First, a story from Second Life: A friend of mine was showing me around his meticulously rendered plot of land when he stopped the tour and excused himself to remove a blackjack table that some person had discarded on his land. He seemed greatly annoyed by this discovery—the random object was incompatible with the simulation he had constructed for his location and therefore had to be expunged.
What might happen if a game like Myst—which focused on realistic renderings of 3D environments and followed a fairly linear storyline—was opened to millions of players? There was actually a parody of Myst called Pyst, which “literally ‘trashes’ the island by showing what happens after 4 million people wander through it.”
In “Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds,” Clay Shirky—who popularized the current definition of the term “social software” in 2002—brings up Huizinga’s “magic circle” when arguing why games (e.g. WoW) are more compelling in their adoption than other types of virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life):
Many games, and most social games, involve an entrance into what theorists call the magic circle, an environment whose characteristics include simplified and knowable rules. The magic circle saves the game from having to live up to expectations carried over from the real world … [Games] are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.
This makes me wonder about the success (or lack thereof) of the Sims and the Sims Online, both games which purposely hew closely to real life yet retain the elements of the magic circle. The single-player version of the Sims is a game of control, where the player both operates within the magic circle of the overarching game structure and constructs a magic circle for behavior within the confines of their simulated home. In contrast, the Sims Online involves the constant creation, interaction, and destruction of a multitude of player-generated magic circles in addition to operating within the overarching game structure. Does this constant collision of magic circles shift the Sims Online from game to non-game classification through the loss of impermeable magic circles? What about Second Life, which is similarly focused around plots of land, building construction, and the creation/interaction/destruction of magic circles by players?
A prognostication: “Garbage pickup” will be an inevitable byproduct of most non-game virtual worlds.
1 response so far ↓
1 Termeh // Feb 18, 2007 at 12:57 pm
While I like the idea of clashing magic circles - there needs to be more expansion on the idea of whether a magic circle created within another one can call itself one. Think of it in terms of card games. While you can play black jack or poker, you are ultimately limited by the rules of the cards themselves - i.e. the number of cards in the deck and the suites - or in other words the architecture or structure of the universe you are playing within. Rules created within existing architectures are first and foremost bound to it - and limit creations outside of those boundaries hence limiting one’s ability to create a magic circle that is truly representative of the individual players ‘ likes and dislikes. This is specially true of the online world (excluding the hacker population).
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