Magic circle (games)
In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Huizinga wrote:[4] All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.
In fact, Huizinga's thesis is much more ambivalent on these issues and he actually closes his seminal book with a passionate argument against a strict separation between life and games.
To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design – two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga's own scholarly work.
[6] Salen and Zimmerman note that even though "the magic circle is merely one of the examples in Huizinga's list of 'play-grounds', the term is used ... [by him] as short-hand for the idea of a special place in time and space created by a game".
[8] Steven Conway, writing for Gamasutra, used the notion of the magic circle to identify when video games actually break the fourth wall.
True fourth wall breaking occurs when some aspect crosses the magic circle and breaks the illusion, such as when the title character in Max Payne, in a drug-induced haze, starts describing himself as a video game character and details what the player sees on their user interface while playing the game.
[12] Another example that illustrates the blurring of the distinction between the real and the virtual is related to politics and the concept of fairness within synthetic worlds.
Castronova states that users "are a community of interests who are affected by the decisions of a coding authority, usually the game developers".
[10] Communication between users and the coding authority takes place in online discussion forums outside the synthetic world.
Castronova notes:[15] When users take their in-world political concerns to out-of-world forums, they break down the distinction between virtual and real in a very radical way.
As the acquisition of currency, items, and skills within synthetic worlds is usually tied with a considerable time dedication of users as well as their individual abilities, people often gain the sense of owning their achievements in cyberspace.
In May 2006, for example, Kathleen Craig wrote: "In what might be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, a Pennsylvania lawyer is suing the publisher of the rapidly growing online world Second Life, alleging the company [closed his account and] unfairly confiscated tens of thousands of dollars worth of his virtual land and other property.
For example, when a pilot of a plane receives instructions from an air traffic controller, at that very same moment, somewhere in the world, there is someone flying a simulation of that plane, or something like it, on a similar flight path, and that person also receiving path instructions from a controller; all of this is occurring through VATSIM.net, a virtual air traffic simulation system.
