Three installments ago, I attacked the concept of the magic circle. My assessment wasn’t completely fair in that I didn’t fully disclose why I did so. Eric Zimmerman wrote about attacks on the magic circle in a February 7, 2012 piece on Gamasutra’s website. He argues that many of these complaints use straw men fallacies to establish the author’s position. On a cursory read, I do seem to be using just such a tactic in how I approached the subject. So, why did I do it if I knew that it would appear as if I were basing my premise on a logical fallacy? In part, what I was trying to do was cut through the complexity of the subject to isolate one component to illustrate the need to separate the mythic structure of the social contract in the guise of the magic circle from its reality. The other reason was that in an essay format, there was too much material to cover and I knew I would have to write this piece in order to address some of the missing elements.
This is why I did it: in my experience with literary circles of academia, the liminal space gets conflated with the play space as if they completely suspend the rules of reality in the same manner. Now, this makes sense if you only apply the theory to works of art, visual or print. It is a part of what the surrealist movement was about. The material of that movement actively works to circumvent the notions of reality and the need for art to conform to the world we know and asks us to question what we accept as “realistic.” Anyone who has studied the more artistic humanities will appreciate how this playing with normative conventions is meant to inspire discussions on the role of art, what it reveals, etc. Art is artifice, after all. If only it stopped there.
As studies in drama taught me, the same thing is applied to theater. The roots of drama are ritual ceremony. When one entered the sacred space, it was a liminal place. Some of that is still retained in Western cultures, but ceremonies are not strictly linked to the supernatural or in reverence of the divine. Add to this the fact that not all rituals are clad in the trappings of symbolism meant to reveal or invoke an altered state, and the artificial space created by the social contract is anything but magical. Someone who acts as the master of ceremonies at a charity event cannot be necessarily said to be heading a religious experience, for example. Even the ritual of graduation from an educational institute does not invoke a higher power, despite any prior associations. Yet, in drama, the stage is still seen as a magic circle in some respects. The play is no longer bound to religious stories, though the tales may speak to common situations that affect the community as a whole.
Then there’s the issue of rules. As much as I would like it to be the case, formal structures are not always elegant enough to rise to the level of art. Personally, I know of no one who has ever exclaimed that the combination of specific phonemes is art. Nor have I heard the rules of language described that way. How they are used, on the other hand, is where people generally speak of language arts. It is how one wields the rules where the quasi-magical occurs. Otherwise, languages would be considered artistic expressions on their own without the need to distinguish them from the works written in any given tongue. All this is a long-winded prelude to my attempt in decoupling the liminal space from the social contract is simply that not all things remain within the play space; some experiences impact the game and the real world and this is a direct response to the implications of the social structure imposed on the bound space without the need to rely on ephemeral notions like liminality.
Whenever anyone enters/leaves the play space, attitudes enter and knowledge leaves. The permeable barrier between the social contract of the play space and reality cannot slough off the relationships and emotions of players as they enter. Those behaviors and outside relationships are key to who the players are for that play session, if not in reality. The porous boundaries of the so-called liminal space allow for a constant exchange of information and attitudes between reality and the game. Don’t believe me? You might want to check out The Ungame. Its primary purpose is to make you learn something about your fellow participants that has nothing to do with how they play games. The information learned is brought in from outside the play space and makes the player a component of the game. There is nothing magical in this nor is it liminal, it’s part of the rules of the game. Say, however, the game is less “educational” in scope. The experience remains with the players. It isn’t extracted as some form of selected amnesia when the game is left behind. Players also take away improved skills whether they won or not; and, when returning to memories of games played, they may think of ways to better their chances of winning.
Games are spaces of confusion. This is deliberate, but likely where the conflation with the liminal is most flagrant. Whether we are meant to ascribe our own meaning to the play experience or our relationship to the various forms of knowledge, we are expected to work within the game’s framework. That is appropriate and respects the conditions enacted by the social contract. The admixture of seemingly unrelated subjects is grounds for us to relax and rethink how information or concepts from different disciplines might be related. On the face of it, this idea sounds magical. However, science has offered an explanation why this is the case and how it further debunks the erstwhile mythical view of genius in action. This is one of the points raised on The Dylan Ratigan Show when Jonah Lehrer was interviewed during his March 19, 2012 appearance in relation to his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. It’s the thread between ideas, no matter how tenuous, that helps create insight. This has bearing here as it shows that while a formal structure can provide the security to fail time and again until a solution is found, nothing magical or liminal is attached to it. This should not be taken to preclude experiences from feeling magical only that engendering environments are not equitable in this capacity.
Furthermore, the obscuration players use as fiat to mask their strategies to win are often designed to confound opponents as much as possible. Second guessing your own moves in a game is a way in which a player has managed to confuse you. Why did he make that move? What does she hope to gain by playing that card? Both are examples of questions of player-generated confusion. The route taken is not prescribed by the rules. Add to this the ways in which the conditions of reality or the game impinge upon the other and it’s a bit easier to see how the barriers between game and reality are blurred sufficient enough to confuse where one ends and the other begins, to say nothing of the emotional states of the players. As the environment was the subject of much of the entry on house rules, I’ll leave the subject at this for the sake of brevity.
One problem with the conflation of the magic circle with the liminal, artistic space is how people can be hurt through its application in ways it should not be used. Granted, wisdom is the outgrowth of the pain from knowledge and may be induced during rituals in order to inure the initiate against future agonies, but that makes for a very bad game. The whole point of keeping the social contract separate from the liminal is to reduce the confusion and expose the artifice for what it really is. Games are a form of art, yes, but they are by no means magical or necessarily ritualistic and transformative experiences. The art is in the crafting of the artifice that you, as a player, use to create your own experiences. The blurred boundaries of art and religious experience aren’t meant to be destructive. If they inflict pain, it is in order to reveal the world as the community sees it and the subsequent realignment of the individual’s ego to the group’s worldview. A game like poker shows how this isn’t always the case with games.
The confused experience of game spaces like poker work to create the potential of a dangerous situation. This is the key difference between the shock of ritual and the empty wallet from a poker game. Sure, you might learn the hard lesson that chance can lead you to ruin, but it doesn’t mean you won’t come back time and again to lose it all to your friends. The ceremony, however, was designed to align members to the community’s interests where as the poker game is one of self interest. In part, this is due to the emotional entanglement created by both the ceremony and poker. One is decidedly more positive than the other given our social needs as a species. Games that deal with relationships and/or psychology mimic some of the same core elements of our most sacred rites, including secular ones. When you take real money in poker, you deprive someone of their earnings. This is not a slam against the game, I’m just pointing out the rules of the game.
Like religion, poker requires a communal responsibility, but this conflicts with the game’s goal: win as much as you can. The attitude of the players matters because they determine how much they will respect the limits of others and even go so far as to prevent fellow players from draining their savings, especially if the game is played amongst friends. There are moral and ethical issues in games and rituals which have this level of impact on the world at large for the participants. Play is taken less seriously however, and it is this very attitude which is conducive to the blurring of the lines between reality and play spaces.
To reiterate: players always take something away when they leave the play space. Our capacity to retain memories of an experience only helps to reinforce that a game can produce emotional entanglements between that extends beyond the play space in a like fashion as religious ceremonies. While not magical or liminal for games, it is intangible. Players will remember how they were treated by fellow participants. The more a game or ritual conflates liminal spaces with reality, the greater the emotional entanglement is as the barriers between the two become so diffused that it may be harder to distinguish them. This is in no small part due to the involvement of the person’s body or ego in the game. If this weren’t true, why have rules of sportsmanship to govern behavior and curb emotional outbursts or the disclaimers so often found in roleplaying games that players are not their characters?
Why should a clear delineation between game spaces and reality matter so much? Because not everyone wants to play the game. And, if they should, they likely do not want to play at the same time as others for myriad reasons. Chances are that if they do wish to participate, they do not wish for the social contract to be in play anymore than they may wish the play space to expand beyond what is needed. This is tantamount to a form of moving the goal posts and it runs the risk of removing a player’s agency, forcing him to continue to unwillingly participate. If the divisions aren’t clear, the liminal never ends and all spaces risk collapse in conflation. Imagine the stress of such emotional entanglement in an activity that you would prefer does not interfere with other activities in your life. In such games, players are always playing, even when they are not in such a scenario. This is essentially the essence of what people do to others to earn description of “gaming the system.”
Finally, not all so-called liminal spaces are meant for play. Despite being pageants that do not have practical significance beyond the emotional states they are intended to create in a person, the conflation of play spaces with the liminal/artistic and sacred rite/magic circle is the very thing that must be respected while simultaneously guarded against in the way these similar, yet radically different concepts are described and conducted. We need play, ceremony, and art, but not always at once or combined. What’s needed is a recognition that the social contract requires a sense of responsibility for our fellow players as the real magic is the forging of community and the nurturing games provide via creative associations accepted knowledge have with one another. When the use of social contracts and liminal spaces are better understood by disciplines beyond game design, the lines likely won’t be so blurred. It is the community that is sacred; games and rituals are merely the glue to keep people bonded to one another.
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Anatomy of Game Design: House Rules
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Anatomy of Game Design: Driven Towards Extinction