Did you ever get lost in a video game?
Have you ever forgotten, that you are not Indiana Jones or Lara Croft? Have you ever accepted the presented reality in games as your own? That you can teleport from one map point to another? What happened for you, even if only for a split second that you were drawn into the narration, you were experiencing the so-called “Magic Circle“.
The magic Circle in Game and Play theory is
“to step inside a concrete or metaphorical circle where special rules apply.”
Juul, 2009
The Magic Circle highlights that all games are ultimately constructed. Fictional worlds absorb our attention and let us forget what is real and what is not. All of the meaning a game can create exists within this artificial state - within the circle.
If you play Monopoly, you could theoretically just take all the money and cards from your smaller brother’s pile. But you don’t because you entered a contract with your second-born family member. You enjoy the limited agency for the pleasure of the adventure (even if he has tremendous unfair luck with the dice!!!).
Rules (in games) collapse your attention that you can experience a certain agency that was designed for you. When you read a book you experience the feelings, thoughts & actions of a robot boy. The same happens when you play a robot that wants to be a real boy for your high school theater. It’s an unique suspense of disbelief and logic that humans sometimes do for the sake of constructing a good time for everyone included in the circle.
In this way, video games being enjoyable relies on our collapsed awareness. By following the rules of games you can experience the agency somebody else designed. If you play along with a certain storyline you can experience the tragedies, adventures & epiphanies somebody else imagined. Commitment creates narrative depth.
If you are playing video games, you might have heard about immersion in games, but psychologists generally prefer the term spatial presence which is generally defined as when the contents of media are perceived as real in the sense that you feel a sensation of being spatially located in the presented environment.
The rules of games are often redundant, yet they allow us to dive into specific aesthetics of experiences.
“Fun is giving respect to something that does not deserve it.”
And so is basically our life. Nothing really deserves our attention and respect. Nothing demands us to follow any rules. You are free my child, free!!
But do you really want to be free?
Yes, if you do not follow the rules, you can play more freely, yet you will not be able to experience the particular experience that has been sculpted by the author. You lose the possibility of this specific agency experience. In the same way, somebody that reads all the words in the book Dune in a random order doesn’t experience the novel.
Rules can create possibilities, not just limitations. If u wear a parachute (limitation), you can jump off planes (freedom). If u follow the western genre, u experience a cowboy experience. If we read a novel from the front to the back (rule), we can experience the story (freedom).
A problem might emerge when we become dogmatic about the circle. If we create rules that enslave us. If we forget the constructed fluid nature of rules like social structures and traditions, we become dogmatic, stiff and unable to adapt. Like a group of army ants following each other blindly in a circle continuously until they somehow manage to break out or unfortunately die of exhaustion.
“My magic circle is real!“
Our need for structure and meaning becomes clear in the psychological experiments, in which there is no causal relationship between performance and reward, but the subject is not aware of this.
In one of these experiments, the subjects get presented with pairs of numbers (“31 and 80”) and their task is to decide if the numbers "match". In a sense, the poor participants are thrown into a nebulous chaotic world in which they have to find order and meaning. Their quest is to find the magic circle.
What the participants don’t know is, that the pairs of numbers are randomly selected, and the experimenter gives his or her rating of "correct" or "incorrect" based on a rising probability function. The positive answer of "correct" becomes more and more frequent as the experiment progresses. Because of this increasing success, the test subject forms a hypothesis. A constructed story about the numbers presented to him.
In fact, even when the experimental design is revealed to them, the subject occasionally wants to convince that he or she has discovered a regularity that the experimenter missed. In the truest sense of the word, the subject has thus invented a reality - a hidden order - that he assumes to have found. A magic circle that he refuses to give up even if presented with its fictional nature.
The circle is alive!
A similar situation is presented to improvisation theater actors. When entering the stage they don’t have any order yet in their world. And similar to the psychological experiment above, it is their task to find it. Yet the big difference is that the improvers know of the fictional nature of their presented meaning. They can find themselves in a Spaceship near Jupiter or in a social drama about the “Irish Potato Famine”. In Improv there are not many fixed rules. As in our daily lives, it is advised to not behave like a jerk when playing with your fellow players, but everything beyond is not defined.
“Breaking rules isn’t interesting. It’s making up new ones that keeps things exciting.”
- Christopher Nolan
In improv, there is no fixed line to step into. No circle to enter. Improv is not a magic circle but a magic cell. A living organic open system. Always changing. Always adapting. And it needs to be played to exist. Only when played we can find, follow and forget the everchanging rules. Our actions become the food for our magic cell. The good news is, that improv is an organism that can use & digest everything. If somebody farts on stage, you don’t stop the game and laugh finger pointing at your college. You use the fart. You say: “Did you hear that? I think dad is home.“ or “Was that an explosion?“. On the improv stage, we can use everything. We can expand the cell to include even real-life events.
The essence of improv is to perceive no cringe, to allow & utilize all cringe into your creative flow.
When our mind becomes stiff. When we enter a habituated tunnel vision, our living cell freezes, it freezes into a circle with fixed rules and a fixed form of our collapsed awareness. The improvisational character of our life transforms into a chess game like black and white thinking. Me vs The Others. King vs Farmer.
In contrast to certain types of mindfulness and forms of Buddhism, where the goal is to expand awareness and become lucid of the narrative mind, improv trains us to keep the Magic Circle alive, yet training us to be adaptive. To allow different forms of agency. Different forms of collapsed awareness. Being immersed in our constructed agency while being open to new information.
I like this phrase you wrote!
"The essence of improv is to perceive no cringe."