Ludic identities and the magic circle

Abstract

Johan Huizinga’s work has received renewed attention with the emergence and growth of Game Studies. An important aspect of Huizinga’s explication of play is it’s bounded nature. Like other cultural artefacts Huizinga describes in Homo Ludens (1955), the act of game-playing requires the crossing of a boundary which marks the game from the ordinary world. The crossing of this boundary into game-space implies a shift in the player’s identity that takes them from their everyday, “ordinary” selves, into their ludic selves. Suits (1978) has described this as the “lusory attitude”; a disposition one enters into when interacting with the bounded space of the game. This chapter examines the concept of the magic circle and considers the ways in which its adoption impacts upon player experience and identity. Following this the chapter considers the work of theorists like Anchor, Ehrmann, Fink and Gombrich which have adopted critical stances towards Huizinga’s notion of play as separate from everyday. The inadequacy of the latter becomes more apparent when we consider contemporary efforts to stretch Huizinga’s work and apply it to engagement with contemporary digital games. This chapter will thus take to task the taken-for-granted applicability of Huizinga’s notion of play for digital games focusing on the challenges this presents to understanding player experience and identity.