Magic Circle Research Articles

Into The Magic Circle

In this irregular, PhD student and clubgoer Ruby Schofield critically examines discourses around nightclubs, on the basis of her own mixed experiences. She engages Johan Huizinga's concept of a magic circle as a productive means to explain both the play-ground nature of a club, as well as the need to renegotiate the boundaries of club life, in order to keep it that way.

A Speedrun within a Rock Show

Bit Brigade is a five-piece band that combines hard-rock adaptations of classic-era Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) soundtracks with live speedruns of the game, performed in concert as a rock show. This article uses Bit Brigade as a case study to develop a conceptual model for multimedia analysis that investigates audiovisual integration in novel ways. The essay comes in four theoretical sections followed by a full analysis of Bit Brigade’s speedrun of The Legend of Zelda. The first section explores Johan Huizinga’s magic circle and Kofi Agawu’s region of play to describe types of semiotic play that involve the gamer, band, and audience at a show. The second and third sections focus on intertextuality and how adaptation and nostalgic recycling of the past yield meaning in this unique artform. The fourth segment unpacks intertextually enhanced agency and investigates audience immersion through the social act of performance. After developing this multi-part framework, the latter half of this article presents an analysis of Bit Brigade’s performance of The Legend of Zelda at MAGFest (2022), chosen because of the group’s unique musical and ludic approach to the game. Throughout, the goals of this study are to show how gaming performance parallels music making and to clarify the ways in which concepts associated with music theory can be reexamined through the study of video game performance art.

The Game-Like Experience of Virtual Reality Art: Sensational Players and Critical Audiences

This article delves into why audiences perceive virtual reality (VR) art as a game-like experience and how it impacts audiences’ reception of culture by examining two VR art pieces and their respective audience responses in focus group discussions. Through qualitative analysis, two factors are identified: the cognitive association of VR with gaming due to audiences’ preconceptions about VR, and the immersive environment of VR creating the “magic circle” that fosters the sense of play. The study argues that the intersection of VR and art generates the affordance allowing audiences to “play” with culture. However, the “not-serious” feature of play in VR may work against the norms and mores of a specific culture in the real world, especially when it relates to religious or ethnic culture. This article sheds light on the implications of the game-like experience in VR for creating VR applications beyond gaming, particularly in art and cultural heritage.

What is Real in Virtual Reality?

The paper discusses the thesis of virtual realism presented by David Chalmers in his paper “The Virtual and the Real” (2017). Here, I suggest an even stronger version of the claim that I call “virtual physicalism”. According to this view, virtual objects are not only real but physical as they are identical to the physical states of computers that run VR software. I suggest that virtual objects should have a similar ontological status to toys—they should be treated as models or simplifications of ordinary objects. Just like toys, virtual objects can sometimes be good enough to be used instead of their ordinary counterparts. In these cases, virtual objects start to be treated as instantiations of the same kind. In the last part of the paper, I use Johan Huizinga’s notion of a “magic circle” to suggest how different objects could be successfully “virtualized”, that is, moved into a digital realm while remaining objects of the same kind as their non-virtual counterparts. I suggest this will happen once virtual reality becomes permanent and causally connected with non-virtual reality. I finish the paper by looking at examples of natural kind objects and individuals, which seem to be the hardest cases for successful virtualization.

Crafting Inclusive Playful Learning Environments: Exploring Affective Strategies and Atmospheres

This article contributes new critical perspectives to Playful Learning, an emerging educational field rooted in inclusivity, democratic principles, and adaptability. It seeks to bridge the gap between playful learning and affective thinking, exploring how atmospheres can enhance inclusivity within higher educational contexts. Specifically, it investigates artful teaching practices in the Social Education Study Program at a University College in Denmark to uncover affective strategies that foster inclusivity within playful approaches. The article establishes the potential of integrating affect-based thinking in playful learning. It navigates the complexities of the magic circle of play and contextualizes the study within the broader landscape of art education and atmospheres. Drawing from a situated relational approach to affect, it introduces the concept of affective arrangements and atmospheres, showcasing their influence on agency and inclusion. The empirical analysis presents two ethnographic vignettes demonstrating how intentional design choices create atmospheres of inclusion. By shedding light on the interplay between affect, atmospheres, and inclusivity, this article contributes to the emerging field of Playful Learning. It offers critical insights for educators striving to create inclusive playful learning environments.

Redemption Through Play? Exploring the Ethics of Workplace Gamification

Today, it is becoming increasingly common for companies to harness the spirit of play in order to increase worker engagement and improve organizational performance. This paper examines the ethics of play in a business context, focusing specifically on the phenomenon of workplace gamification. While critics highlight ethical problems with gamification, they also advocate for more positive, transformative, and life-affirming modes of organizational play. Gamification is ethical, on this view, when it allows users to reach a state of authentic happiness or eudaimonia. The underlying assumption, here, is that the ‘magic circle’ of play—a sphere that exists entirely for its own sake—should be protected in order to secure meaningfulness at work. However, we argue that this faith in play is misguided because play, even at its most autotelic, is ethically ambivalent; it does not lead inexorably to virtuous work environments, but may in fact have an undesirable impact on those who are playing. Our study thus contributes to research on the ‘dark side’ of organizational play, a strand of scholarship that questions the idea that play always points toward the good life.

Outlaw Ludens: Explaining Traditional Outlaw Motorcycle Club Violence Through Ludology

ABSTRACT This article explains how the war mentality of Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG) culture of interclub violence is a form of game established as an outlet for the natural consequences of the reactionary masculinity of its members. It disputes the claim that all violence by clubs is motivated by organized criminal activity. The original OMCG culture exemplifies extreme camaraderie, risk-taking, a lifestyle that condones violence, and an elitist mind-set that expresses itself through violent defense of club honor, including vendetta between clubs. The war mentality and the battles it produces are performed in accordance with the description of games developed by ludology, being played in a magic circle, according to rules, and only by members of the OMCG cultural milieu. This understanding is important to ensure that intelligence analysis of OMCG activity can distinguish between the game of war mentality and genuine organized criminal activity. Failure to perceive the difference can distort intelligence conclusions and misdirect policing responses.

The face of mischief: A stereotyped signal of norm violation within a Magic Circle

The face of mischief: A stereotyped signal of norm violation within a Magic Circle

Rewriting rules, changing worlds: Diegetic and ludic forms of metareference in The Magic Circle

Abstract In addition to transmedial techniques such as metalepses, allegories, or obtrusive narrators, contemporary videogames also use medium-specific forms, including game rules, mechanics, or interfaces, to create metareference. Similarly, metareferential games seem not only concerned with questions of their fictionality but show particular interest in their own technological infrastructure and embeddedness in digital culture. In this article, I propose a systematic approach to analysing metareference in videogames, distinguishing between the gameworld and the game system as the two main layers of communication from which metareference emerges. In a case study of the indie metagame The Magic Circle (Question 2015), I show that the game’s distinctive metareferential style is the result of interactions between what I call diegetic and ludic forms of metareference, and which are produced at the level of the gameworld and the game system, respectively.

The Magic Circle: Visually Representing the Woman of Endor (ovot)

The interaction between Saul and the woman of Endor is a minor episode, not only within the first book of Samuel, but in the Tanakh as a whole. The woman, whose actions drive the narrative, is not named nor is very much known about her. All that the text reveals are her gender, domicile location, familiarity with the law (Saul’s ban on ovot and yid’onim), and culinary possessions (flour and a calf). Through linguistic connotation her age range is surmisable: she is neither maiden nor elderly. Of her specific abilities, little is actually known as it is totally unclear what she did exactly that caused connection between the living Saul and deceased Samuel. Yet this woman, and the language used that describes her in a few verses without substantive information, have singularly driven wildly polarizing visual representations of the female thaumaturge for centuries. The artistically rendered visage of the Endoran ranges from the crone of gothic nightmares to hypersexual femme fatale, to gregarious earth mother, to occult adept perfecting her craft. Despite her shifting guise, one aspect remains consistent throughout the majority of images: the visual translation (or mistranslation) of ovot.

Astral Cult in the Encompassing Mind: Rethinking the ‘Stellar Magic Circle’ from Khara-Khoto

A rare painting with unique subject matter among extant Tangut cultural heritage, the so-called astral maṇḍala (more accurately, Grahamātṛkā-maṇḍala) from Khara-khoto deserves focused academic attention. Now in the collection of Hermitage, this painting broadens the horizons of research from multiple perspectives, including the history of astrology, Tangut culture, Esoteric Buddhism, and ritual studies. Introduced into Tangut Buddhism likely via Tibet, the Grahamātṛka-maṇḍala contributed to the construction of both a new iconographical system and a new pantheon of astral deities. The painting provides important visual details that gradually reveal a complete series of liturgies based on the Tangut astral cult, from the maṇḍala construction to fire ritual with offerings and visualization. Therefore, it helps to demonstrate astrological knowledge and religious practices prevalent in the Tangut period but previously overlooked by modern researchers. The Tangut people learned with an encompassing mind and became skilled at new teachings, methods, and practices through transcultural communications with India and Tibet. They actively combined this learning with the existing Chinese astrological and religious traditions in the Héxī region.

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Poker in Virtual Reality

This study examines virtual reality (VR) poker and how the platform affects poker players' experience. Players use a self-customized avatar and other features of a computer platform that differs from in-person poker. Data were collected through observations from in-game poker VR recordings and interviews with five professional poker players. Findings are analysed theoretically through proteus effects, social presence, ecological psychology, magic circle, and liminality. This demonstrates the interactive cues that poker players use when immersed in virtual reality and embodied in a digital avatar. The goals from this research are to learn about the influence avatars have on poker players: if players can still maintain their poker skills and read different cue signs from other players while embodied in an avatar and immersed in VR. This paper also explores the promise of poker in virtual reality and its environment, examples of existing applications, a discussion of the research to date, and also provides a vision for the future.

Shakespeare and Virtual Reality. Edited by Stephen Wittek and David McInnis

A title in the Cambridge Elements’ “Shakespeare and Pedagogy” series, this small but valuable collection grew out of a seminar at the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America meeting. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes either to use virtual reality in their teaching or to bring early modern literature into conversation with virtual reality technology. The book is divided into three sections, “Why Shakespeare and Virtual Reality?,” “Education,” and “Current and Future Directions,” and concludes with an annotated bibliography of Shakespearean projects that deploy or invoke virtual reality, augmented reality, and related technologies. The book’s opening essay, Jennifer Roberts-Smith’s “What Can Shakespeare Do for Virtual Reality,” is one of several essays addressed specifically to “we” “as Shakespeare educators” (4), though theorists of the virtual in any field will find much to mine here. Making the counterintuitive case that “new technologies do not bring new affordances to Shakespeare; rather, ‘Shakespeare’ … will bring new opportunities for meaning-making to VR” (4), Roberts-Smith sets a conceptually rigorous tone for the study of Shakespeare in virtual space. The manifesto-like set of provocations includes shrewd ruminations on issues such as intermediality, community, and personal agency as they relate to virtual reality. Invoking game studies, she argues that “as in the theatre, the meaning of a VR experience is located outside, not inside, the ‘magic circle’ that has come to be understood as the hermetic space of a virtual world,” and that VR therefore “generates opportunities for the communal consideration of shared experiences” (9). Curiously though, Roberts-Smith does not turn to works by or adaptations of Shakespeare or his contemporaries to make these points; rather, she cites mostly non-Shakespearean virtual reality productions, such as imagineNative 2167 VR and The Blue Hour VR, allowing the reader to forge their own connections. The reader is, in fact, not told what Shakespeare “can do” for VR, though like any good opener, Roberts-Smith’s piece generates questions and tensions that help steer the collection.

The Corporate (Magic) Circle: Fun Work or Controlled Play?

Entertainment games have traditionally been articulated as leisure. However, they have also been used in the work context, in the form of serious games or gamification. In this qualitative research, we aimed to investigate the purpose of games used in the work context. To accomplish this, we conducted six semi-structured interviews and analyzed the discourses of the heads of the companies that produce serious games or gamification projects for work environments. Based on these statements, we assessed the views of the work context, the workers, and the projects the companies produce. We found that games have acquired different purposes, such as employee control to increase organizational results or enhance workers’ happiness and wellbeing. Although these purposes seemed to stand out in all the analyzed speeches, several other different purposes emerged, according to the conditions of entry into the market and the type of projects produced.

Breaking immersion: A theoretical framework of alienated play to facilitate critical reflection on interactive media

There is a growing interest in understanding how to best represent complexity using IDNs. We conceptualize this as the aim to make players of such IDNs reflect critically on the complexity being represented. We argue that current understandings of player experience do not lend themselves to this aim. Research on interactive media has assumed immersion to be a universal positive for the player experience. However, in this article we argue that immersion into the Magic Circle of an IDN could be antagonistic to a critical experience. This is because immersion persuades players into suspending their disbelief, rather than facilitating critical reflection. Instead we propose, on the basis of the Epic Theater, an alternative form of play called alienated play. Meaning, a form of play in which the player is playing, while also observing themselves play. This form of play should allow for players to benefit from the enjoyable nature of play, while simultaneously remaining at a critical distance. To illustrate our theory we design two models, one for immersed play and one for alienated play. Furthermore, we present examples of the design for alienation in commercial video games, as well as hypotheses to test out theory in future research. Therefore, this work contributes an initial theoretical and practical informed form of play, specifically designed to facilitate critical reflection on IDNs representing complexity.

New development trends of “metaverse + psychology” blending virtual and reality

<p align="justify">Metaverse is a hot topic recently, which has aroused widespread concern from all walks of life. The possible impact of the metaverse on the field of psychology includes creating a new field of panoramic learning process by creating an educational metaverse, creating a more scientific and novel teaching model by creating a MOOC metaverse, breaking the “magic circle” to alleviate interpersonal avoidance and promote individual social behavior, fostering individual self-identity by shaping the metaverse cyberpunk culture, improving the effectiveness of school mental health education by building a metaverse psychological experience center, creating a metaverse psychological intervention system based on traditional behavioral therapy to improve the effectiveness of psychological counseling, etc. However, the emerging technology represented by the metaverse is a double-edged sword. It is not only necessary to pay attention to this opportunity to create a perfect world or to create miracles, but also to guard against potential harm to the development of human society.<strong></strong></p>

New development trends of “metaverse + psychology” blending virtual and reality

<p align="justify">Metaverse is a hot topic recently, which has aroused widespread concern from all walks of life. The possible impact of the metaverse on the field of psychology includes creating a new field of panoramic learning process by creating an educational metaverse, creating a more scientific and novel teaching model by creating a MOOC metaverse, breaking the “magic circle” to alleviate interpersonal avoidance and promote individual social behavior, fostering individual self-identity by shaping the metaverse cyberpunk culture, improving the effectiveness of school mental health education by building a metaverse psychological experience center, creating a metaverse psychological intervention system based on traditional behavioral therapy to improve the effectiveness of psychological counseling, etc. However, the emerging technology represented by the metaverse is a double-edged sword. It is not only necessary to pay attention to this opportunity to create a perfect world or to create miracles, but also to guard against potential harm to the development of human society.<strong></strong></p>

Smith and Smitherson’s Theatre of the Absurd

Smith and Smitherson’s Theatre of the Absurd

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic