The Magic Circle

I have been thinking about the relationship of law to virtual worlds for a long time -- and here's one result. 

So, one thing that law professors don't really get to do is speak plainly.  That is what this "paper," or "speech," or whatever, is, in intellectualized form.   It's a polite rant.   So, a few things from the start:

(1) I don't know if I'm right.  I do want to articulate a position that I think best describes the current and future relationships between law and virtual worlds. 

(2) I don't think I'm righter than anyone else.  There are a lot of really important reasons to create "law free" zones.  Humans need frontiers.  Virtual worlds have been our frontier for a long time.  But a sad thing happens to frontiers -- I mean, is Kansas City still the Wild, Wild West?  Not so much. 

For those who don't want to click through, the basic idea is this: Law already governs every aspect of virtual worlds -- from the contract law invoked by EULAs, to tort laws premised on various theories of consent, to tax law, to criminal law.  But that does not mean that we must give up everything that makes virtual worlds special.  The common law has had a long practice of deferring to industry or community customs and practices.  There is no reason for courts to stop now.  The debate, thus, should be shifted from whether law does (it does) or should (ok, more debatable) affect virtual worlds to what mechanisms we should adopt for sussing out what norms are emerging within virtual worlds, and which of those norms ought to be plugged into the socket in the law that courts reserve for community norms.

Let me know what you think.

Comments

[Susan]

1.

Joshua,

I think I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I'd like to defend some version of the "magic circle" idea.

1. There's clearly a difference between actually, physically doing something and reading or writing a work of fiction in which a character does it. As you say, when one avatar "kills" another in a virtual world, it is not a murder because no-one really dies.

So I think there's some mileage to the idea that actions portrayed in a virtual world are fictional, "not real", and hence not subject to the laws that would apply to them if they were real.

The strange thing is that some actions in a virtual world are real. For example, if you play poker in Second Life with L$ you bought for real U.S. dollars, you are actually playing poker for money. (Not just reading or writing a fiction about a character who is a poker player).

There are grey areas between the poker game (real) and the killing of an avatar (not real). For example, is cybersex real sex, and to what extent do laws regulating sexual conduct apply to it? (e.g. laws against rape; age of consent; incest; bestiality) Some sexual offenses depend on the gender of the person(s) involved - tricky if avatar gender is
different from player gender.

2. Even when an action consists purely of speech, there's a difference between saying it a "normal" context and saying it as an actor in a play or film. The context seems to change the meaning of the action. If an actor and actress star in a film in which their characters get married, the actors do not become married in real life. The actor whose character agrees to a contract with Dracula in a film is not (in real life) bound by that contract.

I think the "magic circle" idea is one way to describe this change of context, that substantially changes the legal effect of an action.

[Susan]

2.

The problem, of course, is that “free speech” does not exist online.

This is (arguably) true, but there's a difference between the government prohibiting speech via the criminal law, versus a service provider prohibiting speech via contract. A legal difference; from the point-of-view of the user who gets censored, the effect may feel the same.

Most virtual worlds I'm familiar with have some kind of acceptable use policy that limits what users can say. But it's a different matter to say to that certain forms of speech are illegal.

[Joshua_Fairfield]

3.

Susan:

So many good points here. I think game designers have blurred the lines between extra-contractual and illegal very often. Mostly because courts are confused about the effects of breach of contract when an IP license is at stake. Remember that, under current (silly) doctrine, a breach of the EULA might be considered to be unauthorized use of the IP -- that is, a copyright violation.

I'm entirely in your camp. Breach of contract is breach of contract. It's not illegal to break the EULA, it's (at most) a contractual breach.

[Thomas Malaby]

4.

Fascinating read, Josh. Unlike Susan, I guess, I'm happy to see the *analytical* value of the 'magic circle' undercut quite effectively, as you do. The point always seems to come down to the demonstrable fact that while there are relative distinctions between the stakes that pertain to different actions in different places, this doesn't reliably map onto a bright line analytical distinction such as the magic circle suggests, even if social actors often appeal to as if there were so. It's a cultural representation that won't bear much weight for analysis (as I've said elsewhere).

I did have a question, Josh: Do Goldsmith and Wu, whom you mention in the paper, refer to their own approach as pragmatic (the word you use most often as a label for their view)? The reason I ask is that, if their argument is that laws apply in virtual worlds to the same extent they apply in other domains of human action, then that sounds pragmatic as far as it goes, but for them to be pragmatists they would also have to acknowledge the limits of law in those *other* (non-virtual world) domains as well. That is, a pragmatic approach to the law, as I understand it, acknowledges that emergent social conventions can themselves shape that law; i.e., that there is not a unidirectional line of influence from the law to social action. As you frame their argument in this piece, however, they seem only to be saying something like, "the law obtains, just like it does offline." I guess my point is that this could just as well characterize a legal formalist perspective, so I was confused.

[Thomas Malaby]

5.

Erk. In first para, should say "even if social actors often appeal to it as if it does."

[Amarilla]

6.

the concept of protecting the play-space from influences from " outside " , the concept of the magic circle is wrong by its root: the play-space is a part, only a part of the human behavior , it is not something apart . Any game a human plays , is a part of the very reality : if you stole or broke my doll you can bet your parent will pay that damage to my parent. This " magic circle " ideea , as like the game would be something apart and basically different just because it's online , is a sick approach . There is no other approach to the law but the pragmatic one : it concern the acts of humans , including the act of playing games. The law is not above the human. I make the law, i change the law, i disobey the law.There are very few principles regulating the human interactions in a group/society , principles proved to be benefitial to the growth and progress of that group. No matter how magic is the game i play, i am a real person having real needs and goals and while i kill virtual monsters and while a fly or teleport , i still hear my kids asking for food ; there is nothing magic-special in my relationship with the game-makers , and there is nothing magic-special in what the representation of myself in game does or speak : i may not use my doll to break your doll and i may not say using my doll's voice : " ...you motherfucker nigger " . And i wont ever accept my children in my backyard to play a game where one of them pretend to be a white man lynching his brother, a pretended black man .Or pretending to rape a pretended VIRTUAL girl. Because what a kid does, playing a game , it matters.So, please....gimme a breake. The fact that many ppls use illegal drugs is not a good reason to declare them legal. The players' real life interest is in need to be protected , not the shady business of some game-makers , game-makers invoquing the sick arguement : " but we have to protect the game....we cannot make a legal/ethycal EULA because in that case we gonna lose a potential profit...we like to be different and above or at least in the grey areas of laws, because we are virtual, we are emergent, we are the future , we have employees...". Use your head,Hercules...in any healthy society there are a set of simple and basic rules concerning the commerce and the services and even the games.Nothing magic there. The wild wild west was a harsh reality, not a necessity.Why would you create/perpetuate such a " law free " zone ? Except for profit....that's a really important reason ....the only one.

[Dave Rickey]

7.

Okay, please excuse my ignorance here, but maybe we need a doctrine for "piercing the magic circle" similar to that for "piercing the corporate veil"? It's not like there's *no* precedent for considering the circumstances of a game or sport to be outside of the normal source of law. A boxing or martial arts match, even an amateur one with all appropriate safety equipment and officials, involves what would be assault, perhaps even with a deadly weapon, in another context.

So it should be fairly straightforward to go about setting a legal test for the "magic circle". Was the action inside of the context of the game? Was gains the game used for a quid-pro-quo in the real world? I dunno, not a lawyer.

--Dave

[Richard Bartle]

8.

On the whole, yes, this paper makes a lot of sense. I have three main issues with it, though, two minor and one major.

The first minor one is section IV, which attempts to portray as an anomaly the view that real money has no place in game-like virtual worlds. "Nobody complains that I did not build my truck by hand. And yet there is a complaint when I ask someone else to build an avatar or to build an account in a virtual world to my specifications". Yes, and they complain when I ask someone else to build a PhD thesis to my specifications, too. This argument you're making completely misses the point that for some people - most players, in fact - there is a very strong feeling that an avatar should reflect a person's achievement in the virtual world. It doesn't matter that you don't feel that way - the people who sell student essays online don't feel the same way as most of us do about academic qualifications. Enough people do feel that way that you can't simply dismiss the building of virtual characters for money as the same thing as building a truck for money.

Oh, and DKP are an internal currency developed precisely to tie reward to achievement. They buff the anti-RMT argument, not debuff it. When was the last time you saw DKP sold for real money?

The second minor point: your definition of the magic circle is founded on the notion of consent. This is good - that's exactly what the magic circle is indeed founded on. What you don't take account of is that real-world government (at least in western democracies) is also founded on the issue of consent. Governments govern by the consent of the governed; magic circles exist by the consent of the players. Any argument you make against the sanctity of the magic circle can be reflected as an argument against the sanctity of (in your case) the US constitution. What gives law enforcement officers the right to break the magic circle? Ultimately, the consent of the people - which is itself a magic circle.

For example, your "in-world/out-of-world distinction fallacy" applies equally well to virtual worlds as to real governments. If carrying out an in-game threat by hacking the player's PC and deleting their character fatally undermines a virtual world's claim to have a magic circle, then carrying out a political threat by hacking a voting machine and changing hundreds of votes fatally undermines a government's right to govern. Except, of course, it doesn't: in both cases, this is mere noise compared to the general robustness of the system. You're not pricking a bubble, you're pricking a sandcastle.

You say, "remembering the role of consent in games really simplifies the legal issues affecting
virtual worlds". I put it to you that remembering the role of consent in the law really simplifies the legal issues affecting virtual worlds, too.

Finally, my major point: you're misrepresenting what the magic circle is. You say in your first paragraph, "The purpose of the magic circle is to protect virtual worlds from outside influences – law, real-world economics, money, etc.". This is incorrect. The purpose of the magic circle is to allow a set of consenting individuals to gain freedoms they couldn't have had otherwise. What it basically comes down to is that a group of people willingly agree to limit their behaviour (ie. conform to a set of rules) in order to gain an experience they wouldn't have got if they didn't all do that.

If I'm playing chess, I could take your king immediately with my first move, but I don't because that would break the rules. I don't want to break the rules, because the fun from chess goes away if there are no rules. You have the same point of view. You want to do all the planning and counter-planning and pattern-recognition that makes chess enjoyable. You also want to win, and are willing to follow the rules for a shot at that. Therefore, even though in practice either one of us could take the other's king, snap the head off and hurl it across the room into a fire, we don't. We're limiting our behaviour in order to gain an experience we couldn't have if we didn't do it. That is what the magic circle is: an arena of behaviour sustained by the consent of those within it.

The way you describe the magic circle, it's as if it's somehow location-based: in-world or out-of-world. Players do indeed have this kind of notion, but it's not the magic circle. It's more akin to the willed suspension of disbelief that comes with reading a novel: they know it's not real, but they temporarily accept the conceit that it is real in order to get more out of it. Now you can attack that all you like, but it's not the magic circle. The magic circle is the mutual and consensual adherence by players to rules in order to gain benefits not available unless they all so agree. The "game conceit" is that you're visiting a strange and separate other world, where normal rules don't apply. This is what your paper is attacking - not the magic circle. The magic circle and the game conceit are related - the game conceit is necessitated by a game - but they're not isomorphic.

The magic circle wasn't created by Huizinga, it was identified by him. It does exist and is a useful concept. You're misappropriating it here (although probably because so many have misappropriated it before you) and you're thereby doing it a disservice.

Richard

[Thomas Malaby]

9.

But with the magic circle defined that way, Richard, you're no longer talking about anything specific to games. You're simply talking about the social construction of reality, the way the "definition of the situation" (as Erving Goffman called it) is arrived at through an act of collective fiction (in the "making something," not "false" sense). That is, that kind of "bracketing off" of other concerns, demands, obligations, etc, happens *all the time* in the domains in which we act (such as the legal, the market, the educational, etc), and social scientists are already well-versed in talking about it. Holding onto the "magic circle" as a label for it suggests that there is something different to that phenomena when it comes to games, but it doesn't hold up empirically.

[robusticus]

10.

I think it's a pretty weak case, this magic circle thing. I find the notion of in game gold being some sort of intellectual property absolutely absurd.

As for avatars, well, I think that the operators DO have some IP rights to that. Except for I think there is very good precedent in other media industries. If I buy a CD, I have a right to resell it, loan it out, etc. But I do not have the right to make a gazillion copies.

As for DKP systems, well, my view is that is just another way to game the casino. I realize that y'all look at that and marvel at how smart the monkeys are, they made a currency, but really, it is just control mechanism in a world where achievement masquerades as chance.

So yeah, I can dismiss the achievers, completely and easily. Making a game is an achievement. Getting to the level cap in WoW is not. Wining a nobel prize is an achievement. "Independently developing" a thesis that is readily available to purchase, is not.

So from that, you take a good hard look at what actually drives REAL value in a virtual world. So far, developer+designer+artist remains the holy trinity.

[robusticus]

11.

Oh yeah, as for selling DKP... that would be a rather fun challenge, and don't they do that in Korea? Except for that whole getting sued by a game publisher thing. That wouldn't be such a fun challenge, they seem to think they can operate above the law, any morality or decency most of the time, so I wouldn't want to have to bring a knife to a gunfight.

Randolfe says it's counterparty risk (where the parents find out and cancel the transaction), but to me, that's small worries in comparison.

[Hellinar]

12.

@Joshua: Lots I would agree with in that paper. I don’t have as clear an idea of the “Magic Circle” as Richard, but you do seem to be choosing your examples to avoid the situations where it might most likely apply.

“My actions in the real world are subject to legal sanction, whereas my actions in the virtual world are not..”

The more relevant “magic circle” question is, are my character’s in world actions subject to legal sanction? Once you have adopted the “gamer” view, that my avatar is me, you are halfway out of the “magic circle” already. In RP convention the implied consent is that the actions of the character stay with the character, not the player. Which of course requires that the characters motives take precedence over the players.

In an RP world, my character may threaten your character, while the players in question remain in perfect harmony. In the RP environments I am familiar with, there is often an OOC backchannel devoted to ensuring this is so. It seems to me the legal limitations around performance and theatre might be relevant in this environment. As in the theatre, you are agreeing the actions and motives you are portraying are not your own. Do you have any insight into that area of law, Joshua? Can anyone else shed some light on it?

“First, I will simply note that the basic exchange of money for time is a bedrock of our culture.”

Hehe. Spoken like a true lawyer. I’d agree that billing by the hour is the bedrock of the legal culture. But for some of us, there are other motivations for activity in Virtual Worlds, like “fun” and “adventure”. As you seem well aware, once you make your game to be about resource acquisition, then markets are pretty much inevitable. Markets are a proved, effective tool for efficient resource allocation, so are likely to play a role in any acquisition based game.

You seem to be pretty oblivious though to story based play. As in, a good story can get along quite nicely without any merchants or trade. It can include them too, but they are optional. MMORPGs were originally sold as having a story based element. Market based mechanisms are rather hostile to this on the whole. They are inherently about efficiency and optimizing resources under scarcity. I love games that are about efficiency and optimizing. But they are quite antithetical to my ideas of “adventure”.

I would love to see a version of WoW that wasn’t about optimized acquistion, but I am not holding my breath. You should recognize though that your arguments on money in Virtual Worlds are based entirely on the game being an acquistion game. There are other playstyles where this is not relevant.

@Amarilla: Do you go to plays or movies much? Have you experience of performing in such events?

[Amarilla]

13.

@Hellinar: is that a sort of proposal ? Do you ask me a date ?

[Hellinar]

14.

@Amarilla: LoL. Err, no. I’m curious as to where you see those events taking place. You say

“the play-space is a part, only a part of the human behavior , it is not something apart”

So where is the action in a Shakespeare play taking place? Are the actors simply behaving normally? I would grant that play is a normal human behavior. But I would still contend that the action in a play is taking place in a different ‘space’ than the world of the players and audience.

[ron meiners]

15.

@Thomas
quoth: "That is, that kind of "bracketing off" of other concerns, demands, obligations, etc, happens *all the time* in the domains in which we act (such as the legal, the market, the educational, etc), and social scientists are already well-versed in talking about it. Holding onto the "magic circle" as a label for it suggests that there is something different to that phenomena when it comes to games, but it doesn't hold up empirically."

Thomas, do you think there's value to the notion that the essence of the "magic circle" lies precisely in this application of a variant social basis to a non-functional, ie. play based, interaction? A sort of informed, or self-aware, intentional engagement with new social forms as an experiment or exploration of a new social identity... explicitly taken on as a choice, or as part of a shared appreciation and celebration of a temporary autonomous zone, as it were, whether drawn from myth, or fiction, or spontaneous creativity... I guess I would see one similarity as being to religious rituals and performances, something voluntarily joined to create ... well, an alternate perspective? Shared and reaffirmed? Certainly too, this seems to shade to Turner, doesn't it? The entering of a liminal space, and the creation of communitas.

[Thomas Malaby]

16.

In short, no, I don't think there's much to to be mined in that direction, Ron. While I would first of all have deep reservations about construing it in terms of human choice (a much longer conversation), more importantly I would object to the assumption that gaming is a form of play and therefore "non-functional" in the way you describe. But then, I've talked about why games should be decoupled from this notion of play (as separable, safe, and consequence-free) at length elsewhere. :-)

[Amarilla]

17.

@Hellinar : Uh ! What a relief...
" So, where is the action....taking place ? "
Answer : on the stage.
" Are the actors simply behaving normally ?"
Answer : most of them and most of the times, yes.
" But i will still contend that the action in a play is taking place....."
Counter-arguement : but i still contend exactly the same .
What have Shakespeare to do with a play where the actors are required to perform with sharp blades, to show their real blood , where the audience is required to be half foot on the stage , half foot on the balcony and the fire is not " requisite " but is real fire and the firemen are not alowed to be there ?
Opinions : Shakespeare was a real guy in the real world; the world is always real ;play is a normal human behavior when it is so, and it's not when it is not. " Separable, safe , consequence-free "

[Richard Bartle]

18.

Thomas Malaby>But with the magic circle defined that way, Richard, you're no longer talking about anything specific to games.

That's correct. You always need a magic circle for games and play, but that doesn't mean you can't use them for other things.

>You're simply talking about the social construction of reality

No I'm not. I may be talking about a social contract between players that they will all behave in a certain way, but I'm not talking about the social construction of reality.

I haven't read Erving Goffman, so there may be some nuances to the phrase "social construction of reality" that carry meaning not obvious from the statement itself, but on the face of it I can't see any "reality" being constructed by the players here, socially or otherwise. That's for the magic circle, by the way; I do see how you might be able to argue that "the virtual world is real" could be a socially constructed reality - a consensual illusion that enhances the experience of the players who sign up to it.

>Holding onto the "magic circle" as a label for it suggests that there is something different to that phenomena when it comes to games, but it doesn't hold up empirically.

I'm trying to distinguish between the magic circle (players agree to abide by a set of rules in order to gain mutual benefit from doing so) and the "imaginary world is non-imaginary" conceit (players temporarily override what they know to be true in order to benefit from doing so). It seems to me that what Joshua is attacking is the latter, rather than the former, but he labels it as the former when it isn't.

Richard

[nate_combs]

19.

I think the strawman against real money / private property in real worlds (Section IV): "infringe on what is called the 'clean start'" misses another and IMO more compelling complaint. Namely that introduction of external value of virtual property (arguably) changes the behavior of the participants in the game world. I don't mean this in a 'magic circle' (narrow) sense - a concept that seems to fuzzy for me to comfortably use. I do mean it, however, in the sense of if players are more willing to change their behavior (e.g. commit/react to in-game 'fraud' or deceptive practices because now the baubbles players obtain can be cashed out), then I think it is bad for the game world as well as the players (why introduce another point of tension)?

[Bryan Camp]

20.

Hi all,

I'm supposed to be creating a little "magic circle" of unreality today myself----it's called an administrative law exam.

But this is a great thread and I'm new to the subject, so just wanted to weigh in with a thought or two.

First, I am happy to see Amarilla bring up theater. I personally really like that analogy and use it in my article on virtual taxation. I wonder why there is not more discussion about any difference between a virtual world and a continuous improvisational play, where you can choose whether to be in the audience or be on stage? People play roles all their lives but the difference with the stage is the common agreement/understanding of the separation of those roles from the roles we play in daily life. In theater, we call this the fourth wall.

Second, the idea of "social construct of reality" is a very useful tool to deconstruct claims of reality, but it is not a very useful concept to analyze differet levels of social cosntruction. I think the "magic circle" and "fourth wall" are useful terms of art to bracket different social constructs of reality. I agree with Thomas that the label "magic circle" encompasses no different phenomenon than other ways we divide the real from the unreal, but I think I disagree with his statement that "you're no longer talking about anything specific to games. You're simply talking about the social construction of reality" I disagree with the implied claim that the label "magic circle" add nothing to the analysis. I think Richard has staked out a very persuasive position for the utility of the magic circle concept. I apologize, Thomas, if I've misread you here. I have read Goffman, but 20 years ago and it's a bit fuzzy.

Third, @ Josh and Hellinar's back-and-forth on money-value of time (not to mention the corollary time-value of money!). That is exactly what I address (or try to) in my article on taxation. Not everything that can be conceived of as economic wealth IS socially constructed as economic wealth (in those societies that even have a concept of economic wealth). Although Ted and others have done a great job in showing the connection between virtual world activity and real world markets, I would argue that virtual markets create no socially constructed economic wealth unless and until they dispace real world markets. Until the, it's just entertainment consumption activity. Sure, folks spend over a billion dollars a year on activity within virtual worlds. I bet you can find any number of entertainment activities costing a billion dollars a year---perhaps gambling, or maybe even theme parks. That does not mean that the virtual world of theme parks are in and of themselves

For me the acid test is when H&R Block starts accepting Lindens to prepare your tax returns in SL.

Cheers, (and back to writing my little short stories that I call "fact patterns" for my exam).

-bryan camp

[Thomas Malaby]

21.

Richard, I don't object to the idea that we should be interested in the magic circle as a cultural accomplishment, which is what you seem to be saying -- in fact, this is the view I have advocated for. But this is very often not how it is used in games research. Yes, social actors work to achieve a degree of semi-boundedness for their game spaces. Yes, they sometimes appeal to this expression or something very similar. Yes, we should be very interested in how this cultural act of boundary maintenance takes place.

But the concept is rarely used this carefully, as it is often asked to do far more. In short, it is treated not as something that cultural actors may or may not accomplish, but as something that simply issues from the fact that they're playing a game at all. It is this application of the phrase to which I most strongly object, and it is all over games scholarship (it's just one kind of formalism to which the field has been prone). If instead we want to draw attention to the fact that actors accomplish this boundary, and how they do it, I don't see how this term adds anything to the scholarship. What is it supposed to explain? Shouldn't we be talking, in each case, about the tropes and techniques that actors invoke to do this? So on the empirical side it's not adding anything, and in fact may obscure the culturally and historically particular aspects of any situation.

Beyond that important concern, I again would point to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun here, in terms of social theory. On the social theory side, there is a constellation of concepts already in place to talk about this kind of thing, whether its Goffmanian ideas about frontstage and backstage, or ideas from anthropology about shifting boundaries of cultural intimacy. Part of my aim has been to bring games research into connection with established social theory -- it has for too long realized the exceptionalism with which it treats games even in its own constitution as a field -- and the magic circle, even if used in the pretty much unobjectionable way you frame it, does not add anything, in my view. (And again, it is rarely used to innocently mark the fact that actors somewhere may be engaged in boundary maintenance; instead invoking it usually "smuggles in" a set of other associations, such as those I've mentioned above.)

[Bryan Camp]

22.

Hi all, there are limits, of course, to how far one can push the "social construct of reality" concept itself. My favorite reminder of that is this poem from Christian Morgenstern's "Gallows Songs" (translation by Max Knight):

The Impossible Fact

Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,
walking while in deep relfection
at a busy intersection
is run over.

"How, now," ha announces, rising
and with firmess death despising,
"can an accident like this
ever happen? What's amiss?

"Did the state administration
fail in motor transportation?
Under the police chief's sway
had the driver right of way?

"Isn't there a prohibition,
barring moterized transmission
of the living to the dead?
Did the driver lose his head?"

Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
he explores the legal issues,
and it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!

And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which MUST not, CAN not be.

Cheers, -bryan

[Thomas Malaby]

23.

Enjoyable, Bryan, but I'm desperately hoping this doesn't devolve into (yet) another polarized dispute between the excesses of materialism and interpretivism (this has happened a few times on TN). The idea of the social construction of reality (best understood) is *not* that everything we do is always and only made by the meanings we deploy. It is only to remind us that acts of representation, culturally-shaped practices, *and* material conditions are each potentially consequential; not one of them trumps the others in every case. :-)

[Patroklus Murakami]

24.

I found the deconstruction of the notion of 'the magic circle' and the basis in consent to be quite useful so I'm glad you linked to your paper. I find it interesting that you have considered how actions in a virtual world may result in legal action in a real world court and where the boundaries might be separating legitimate, expected, consensual gameplay from fraud or other illegal activities but not considered the possibility of the development of law within virtual worlds.

Sadly, the results to date have not been stellar. We tried to develop a legal system in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators (CDS for short) in Second Life last year. (The CDS is a self-governing, democratic community; I'm an elected member of our Representative Assembly.) We spent many months debating, and then finally implementing, an elaborate judicial system based largely on English common law principles. It was hugely controversial and, in the end, we scrapped most of it, reverting to our version of a 'tribal council'. The debate is there in all its glory on our forums.

I'm still hopeful that we can develop our legal system from its rudimentary beginnings and avoid the behemoth that the first attempt became. Does our experience suggest that inworld courts, based in stable solidly democratic self-governing opt-in communities are a utopian pipe-dream? Should we rely on the game gods to provide an authoritarian solution? (I'm thinking in particular of the Lindens' untransparent Abuse Report system and anonymised Police Blotter - justice carried out behind closed doors).

[Dave Rickey]

25.

Let's not overcomplicate this. The "magic circle" is an agreement by the participants that the actions they participate in operate under different rules. Society routinely recognizes this without realizing it in those terms: Hockey, baseball, and football players routinely engage in what is not only technically assault, but is against the rules of the games themselves, but the law does not get involved. A million witnesses watch a hockey fight, a batter getting beaned turn into a bench-clearing brawl, or a football lineman taking down the quarterback well after the end of the play, and although all of these are considered "poor sportsmanship", they aren't prosecuted as crimes.

If the shortstop bobbles a catch because he's feuding with the pitcher it's just part of the accepted meta-game, if he does it because a bookie is paying him to (or he has a bet on the game himself), it's a crime. The law doesn't need to "catch up" because it's already there, with a body of precedent that may need extension but already contains the seeds for a framework that can preserve both the games and the law.

--Dave

[Andy Havens]

26.

I do enjoy this discussion, and especially like the comparison of the magic circle to the fourth wall in theater, but have one word to throw into the mix that makes things, for me anyway, much more complex:

Brecht. [bear with me, please]

Of course there are other good examples of playwrights whose work breaks the fourth wall, but Brecht really does a job on it. When one of your characters pleads with the audience not to be unhappy with the ending of a play, but to make one up they like better... that's taking a pick-ax to it, eh?

Thomas has written before about "games within games," and the idea that the rules of meta-games or of social games that envelop other games may apply to how we discuss and observe games. Sure. I buy that in its entirety. Richard and I may sit down to a game of chess, as he says. We may agree on the rules, and he (being the better chess player) may be doing so for the meta-game reason that he enjoys the "game" of helping less practiced players get better. I may be either enjoying the balanced meta-game of being tutored, or an entirely different one; Richard may serve good booze, have a nice house, be good company, have lovely art, etc. In the same way, I may go out to a play for entertainment, embrace the fourth wall and willfully suspend my disbelief as much as entirely possible, but enjoy the company of my date even more so. Games within games, circles within circles, walls behind walls.

No problemo. I got no bones with that. It's all been established before. Except...

In most classic cases (and here's where Brecht and his compatriots come in) -- including sports and law and other social constructs relying on a magic circle -- the actors (in all senses of that word) have at least a functional understanding of the bounds of the various circles, and their (reasonable) limits.

I would not, for example, expect Richard to invite me over to play chess if the meta-game was a pretext to prepare me for an Olympic skiing event. I don't ski, and so that would be... odd. More to the point, I also wouldn't expect him to invite me over to play chess with him if he then expected me to cheerfully play Monopoly with 14-year-old nephew, Duane.

Brecht liked to do shit like that. Break the walls in order to demonstrate the audience's unquestioned acceptance of authority.

Now... (still bearing with me, please, I hope) I'm not talking about hacking and ganking and exploits. I'm suggesting that perhaps there is something Brechtian about *all* shared gaming spaces, because you never know if the toon next to you is an actor or an audience member... or to what extent he is or might be from moment to moment... or, maybe even, to what extent *you* are.

I know, when I'm in the audience of a play, that there is a 99.9% chance that my interaction with the content will be limited to applause... which I'm not sure counts. The fourth wall may be down at that point, since I'm applauding the actors, not the characters.

Unless it's a really Brechtian piece. In which case, an actor may take me by the hand and ask me for my name, or a false name, and drag me into the scene.

Now... that's OK if I signed up to go see that kind of play. What is doubly strange about certain online environments -- SL strikes me as the most like this of the ones I know pretty well -- is that some folks treat it like straight theater, and some like Brecht, and some like the lobby (ie, a slice of RL, but online).

When a toon meets a toon, comin' through the eRye... all kinds of assumptions must be suspended until otherwise established. Even then... Trust but verify, as Ronnie said.

For example, in SL, it is considered (among many) rather bad form to ask about RL unless something about your first life is posted in your profile, or you offer it up initially. That being the case, I treat all such relationships in SL as total roleplay. Why? Well... with nothing outside SL to go on, what choice do I have? I trust that the person behind the avie wants me to treat them based on their avatar's appearance, behavior, actions, etc. Whether or not those match up with his/her/its RL self is, frankly, meaningless, because there's no RL context.

Now... I've had that policy confronted by people who, after a time, made it clear to me that their RL selves were different than their SL avatars, and they preferred to be treated more in line with various RL attributes, regardless of their SL selves (SLves?)

Very. Brechtian. Moments. When the tall, well-muscled, highly profane, jeans and cowboy-hat wearin' stud you've been having man-talk with all night suddenly reveals that he(?) is a 20-year-old woman and doesn't want to talk about politics anymore.

Or is he? She? Again with the Brecht.

In any game, there's a possibility that there is a meta-game or an uber-game, or that there are other games going on around you. That's a given for monkeys as complicated as we. But in online games, where we are often represented by virtual actors who (sometimes) play very different roles for us, and (sometimes) act in our place, and where those actions can be interpreted quite differently by others, depending on *their* status... I'd argue that the magic circle is more like a magic Celtic Knot.

[Andy Havens]

27.

Ooh! I thought of a good analogy. Imagine Richard invites me over to play chess, but he's also in the process of rehearsing for a role in a play as a much dumber person. And he's a method actor, and I never know if he's "getting into character" or not while we're playing. I don't mind helping him with his method, and I don't mind playing "regular chess" with Richard... but it might piss me off not to know which version is which at any given moment.

[Richard Bartle]

28.

Thomas Malaby>But the concept is rarely used this carefully, as it is often asked to do far more.

And we should just lie down and accept this?

If so, we need a new term to describe what it is that "Magic Circle" used to refer to with reference to play.

>It is this application of the phrase to which I most strongly object, and it is all over games scholarship

It's headed the same way that "hero's journey" is heading in film. Now we're seeing books about interpreting how Vogel interpreted how Campbell interpreted myth - it's too far removed from the source, and becomes a kind of shorthand for a set of ideas that aren't all that in tune with where they came from.

We see articles define the "magic circle" and pay lip service to its being metaphorical, and then treat it as if it were a hard-and-fast boundary between game world and real world, which can then be easily demolished (because there isn't such a hard-and-fast boundary, mainly because real people are in both worlds).

>What is it supposed to explain? Shouldn't we be talking, in each case, about the tropes and techniques that actors invoke to do this? So on the empirical side it's not adding anything, and in fact may obscure the culturally and historically particular aspects of any situation.

Sorry, you've lost me there.

Are you saying that the techniques that players use to help make their virtual worlds feel more persuasive are what we should be looking at? And that looking at virtual worlds as embodying a magic circle is counter-productive? If so, I agree that we should be looking at this (and how the actions of other players interfere with it, eg. via RMT), but I disagree that looking at the magic circle (in the we-play-by-rules-to-gain-mutual-benefit sense) is a done deal and we can forget all about it. The reason I disagree is that we don't yet have an answer to the question of how such spaces can be protected from assault by those wishing to play by a different set of rules.

>there is nothing new under the sun here, in terms of social theory.

Good. In that case, what's the social theory solution to the question posed above? If a group of people want to follow a set of rules, and other individuals determine to change those rules better to fit their own purposes, then how can the former resist the attentions of the latter? I don't want a description, I want a theory that provides a solution (or explains the impossibility of a solution).

Richard

[Amarilla]

29.

Could be : who's talking , and 'bout what ? One part is expressing itself in terms of moral/imoral , while the other part is preaching and practicing amorality. When this conversation is trying to solve the " desirable ",to find a " solution " well, this relationship ( the conversation ,the debate ,the relationship in itself )will have rules - any rules -only when the rules are enforced.Even being the rule : " no rules ". Until then ,we're talking apples versus oranges. The relationships between the actors, performers, theatre owners , the public , the audience , the media , the society and the Law , are distorsed because of this discrepance : the world inside the magic circle is trying to impose itself over the real world. There is no social theory able to deal with this situation yet, because the advance of technology made possible the emergence of something totally new to the human relationships : the imaginary, the fantasy became more important to the individuals , than the reality. I can see this happening right now , both in the makers and players. It's called " state of denial ".

[Thomas Malaby]

30.

Richard, this is very helpful, as I see the differences in our views more clearly now. While we agree on a fair amount, we're not quite talking about the same thing.

First, a clarification (I hope!):
>Sorry, you've lost me there.

I was talking about how we should, in scholarship about this boundary maintenance, be talking about the concepts and techniques the actors actually use to accomplish this semi-boundedness, rather than labeling it as the magic circle. This is in much the same way that one sign of a bad ethnography is the overuse of the word "culture." If it's all over the text, that means it's standing in the way of analysis, not serving it.

In any case, you have a pretty clear definition of the magic circle, and it comes through pretty clearly in this comment. It is, as you put it, the idea that "we-play-by-rules-to-gain-mutual-benefit." But to me this is too narrow an account of the social phenomenon that the phrase tries to get at it. My problem with it is the highlighting of rule-following to the exclusion of other ways in which the domain of a game may be semi-bounded from other domains of our experience.

When people go about boundary maintenance, for any domain, that indeed entails the establishment of legitimate constraints (i.e., a set of constraints that participants buy into). This includes their practical agreement to adhere to rules, but also their practical agreement to other kinds of control, such as architectural constraints (the field of play as delimited by physical obstacles, for example), and to social conventions (which may be "rule-like," but are not rules).

But that is not all that can be reconfigured through successful acts of boundary maintenance. The stakes of social action within the domain may also be changed. The meanings that obtain may also be defined through this cultural effort. And all of the above apply to human acts of boundary maintenance wherever they may be found. There is nothing special about games in these respects, and the magic circle phrase does not add anything to our understanding of them.

That said, I do think that games are distinctive domains, but not in the way that the "magic circle" tries to highlight. What is distinctive about the boundary-making that goes on around games is the way they are established as legitimate arenas for the contrivance of unexpected outcomes (and this is what makes them antithetical, in some ways, to bureaucracy -- this is the stuff I've talked a bit opaquely about here and am writing about now). So, what I'm trying to do is show the limitations of the term, both in light of the broader phenomenon of boundary maintenance as talked about in the social sciences, and in terms of how it misses what *is* distinctive about games, in my opinion.

[Bryan Camp]

31.

Hi all,

Well, I only speak from my little corner of the metaverse, but my "role" as a legal academic is much less to stand back and analyze or describe or construct or deconstruct, and much more to think about how all that stuff should translate into rules of action, rules of law.

I'm just an enzyme in the body politic.

Traditional legal scholarship gets a bum rush from many other disciplines precisely because much of it is inconsistent with theory and even self-contradictory.

So the idea of "magic circle" as Richard explains it (or my pathetic attempt to import a similar concept of fourth wall from theater---and yea! Brecht, Andy, great post!) may be a big yawn to social scientists but is, I think highly useful to those who have to administer a system of taxation to over 130 million potentially unhappy customers.

I suppose I react to the term "boundary maintenance" by thinking of how do we know when comes the appropriate time for the tax law to impose duties on gamers to report their virtual world activities just as they must report their RL activities.

For example, economists object to tax lawyers insisting on using the concept of "realization" as a boundary marker because one has economic income without ever engaging in something called "realization." So when I buy Google at 85 and it rises in value to 500 I am economically wealthier but I have no income to be taxed until I do something with that appreciated stock to "realize" its gain. The tax system uses the "realization" concept for practical operational reasons, even though it is theoretically impure.

Similarly, I think the "magic circle" concept is useful for tax administration. There may be nothing special about the concept as applied to virtual games compared to other aspects of life, but it is the uniquely trompe d'oil nature of virtual games that creates the potential confusion in applying law in general, and tax law in particular. Just as "realization" is a legal term of art with deeply complex and sometimes contradictory meanings, so am I suggesting "magic cirle" as a similar term of art. It does not mean a formalist separation from RL, or a preference for words over actions, but simply a way to analyze the actions relation to law.

Back to my admin law exam.

Cheers, -bryan

[Andy Havens]

32.

Thomas said (about what Richard said): "It is, as you put it, the idea that 'we play by rules to gain mutual benefit.' But to me this is too narrow an account of the social phenomenon that the phrase tries to get at it. My problem with it is the highlighting of rule-following to the exclusion of other ways in which the domain of a game may be semi-bounded from other domains of our experience."

My reading of what Richard said gave a much broader interpretation to the meaning of the word, "rules." Because I used *your* (Thomas) definition from our earlier conversations.

Which then made his definition of the term "magic circle" and yours completely harmonious.

Which underscores my point about Brecht.

And circles of apparently different diameters. I think (and maybe Richard does) that we're standing in a small circle, and want to be. You (and maybe Prok?) think we're standing in a much larger circle. RMTers want some other circles to overlap with the one that Richard and I are standing in, so they see our circle as being much, much bigger. We stubbornly refuse to believe it is so... but note that crap from their circle is now inside ours. How'd that happen?

I went to the theater expecting and wanting to only be in the audience. I got dragged on stage and embarrassed in front of my date. At some point, the wall moved... the circle expanded... despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Trompe l'oeil, indeed.

[Thomas Malaby]

33.

@Bryan

Makes sense to me -- the terms that should interest the law should be the ones that reflect the culturally-shaped practices with which it must contend, not the best analytical concepts of us academicians.

@Andy

/bow

[Richard Bartle]

34.

Thomas Malaby>I was talking about how we should, in scholarship about this boundary maintenance, be talking about the concepts and techniques the actors actually use to accomplish this semi-boundedness, rather than labeling it as the magic circle.

Why is it either/or? Why can't we talk about concepts and techniques actors use to accomplish semi-boundedness AND label it "the magic circle"? And why stop at accomplishing this semi-boundedness, why not also look at ways to sustain it in the face of threats to its integrity?

The reason I want to keep the term "magic circle" is because we can use it as a shorthand for a raft of ideas that we, as researchers, already know and don't want to have to explain every time. I can see where you're coming from, in that if Joshua had called his paper "The Semi-Boundedness" then we'd have been giving him blank looks, as basically he criticises the semi-bounded for being semi-bounded. However, my own criticism comes from the observation that what he means by "magic circle" isn't the same as what I mean by it, and by attempting to discredit the one he hurts the other.

>But to me this is too narrow an account of the social phenomenon that the phrase tries to get at it.

>My problem with it is the highlighting of rule-following to the exclusion of other ways in which the domain of a game may be semi-bounded from other domains of our experience.

You seem to be using logic along the following lines: public transport is a way for members of the public to get from A to B without using their own vehicles; however, there are many ways to get from A to B without using your own transport; therefore, we shouldn't use the term "public transport" as it is too narrow.

Well in some circumstances, yes, it is too narrow. Nevertheless, there are plenty of valid uses for the term where it is precisely what you want.

In games, "magic circle" is important because it's fundamental to what games are. No magic circle, no game. Yes, there are other ways to separate the domains of games from the domains of our other experiences, but this one is of particular importance to games (if not to other experiences). It is especially relevant in discussions relating to activities that break the magic circle. We can talk as much as we like about how these activities don't break other semi-bounded borders between game and non-game experiences, but that doesn't alter the fact that if you break the magic circle you break the game.

>This includes their practical agreement to adhere to rules, but also their practical agreement to other kinds of control, such as architectural constraints (the field of play as delimited by physical obstacles, for example), and to social conventions (which may be "rule-like," but are not rules).

They're all rules. Some of them are stated explicitly (bishops move diagonally), some of them are unstated but obvious (the same bishop can't be in two squares at the same time), some of them are unstated but assumed (no rule of chess prevents me heating up a piece so you can't touch it to move it). Players can argue about the stated rules, can't argue about the rules rooted in the physicality of the universe, and have to negotiate the assumed rules.

When people play games, they have (as individuals) some idea of what the rules are. They take it on faith that the other players have the same idea, and therefore there is conflict when another player does something which they believe to be within their version of the rules but you don't believe to be in your version of the rules.

>But that is not all that can be reconfigured through successful acts of boundary maintenance. The stakes of social action within the domain may also be changed.

Yes, and that's worth studying too. It doesn't make consideration of the magic circle in its own terms a mere footnote, though.

>And all of the above apply to human acts of boundary maintenance wherever they may be found.

Good. That means there may be research out there that explains how players can defend the magic circle against attack, right?

>There is nothing special about games in these respects, and the magic circle phrase does not add anything to our understanding of them.

It enables us to engage in a discourse about this particular problem that anyone-can-join-in games have, because we just have to say "magic circle" and we're all talking about the same thing (except we aren't, which is what I was trying to get at earlier).

>What is distinctive about the boundary-making that goes on around games is the way they are established as legitimate arenas for the contrivance of unexpected outcomes

Now it's you who's being too narrow. Games are played because each individual player has a reason for buying into accepting limits on their behaviour (whether you want to call those "rules" or not), but that reason does not have to be about contriving unexpected outcomes. When I used to play Snakes/Chutes and Ladders with my two children, I knew exactly what the outcome would be: I would win precisely one third of the time. That's not an unexpected outcome - I expected exactly what I got. The reason I played with them is that I want them to enjoy themselves, which again isn't unexpected. To my children, sure, they were getting unexpected outcomes, but I wasn't.

>So, what I'm trying to do is show the limitations of the term, both in light of the broader phenomenon of boundary maintenance as talked about in the social sciences, and in terms of how it misses what *is* distinctive about games, in my opinion.

It's limited, but then so is every term. What matters is that for the particular kind of game that we're talking about, it identifies a particular kind of concern which for which we are seeking potential solutions. This makes it useful as a means of referring to this set of issues. It's not being used to distinguish games from other activities, it's being used to pin down something we need to talk about in games, that's all.

Richard

[Thomas Malaby]

35.

Well, I think this exchange has brought the grounds for our difference of opinion into relief, at least. My numerous objections to your treatment of the term have already been stated, but I will say (again) that (a) you seem to want to assume (by subsuming under a term) a process that we should, in each context, be seeking to explicate (not the least because it is not guaranteed to happen); (b) want to subsume everything into being about "rules," which narrows our field of view unnecessarily.

The Chutes and Ladders example is an unfair one. Games like it (such as tic-tac-toe) are associated with childhood for a good reason -- they have extremely shallow contingency, and therefore are not compelling over the long haul. I would see your interest in playing as driven more by the desire to educate and spend time with them then by anything in the game itself. I'm guessing you don't pull it out at parties with adults.

>What matters is that for the particular kind of game that we're talking about, it identifies a particular kind of concern which for which we are seeking potential solutions.

And I'm trying to show you how it already has smuggled in so many assumptions as to have overdetermined your field of vision. In your formulation, it is not about safety, separability, and lack of stakes (as it often is, and we agree on that as problematic), but it is about rules, around which in a tight orbit circle only a specific set of possible questions. I would prefer us to widen that view and be ready to recognize that making sense of people participating in games is not sensible, ultimately, solely in terms of rule-following. To pursue such a treatment turns games into just another form of bureaucracy, in a sense. And they certainly aren't that.

[Thomas Malaby]

36.

I should also mention another thing about your Chutes & Ladders example. You say:

"When I used to play Snakes/Chutes and Ladders with my two children, I knew exactly what the outcome would be: I would win precisely one third of the time."

But herein you conflate two vitally different things. The *outcome* (in this case, the end-state outcome) is never determined or "known." Knowing the pattern (which is pretty obvious, as the game admits of no performative demands beyond counting spaces correctly, and has no social contingency component), is not the same as claiming that the outcome is already known. It isn't. On any particular occasion that you play, you don't know who is going to win.

Ultimately, the game's only source of contingency is the stochastic dice rolls. After mastering counting the spaces (the small amount of performative contingency), the game becomes a rote unfolding of a stochastic process. That's quite a different thing than having determined outcomes.

[Andy Havens]

37.

@Richard and Thomas: Mom? Dad? Why are you fighting? I'm scared...

And, no, I will not be teased into picking out which one of you is 'Dad' ;)

Thomas: I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong, Richard), that R. is saying that the "code is law" rules are the only "rules" that are required for a magic circle. If that were the case, getting up and leaving a game of chess in the middle with no warning wouldn't violate the circle, nor would heaping verbal abuse on him or shooting him thro the haid. There are all kinds of "assumed rules" in many of our games, not the least of which is, "You will not eat the little plastic pieces that your brother is trying to collect on his way 'round the board, Mister Man!"

I think that what Richard (again, I assume, perhaps too much) and I (assumptions ok) object to is the idea that just about bloody anything can legitimately find its way into the magic circle if somebody... somewhere... thinks that it's "part of the game."

[randolfe_]

38.

Just a little nitpicking (no bristling). I'm somewhat interested in keeping metaphors honest, given my recent experience on these subjects.

The *outcome* (in this case, the end-state outcome) is never determined or "known." Knowing the pattern (which is pretty obvious[...]) is not the same as claiming that the outcome is already known.

That is an ambiguous definition of "outcome". I can say with certainty that I indeed know the outcome distribution within a confidence interval. That fact is not without ex ante value ascribable to the specific sample instance being tested (game being played). For example, I know well, ex ante, not to make claims or promises to my kids that depend upon me winning *this* game, if the costs of losing are greater than the expected value, which itself depends upon the "roughly one third" stochastic rate of success. I'm not sure invoking stochastic process in this example is necessary either. There are no continuous random variables.

[randolfe_]

39.

Correcting my own previous comment:

In the specific case of Chutes & Ladders, there does exist a continuous random variable in my own anecdotal experience. I label this T^3, or time-to-tantrum. It is a variable which hopefully diminishes as a cube root over a time series, if my parenting skills (arguably yet another set of random variables) are functioning accordingly.

[Thomas Malaby]

40.

Thanks, randolfe_. All I was pointing out is that knowing ahead of time the outcome distribution, as you rightly put it, is not the same as knowing the outcome of a given event.

@Andy: Yes, it may seem that Richard and I have drilled down to a point of subtle difference, but I don't agree with that assessment. Yes, I understand that he means that there are more than just "code is law"-type rules; in fact, that's the root of my disagreement; the way they're all rules, all the way down. My objection is to the dominance of the rules metaphor. It essentializes games to their rules (explicit, implicit, architectural). As soon as we decide that everything about games is fundamentally, via the magic circle, about "rules" (even the things that aren't explicitly rules, or even about anything concerning control), we've already set our analysis along one particular track, one which inevitably arrives at the point where everything is, if not following a rule, a transgression of a rule.

Roughly speaking, this shuts down our ability to talk about half of the stuff that makes games so compelling -- their mix of pattern and unpredictability. There's no reason to think that being reductionist in this way makes sense from a theoretical point of view, although of course it resonates with the specifically modernist construction of work and play as opposites. It just doesn't hold up when we look around the world (and even in our own backyard) and see what games are. At root, there is a structuralist commitment to pattern and order behind all this, but to buy into this is to look at games with one hand tied behind our back.

[Dave Rickey]

41.

As soon as we decide that everything about games is fundamentally, via the magic circle, about "rules" (even the things that aren't explicitly rules, or even about anything concerning control), we've already set our analysis along one particular track, one which inevitably arrives at the point where everything is, if not following a rule, a transgression of a rule.

"Everything not compulsory is forbidden." I'm sorry, I've lost track here, are we talking about the inside of the magic circle, the outside of it, or that there isn't any such boundary? Because everything you're saying seems to be equally applicable to all three positions.

Beyond that, the presence of rules does not preclude variations in pattern or predictability, you can use stochastic principles (random numbers) or emergent systems in your rulesets to provide those. In fact, it's often useful in MMOG's to treat the players as exactly such, emergent agents behaving in statistically predictable but individually random ways.

--Dave

[Thomas Malaby]

42.

There's a reason that what I'm saying is applicable to all those positions, Dave; I'm arguing that we should be examining how the boundary that imperfectly separates games (like other domains) from other aspects of our experience is or is not accomplished on the ground, in each case. This is the difference between assuming that the boundary exists as a starting point for analysis and making its construction by social actors the object of our analysis. Josh's article is a very nice contribution to this because it shows how it is the actions of the people involved that is decisive for whether that boundary is sought or abandoned.

And thank you, Dave, for making my point about games as combinations of constraint and unpredictability. The art of game design, as I see it, is about arranging and calibrating different kinds of control (including rules and other constraints) with sources of contingency, including random generators among many other things. This is why they are not reducible to their rules, even though many of the rules are about contriving which and what kinds of contingency count and in what ways.

[Richard Bartle]

43.

Thomas Malaby>Well, I think this exchange has brought the grounds for our difference of opinion into relief, at least.

Well, difference of emphasis. I don't think we disagree on the fundamentals.

>(a) you seem to want to assume (by subsuming under a term) a process that we should, in each context, be seeking to explicate (not the least because it is not guaranteed to happen)

I do, yes. Where we seem to differ is that you believe the two (labelling and explaining) are mutually incompatible and I don't.

>(b) want to subsume everything into being about "rules," which narrows our field of view unnecessarily.

No, I don't want to do that at all. I do, however, feel that in this particular case, this is a profitable way to examine the problems that players have. Although there is a magic circle in all other games, the reason we focus on it in game-like virtual worlds is because there are particular problems that virtual worlds have which other games don't. This doesn't mean that other research is invalid or inappropriate or incompatible.

>The Chutes and Ladders example is an unfair one. Games like it (such as tic-tac-toe) are associated with childhood for a good reason -- they have extremely shallow contingency, and therefore are not compelling over the long haul.

It may be unfair, but it remains a counter-example to your description of what's distinctive about games.

>And I'm trying to show you how it already has smuggled in so many assumptions as to have overdetermined your field of vision.

But I want those assumptions - that's the whole point of using a term, to bring with it a collection of baggage that we don't have to redefine every time.

>In your formulation, it is not about safety, separability, and lack of stakes (as it often is, and we agree on that as problematic), but it is about rules

Yes, it is about rules when I use the term "magic circle". It's not when I don't. You seem to believe that I only look at games in terms of the magic circle, which would indeed be foolish of me. However, I don't: I use the magic circle only when it's useful to do so.

>The *outcome* ... is never determined or "known." Knowing the pattern ... is not the same as claiming that the outcome is already known. It isn't. On any particular occasion that you play, you don't know who is going to win.

Well, to me, knowing the precise pattern does amount to knowing the outcome. I can't tell you exactly what the numbers of pi are, but I know formulae to generate those numbers, and I can treat the concept of pi as a first-class object. In the case of Snakes/Chutes & Ladders, I may not be able to instantiate the variable "winner" with the name of a player, but I know the exact formula for it. Thus, I do know the outcome, but as a formula rather than as a static value.

Richard

[Thomas Malaby]

44.

it remains a counter-example to your description of what's distinctive about games.

No, it doesn't. You *don't* know the outcome of a particular game of Chutes & Ladders, unless you have powers beyond the human (hmm....well, you *are* the one who wrote about game developers as *gods* ;-) ). Games generate contingent outcomes. If they didn't, they wouldn't be games.

You seem to believe that I only look at games in terms of the magic circle, which would indeed be foolish of me. However, I don't: I use the magic circle only when it's useful to do so.

Well, that's great to hear, because I could have sworn you said:

In games, "magic circle" is important because it's fundamental to what games are. No magic circle, no game.

;-)

Yes, I think we agree on a lot. I'm just not comfortable having a term as a core part of our research toolbox that carries so many assumptions within it already. Yes, that's what concepts are supposed to do, but in this case, I think it's a bit overdetermined. Instead of a tool that's like a lens through which to view the actions of people around games, it's something more like a stained-glass window, that already structures what you see through it so heavily as to color rather than magnify. (Hrm...not the best metaphor I've ever thought of, but it will have to do.)

[Andy Havens]

45.

@Thomas: 2 things. One, I think *you* are being reductionist in your definition of "rules." For example, in my house, one hard-and-fast rule about games with the little ones is, "If everyone isn't having fun, we stop for awhile." Now... that's a pretty flexible meta-rule, and not one that you could easily code onto the back of the box for every single individual game. But it's still "a rule," if you use a broad enough definition of that term. But it is, I think, a rule. Another rule is, "If you hit someone, you're out. There is no hitting in the Havens house." Also, following closely, "No food in bed." That's not just a game rule, it also goes for bedtime stories.

So... rules can be very non... rule-y.

Second... Richard said, "No magic circle, no game." But he didn't say that you couldn't have other stuff besides the magic circle in a game.

I'm trying to think of an example of what I'd call "a game" where there isn't at least one "rule" that defines some kind of "who" or "what" that's on the outside, and another set of stuff on the inside; ie, a game that doesn't have a magic circle... an understood boundary of, "Here be thy game, and there be not."

And, in almost every case I can think of, the vast majority of what defines "here" vs. "there" is rules, even if they're not the "bishop moves diagonally" sort. They may be rules like: "When it's too dark to see the end of the street, we have to stop, because Kenny needs to be able to know when his mom is waving at him, and she's got the asthmar and can't yell loud." That's not a rule for *your* version of frisbee golf... but it's still a rule that the kids on Pennytree Lane know well, eh?

[ron meiners]

46.

via Andy Havens:

"Ooh! I thought of a good analogy. Imagine Richard invites me over to play chess, but he's also in the process of rehearsing for a role in a play as a much dumber person. And he's a method actor, and I never know if he's "getting into character" or not while we're playing. I don't mind helping him with his method, and I don't mind playing "regular chess" with Richard... but it might piss me off not to know which version is which at any given moment."

If I can join you at the kids' table here, for a moment, I really liked this description, and agree... and find this aspect of virtual worlds really interesting... I don't think we've had such a widely common vehicle for engaging in various activities of cultural creation: the variety of virtual worlds creates a variety of experiences of cultural plasticity and our own freedom in such a context - or, amazingly enough, our own freedom to choose which context we wish to enter next. Not only do I no longer have to travel to Berlin to see Brecht, from my desk here I can "enter" a number of worlds with varying levels or characteristics of invitation to engage in culture play... The part I really wonder about is what happens... in the long haul. I mean, cultures have formed thus far with a stamp of authority, with the power and conviction that each culture was the only correct message. Virtual worlds give us immediate power to step outside those strictures, or expectations, and even more, rather invite us to create new cultural forms, from music videos made with Wow characters to role playing in LOTRO. There are default world examples of culture jamming from Brecht to Burning Man, but the synthetic spaces invite experimentation, and are very accessible. What happens as the general understanding of culture shifts from "we're all this way... because..." to "I'm choosing this social identity for personal reasons (and understand how you might have chosen yours even though it's different than mine)"?

[Thomas Malaby]

47.

@Andy: I'm afraid that again you are misunderstanding my point. I have never said that games don't have rules, or that the rules of games (defined broadly or narrowly) aren't an important part of the practice of boundary maintenance that gets labeled (and thereby often left under-explored) the "magic circle" in past game scholarship. I am not being reductionist about rules. I understand that one could use the metaphor of "rules" to talk about lots of things. But, all metaphoric labels ("species" in biology comes to mind, but I've said that before) run the risk of reification, coming to serve the purpose of (as Richard nicely phrased the contrast) "labeling" instead of "explaining." I cannot be reductionist if the thing I am strongly cautioning against is a reductionist application of a term (one that would fold a whole bunch of different *kinds* of constraints into *one* kind). What I'm worried about is the shutting down of important avenues for inquiry because we're too ready to reach for labels that are already lying around and which, frankly, are not that well thought out, given everything we know about social process in academia writ large. We should be pragmatic in the choice and application of terms to understand games in specific contexts; in order to do that, a lot of formalist habits need to be rethought or rejected. A specific case is that habit of thinking that games are in some reducible to their rules. They are not, and our analytical language for them needs to reflect that.

[Thomas Malaby]

48.

Second to last sentence should read, "A specific case is that habit of thinking that games are in some sense reducible to their rules (or even to their constraints, broadly defined)."

[Andy Havens]

49.

@Thomas: Quick question -- do you think games are reducible at all, on any levels, to any definitions or explanations... including stuff other than rules? I like much of how you've described games in your work (contrived contingency, etc.), and am not wedded to "definitions" as opposed to "descriptions." I also don't have any problem with being quite loosey-goosey when it comes to some of this stuff. I'm just curious... you know... like certain disappearing cats... As the one said in his conversation with Alice, who asked:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where," said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

[Thomas Malaby]

50.

Andy, if by your question you're asking whether I think we can be comparativist at all about games (because in this thread I'm sounding rather particularist), the answer is a resounding yes. I just think that it's going to call for a different approach from those that games scholarship has previously relied upon (with all due respect to Richard -- we've had this conversation before, as you might guess :-) ). In my book on Greek gambling, for example, I drew parallels between different games (with their specific sets of constraints and possibilities) and different arenas of Greek life (business, politics, courtship, etc), to build a picture of the Greek attitude toward chance in their lives. So broader, generalizing work can be done -- it must be done -- but it can only be done if our approach to what games are is as robust as our approach to society itself.

I guess, truth be told, the thing is that I'm incredibly optimistic about what the study of games could contribute to our understanding of society. This is because of stuff I've said elsewhere -- games are powerful and compelling *because* they're so much like other aspects of our lives. Those other aspects of our lives are not reducible to rules either, but we can still examine them critically, and we do. I realize that there is a degree of straightforward-ness in approaches that contain a lot of conclusions in their very terms, but Darwin was right: instead of working from categories of entities and phenomena, we should be studying *processes*. Just like we can identify the processes that make up natural selection (proaptation, exaptation, adaptation, to name a few), we can identify the processes that constitute games (such processes of control, or contingency), and reason about what the differences between games, in different contexts, mean for things like social change and reproduction, for example; that's all I'm trying to advocate for.

[ron meiners]

51.

OK, Thomas, I've re-read your paper, which was brilliant, and better understand some of the context of your perspective. Apologies, I'm not an academic, though, obviously, I do like to hang out with them!

I'm sure you know I agree with 99% of what you've said, or rather, I think we share an appreciation of the potential importance of understanding these dynamics, aka processes, for both a better appreciation of human psyche and social interactions in general, but also because I believe these systems - synthetic worlds especially, but I mean the recent proliferation of computer based games - also afford oppotunities for emergent behavior that I think we'll see grow in importance to the human experience. And apologies for my lack of rigorous terminology, as you know I come from a background of practice (informed by observation, and amazing interchanges like these).

My only potential quibble, or question, has to do with my perception of some sort of invitation to "play", or experiment with the culture, in a much more active sense than happens in most other arenas.To again beat a dead trope, my background also includes Burning Man, where the culture is based strongly on notions of culture jamming, of taking disparate cultural artifacts and smooshing them together in creative (ironic) ways. I think I see something similar in synthetic worlds, a behavior of experimentation in interaction, emergent activity patterns, unexpected behavior, etc. That's the part of synthetic worlds I'd want to identify as singular... do you see that as my cultural bias (either as an observer, or as a component of this culture as opposed to, say, Greek dice players - and that must have been a ton of fun to do, by the way), or as part of the collection of behaviors or processes that are worthy of study?

[Andy Havens]

52.

@ron: To some degree (and I'm gonna get haters on this, I expect), I think you're asking, "Can deconstruction itself be ably (or usefully) deconstructed?" IE, can a game be a non-game and still be a game?

The answer, from those of us in the artistic, Dadaist, live-action-poetry section of the cafe is a resounding, feather-bedecked cry of, "Cheese sandwich."

[Richard Bartle]

53.

Thomas Malaby>No, it doesn't. You *don't* know the outcome of a particular game of Chutes & Ladders, unless you have powers beyond the human

Yes I do! I know it will be a win for me exactly 1/n times, for n players. I still know that after I've won, too. You're just being picky over the definition of "outcome". Would you say that the outcome was decided if I was one die roll away from a guaranteed win and it was my turn, but I hadn't yet rolled? What if two other players were within a roll of winning but I wasn't, so I knew I was guaranteed to lose? Would that count as an outcome, or would you force me to play the game just to prove I had indeed lost? Isn't "outcome" as socially constructed as anything else to do with games?

>Games generate contingent outcomes. If they didn't, they wouldn't be games.

Says you. I say they can be games even if they don't generate contingent outcomes. Golf between a boss and an underling is an example: both of them know exactly who is going to win. You have to change your definition of "outcome" to account for things like that, in which case I can change it for Chutes/Snakes and ladders, too.

What if two people agree to a contest which one of them will let the other win? Is that a game? If it is, how come? It has no contingent outcome. If it isn't, why is it that things like TV wrestling are regarded as a game? Is the fact that the viewer doesn't know the outcome, even though the players do know it, enough to make it a game? In that case, is a TV detective show a game? It's scripted, the actors know the result, but the viewers don't.

>>In games, "magic circle" is important because it's fundamental to what games are. No magic circle, no game.

Yes, I said that. Are you saying that it isn't true? If so, describe to me a game which has no magic circle.

You're criticising me for saying that it's a fundamental property of melody that it has notes, on the grounds that there are many features of music that we should be examining in diverse social contexts. Well that's true, but nevertheless if you don't have notes then you don't have melody. If you don't have a magic circle, you don't have a game. It's a necessary property for games; I wouldn't go so far as to say it's sufficient, because there are some non-games that also have it.

Richard

[Amarilla]

54.

Once, a paesano told me : "...ma'm,for me, the music is that sound that 'tickles' my ears in a pleasant way , even being it a perpetual one note fart . " Games and plays are an exploratory activity . Any exploration suppose the assuming of "..what if ? "
Is the projecting into the magic circle of " what if ". Sorry for the digression.

[Thomas Malaby]

55.

@Ron: I think that what you're noticing *is* distinctive, and calls for our attention, but our knee-jerk habit of thinking of it as the same old (safe, non-consequential) "play" in new clothes is understandable, but misleading. Instead, I tend to see the wide-open scope for possibility in these new spaces as mostly the result of them being not yet colonized by modern institutions, which themselves have worked from a set of regulating techniques that characterize bureaucracy. Games present a challenge to bureaucracy (as I've written about here before, and am writing about in the book on Linden Lab), but it may be only a matter of time before they successfully incorporate the techniques of game design and development both in how they run as institutions and how they seek to govern spaces like virtual worlds.

@Andy: What I've been saying has nearly nothing to do with deconstructionism. I'm trying to get us in the habit of thinking pragmatically (that is, as neither triumphantly formalist nor futilely deconstructionist). Litmus-test debates about what is and what is not a game are not useful for analysis, but we should study the ways that actors themselves get wrapped up in these kinds of boundary debates (see below).

@Richard: I am not being "picky" about the definition of outcome, and I can only believe that you're willfully denying the difference. The difference between knowing a distribution and knowing a specific outcome ahead of time is all the difference in the world when it comes to, for example, how games generate meaning. If you deny that, then I'm afraid we're at an impasse. Consider how comforting it is to someone getting a biopsy to know the odds for a malignant tumor, or to hear the odds after hearing of a positive result -- for most people, not very comforting at all. Or read the plays of Tom Stoppard for all kinds of meditations on this (especially Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead). Or consider Shannon's work on information theory and the mix of the redundant and the unexpected. Games would be meaningless if they were not open-ended, just like language and social processes generally. To deny this by appealing to a fancy that knowledge of a probability distribution is equivalent to omniscience is staggering to me, Richard.

Of course what counts as an outcome in games *is* socially constructed -- that's why the contingency that games have is "contrived." That doesn't change the fact (in fact, it underscores it) that seeing games as entailing both control and contingency is a more useful approach to getting at them as, to name a few avenues of inquiry, sources of meaning, sites for the generation of belonging, grounds for the reproduction of class and other kinds of exlcusionary identities, and on and on. What you don't seem to see is that seeing them in this broader light allows us to talk about everything we already *were* talking about, but also a whole bunch of stuff which is empirically a part of players' experience and that our hands are tied on if we hold to a notion that games are reducible to their rules.

And your examples don't hold water (apart from the fact that getting into wrangling about what is or is not a game is of limited use, for the reason mentioned above, and see below). If you're saying that a boss playing an underling is a guaranteed win for the boss, then that depends on the people involved and the cultural context in which this happens, doesn't it? And if it is a guaranteed win, then yes, it *might make more sense to say* that one of the players has chosen to opt out of playing a game in order to enact a ritual. The same thing is true for those who have decided to have a contest in which the other person will win. Those are better understood as rituals, in my opinion, because what has happened is the active rejection of an indeterminate outcome.

But again, part of the difference here is that *you* want a litmus test, whereas I want us to see these labels pragmatically. Imagine if political scientists decided that they would work really, really hard to come up with a definition of war. They wrangle it out, and decided that now they *know* what war is. What would happen in their scholarship? They would spend all their time in the rather pointless exercise of analyzing conflicts in terms of whether they are really "wars." It's silly. As I've said before, as with other concepts, like ritual, the proof should be in the pudding of the analysis. Does it advance our understanding to see pro wrestling as a ritual, or as a game? One would then be prompted to take into account the cultural representations of wrestling as a game, and as constructed by the actors and institutions involved as behind something like the magic circle, among a whole host of other relevant empirical stuff. The same holds true for things like "virtual world." If someone wanted to argue that MySpace is a virtual world, I'd be very interested in the argument, even though I'm skeptical that it would hold water. To decide ahead of time what counts, and what doesn't, is to reach our conclusions before we've started. We should be united by the questions we're asking instead.

As for the musical analogy, what you're doing is more like saying that it is a fundamental property of all music to have time signatures, or to have pitches within the twelve-tone western scale. All music does not have these, and it would be pointless to go into a new context hamstrung to a set of assumptions about music which may have worked well enough in the past but don't now.

I've argued elsewhere (about ganking), that that is, effectively, no longer playing the game precisely because the outcome isn't in doubt (barring some meta-level competition).

[Thomas Malaby]

56.

[Got cut off -- continuing that last thought.]

But that argument was founded on the idea that we might make some headway in our understanding of ganking if we think of it as a denial of playing the game. In all these respects, I'm trying to advocate for a pragmatic approach to games that, yes, raises a high empirical bar, but is the more powerful thereby (and because it can speak to the broader social theory to which it can make a huge contribution).

[ron meiners]

57.

@Andy

Joining you again (I may write myself hate mail for this one): as near as I can tell, we're hanging out in a culture where we debate the culture of discussing culture...

And did you want bacon with that?

:-)

[Thomas Malaby]

58.

we're hanging out in a culture where we debate the culture of discussing culture

I'll take that over Kuhnian "normal science" any day. :-D

[Thomas Malaby]

59.

@Richard: I just realized how inapt my response to the musical analogy was. My apologies. The better version, as I see it, is that you're advocating something like the notion that music is, essentially, what the score (for classical music) directs the players to do. But of course, music is not bureaucratic, and there is a great deal of "wiggle-room," as they say, which happens in every single actual performance of a work, and -- just as important -- this is understood to be how it works, by the composer, players, etc. *This* is where the music happens. In the same way, the game actually exists only in the playing of it, when things happen, things change, and surprising possibilities emerge. (What makes games distinctive, in my opinion, is that they not only have this quality, like music, but that it is embraced in the socially constructed notion of what games are.) Are scores, like game rules (or social analytical models) useful and illuminating? Yes. Should we mistake them for what we call music? No.

[Richard Bartle]

60.

Thomas Malaby>I am not being "picky" about the definition of outcome, and I can only believe that you're willfully denying the difference.

I'm not willfully denying the difference, but I'm denying that the distinction is important in considering what is and what isn't a game.

Some games don't have endings, for example Dungeons and Dragons. What's the outcome of a game of D&D? No-one gets to win. People play for the journey, not for the destination. Is D&D a game? I believe it is, yes. A game of D&D ends when the magic circle breaks
(ie. people stop playing), not when someone wins.

>The difference between knowing a distribution and knowing a specific outcome ahead of time is all the difference in the world when it comes to, for example, how games generate meaning.

Games don't generate meaning. Players and designers generate meaning. Games are the objects or tools from and through which meaning is generated, but it's the people who generate the meaning. Games are a great way for someone to encapsulate meaning, but they don't themselves generate it. If I choose to interpret a game of pure chance as evidence that the gods love me, or that I'm cleverer than those I beat, that's my doing, not the game's. You might view the same game as being pure chance, but enjoy the thought that if you won you might get some huge material reward. It's all interpretative, and it doesn't apply to games any more than it applies to anything else.

>Consider how comforting it is to someone getting a biopsy to know the odds for a malignant tumor, or to hear the odds after hearing of a positive result -- for most people, not very comforting at all.

Large numbers of people who suspect that they have cancer don't seek medical attention because they don't want their suspicions confirmed.

Anyway, I already gave you an example of something that most people are able to cope with as a concept even though they can't ever specify it: pi. Just because I can't exactly state the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, that doesn't mean I can't profitably use it.

>Games would be meaningless if they were not open-ended, just like language and social processes generally. To deny this by appealing to a fancy that knowledge of a probability distribution is equivalent to omniscience is staggering to me, Richard.

Well, you know, maybe some games as played are indeed meaningless? I know I personally have played card games merely to keep me awake when trapped at an airport. I could have built a house of cards to the same effect if people hadn't been walking past. What meaning did I take from those games?

>Of course what counts as an outcome in games *is* socially constructed

If by "socially constructed" you would include "constructed by an individual" then I'd go along with this, so long as it had the caveat that the social construction could be that there isn't an outcome.

>What you don't seem to see is that seeing them in this broader light allows us to talk about everything we already *were* talking about, but also a whole bunch of stuff which is empirically a part of players' experience and that our hands are tied on if we hold to a notion that games are reducible to their rules.

What you don't seem to see is that I do see that, but I also see a utility in setting it aside when it comes to dealing with a very particular problem. Having a rich understanding of how the human body works is good when looking at systems, but if someone has a tumour in their leg then they're going to want to see a cancer specialist, not a psychologist or a physiotherapist.

>And if it is a guaranteed win, then yes, it *might make more sense to say* that one of the players has chosen to opt out of playing a game in order to enact a ritual.

On the other hand, that person could really enjoy playing golf, regard the act of almost-but-not-quite winning as a challenge, and still regard it as a game.

>The same thing is true for those who have decided to have a contest in which the other person will win. Those are better understood as rituals, in my opinion, because what has happened is the active rejection of an indeterminate outcome.

But they may still be understood as games. You could look on them as meta-games constructed within a different magic circle, or you could look on them as a collision between different views of what the game is they're playing. There are lots of ways to look at it; you pick the one that is most useful as an explanation for the discussion in hand.

I'm saying that for virtual worlds, the magic circle is a particularly useful examination tool for understanding why players get so angry about things such as RMT. Now you can talk about the wider context of socially construction if you like, and you can complain about the disregard that the magic circle has for features you believe are intrinsically important when it comes to studying games, but until you can produce a better tool I'm going to keep on using it.

Game players don't like people who "break the rules", and it doesn't matter what you or I as academics understand to be the shifting grey borders of the word "rules" (or indeed "players"), we're not going to get the opportunity to speak to every player on an individual basis and persuade them of their folly.

Virtual worlds have a particular kind of problem with regards to people who "break the rules", because the usual normative solution - kick them out of the game - doesn't work. This is why it's important for us to look in this area. If we want to address the players' grievances, then we need to be able to characterise their view of play. Their view is that they're offering a deal: I'll play by the rules if you do. This is the notion that the magic circle captures. Yes, each person's magic circle is different, because each person's view of "the rules" is different. They're not actually rules, to those in the know, they're willingly-undertaken limits to behaviour. Nevertheless, the fact is that players have this notion of "rules", and that's the domain we're operating in if we're looking at people who don't play by them.

>But again, part of the difference here is that *you* want a litmus test, whereas I want us to see these labels pragmatically.

From my point of view, you want a general theory of game to which all else conforms, whereas I: a) want to be able to use sub-theories that apply to particular kinds of game but not games (or play) in general, and b) don't think your general theory is general enough.

>What would happen in their scholarship? They would spend all their time in the rather pointless exercise of analyzing conflicts in terms of whether they are really "wars." It's silly.

No they wouldn't. They'd only do that if it were likely to lead to a better understanding of a particular conflict. A conventional war against, say, North Korea: maybe. A less conventional war against, say, Afghan warlords: it could still say something useful. A war against a concept, say, War on Terrorism, it's unlikely. They'd try other models of explanation that would offer better ways of understanding the issues.

>Does it advance our understanding to see pro wrestling as a ritual, or as a game?

The point is, with the definition of "game" you gave us, you have to look at as a ritual, because it doesn't conform to your definition. That's why I mentioned it.

>As for the musical analogy, what you're doing is more like saying that it is a fundamental property of all music to have time signatures, or to have pitches within the twelve-tone western scale.

I talked about melody, not music. Silence performed by musicians can be described as music.

>I've argued elsewhere (about ganking), that that is, effectively, no longer playing the game precisely because the outcome isn't in doubt (barring some meta-level competition).

The outcome of that one small element of that sub-game isn't in doubt (except, the two level 70 stealthed rogues might know it'll be different to what the level 60 attacking the level 40 thinks it will be).

>I'm trying to advocate for a pragmatic approach to games that, yes, raises a high empirical bar, but is the more powerful thereby (and because it can speak to the broader social theory to which it can make a huge contribution).

I'm all for that. I'm all for tools that don't make noise. Sometimes, though, I have to use a hammer rather than a screwdriver.

Richard

[Thomas Malaby]

61.

@Richard: A few points only. This has gone on long enough.

You're reading my posts very selectively.

- By "outcome" I do not only mean "end-state" outcome. I never said I did.

- I made pains to point out that one could look at pro wrestling as a game if one wanted; I wasn't discounting the possibility.

- I gave a different, better response to your music analogy.

- There are a number of points I've made that you've simply ignored, including the issue that there is no reason to think that rules constitute games more fundamentally than other aspects. As such, you're able to represent my views as formalist in a way that they are not.

- You're sounding a lot more like me now, as magic circle no longer comes across as the term from which all games scholarship must begin (or end). You're trying to paint me as didactic, which I find deeply ironic. Move toward a pragmatic view all you like, but don't portray me as something else to get there.

[Richard Bartle]

62.

Thomas Malaby>A few points only. This has gone on long enough.

I agree.

>You're reading my posts very selectively.

If I was, it wasn't intentional. I don't suppose you think you were reading mine selectively, either.

>By "outcome" I do not only mean "end-state" outcome. I never said I did.

I've no objection to your labelling anything you want as an outcome, but you insist that the outcome is contingent. I don't believe it has to be contingent at all. In particular: who wins a game may be contingent, but not be an outcome; a game can have no end, therefore no contingency, but still have an outcome.

>I made pains to point out that one could look at pro wrestling as a game if one wanted; I wasn't discounting the possibility.

Yet that your description of a game in terms of contingent outcomes would rule it out, wouldn't it?

>There are a number of points I've made that you've simply ignored, including the issue that there is no reason to think that rules constitute games more fundamentally than other aspects.

I haven't ignored that at all. I've said several times that the issue of the magic circle is of particular interest to virtual worlds because of a peculiarity of virtual worlds that makes it a very useful tool. I even described the magic circle in terms of willingly limiting behaviour to gain a benefit that only comes if all others playing also limit their behaviour.

Besides, I don't think rules aren't at the most fundamental level anyway. I would, for example, say that a game with no players is not a game; this would be more fundamental than saying a game with no magic circle is not a game, as the magic circle is dependent on there being players.

>- You're sounding a lot more like me now, as magic circle no longer comes across as the term from which all games scholarship must begin (or end).

I never said it was. I do say that every game has to have a magic circle, but that doesn't mean it has to be the start and end of games scholarship, any more than describing games in terms of process or contingency does. It's just another tool, but one which is of particular use in explaining certain player attitudes in virtual worlds.

Richard

[Thomas Malaby]

63.

So we agree after all. ;-)