to talk about the eponymous principle of this blog — the “magic circle.”

The magic circle is a state of mind. It is a buy-in to the conceit of a game. It is a social contract between players mutually interested in having a shared experience. It is the bubble in which the normal rules and realities of the world are replaced by those of the game to everyone playing. Inside of the magic circle, the fastest way around a track in track-and-field is to be the greatest athlete, to train and practice and become faster than your competitors. Outside of the magic circle, the fastest way is to just cut through the middle. Inside of the magic circle, a chess knight is a playing piece, bound to its starting square until it is activated to execute a movement in specific pattern in accordance with a grand strategy. Outside of the magic circle, it is a wooden horse head.

This concept, the concept of a contained circle in which new rules and realities apply, is incredibly important not just to chess or to sports, but to all games. It is the concept that creates the meaning of games. It is the reason people can become so invested in the advancement of their World of Warcraft characters, or the reason that friends are willing to viciously betray each other in Diplomacy. Inside the circle, it’s real.

Depending on who you ask, the magic circle as a term was either coined last decade, or a century ago. Its original use came from the book Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga in 1938. This book was an exploration of the elements of play in culture and the importance of play to humanity. It is an important touchstone in the history of game studies. It didn’t present the term formally, but made a couple light references to it:

“The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

— Huizinga, 1938

The general use of the term in the wider games industry really didn’t begin until it was discussed in Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in 2003. In that book, they really re-invented the concept. They cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and other authors, and reframed the concept in terms of semiotics and design. The definition they put forth is the one discussed earlier in this article, and the one used by the games industry as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, even as simple a concept as the magic circle hasn’t been without controversy. A lot of designers and critics have come away from Rules of Play with a fairly black-and-white view of how the magic circle constrains and controls the play of a game. They see the concept as an approach to game design that encourages the creation of game systems as walled gardens — consequence-free zones completely shielded from cultural context or external ethical influences. In their eyes the magic circle is a dangerous philosophy that seeks to cordon off games from the realities of the wider world, limiting what games can be. This critical view of the concept became widespread enough that even Eric Zimmerman addressed it in a Gamasutra article years after the release of the book.

As is probably abundantly clear from my framing of the critical argument, I don’t particularly agree with that view of the magic circle. As I opened the article: I see the magic circle as a contract between the player and the game — a contract to accept new rules and realities in a limited space, for a limited duration, to experience meaning in interactions they would be otherwise-unable to experience. This contract is necessary to give game rules meaning, and doesn’t exclude the wider contexts outside of the circle, but adds to them. Games are, and should be, informed by world around them. The magical reality inside the world of the game has meaning because it relates back to your life and the world around you.

Examples of this are everywhere. A player’s personal experience with real-world racism will inform how they react to the ostracization of an alien race in their favorite sci-fi RPG. In the reverse, someone with little experience with real-world racism might gain new perspective from experiencing the treatment of the aliens in this RPG. Or, in a board game of deception and betrayal, personal histories between players may affect how players interpret each others’ actions, and insights gleaned from these fraught interactions may inform future real-world relationships. These games don’t gain this relevance in spite of the magic circle, but because of it. This suspension of reality inside the circle is what allows in-game interactions to be meaningful enough to be relatable to the real world.

In the end, regardless of how you decide to interpret it, the concept of “the magic circle” isn’t a principle on how to design games, merely a principle on how to understand players’ relationship to games. It is a lens through which to view your players’ experiences and understand the meanings you’re crafting for them.

Featured posts:

The Magic Circle

Recommended Reading