Development 08 - The Magic Circle and Its Discontents

Apologies for the late post - I've been away at the Living Games Conference all weekend (a truly wonderful, amazing experience) and thus had no time to write absolutely anything. However, I've come away from the con with a lot of thoughts about a lot of topics, and much of how I write has been informed by the conversations I had there. Perhaps one of the conversations I had that has shaped me the most was one at the very end, at a roundtable led by Gabriel De Los Angeles. In it, he discussed taxonomies and relational webs - the idea that we naturally compartmentalize and put things inside boxes in ways that limit their growth and development. An idea he brought up briefly, but really stuck with me, was a criticism of the magic circle.

For those unfamiliar, the magic circle in LARP design refers to the creation of a synthetic space in which the traditional norms of society can be violated, allowing us to act and behave in unique ways. This is the LARP space, which isolates the players from the outside and then serves as a space for examination. It is expected that you don't bring any emotions or non-intellectual impacts from this LARP into the outside world - that event being known as bleed. It's a very familiar idea for me - Wayfinder engages in LARPwork through the lens of a ritualized magic circle constantly. However, I want to bring an eye to the assumptions we make about the nature of such a space.

• That the outside world is disconnected from our LARP. When we LARP, we don't want people to intrude. We want to have an "immersive" space, where we fully believe we're somewhere else. But the idea that in order to LARP well you need to be separate from everyone else around you demonstrates a distrust of your environment. We cannot shut out the outside - to try and do so completely will only end in frustration. Can we write games that accommodate and embrace the outside world?
• That LARPs have limits. By drawing a box around the play space - either literal or conceptual - we say that our game cannot expand into new places. Just as the outside world cannot intrude, we cannot bother the outside world. But why is that? Some people argue that it's unethical to LARP with someone without them being aware it's happening. But I don't think I understand why we can't take our LARPs into the streets, into the world, and play them with people and around people and change their worlds in a way they don't fully get yet. Performance art gets to do that, why don't we?
• Immersion is breakable. One important point De Los Angeles was making was that the notion of immersion is a tool used to keep people quiet and erase the needs of players. "But it breaks my immersion" is a complaint leveled at people of color in fantasy games, safety mechanics, space limitations, accessible costuming and props, and anything else they don't want to see in their perfect magic circle. Immersion isn't a static idea - it's a conceptual process that adapts to its environment. I was more immersed in the game Succumb (by Brodie Atwater and Alex Rowland) than I have been in a long while, and the game was abstracted to the point of conceptualization. Immersion is the process of accepting the fiction and feeling comfortable exploring it, not something bound to the magic circle.
• Everything needs to be contained. Not only must the magic circle be pristine, it must also trap the transformative energies generated within it and prevent their presence outside of it. Sure, people don't like it when they're crying over something their character felt. You don't want grudges carrying through from game into an out-of-game space. But why are we so scared of letting the messiness loose? What actually happens if we bust open the box and say "everything that happens in here happens out there. Let your emotions run rampant across the world. Love people you don't know, cry because bad things happened to you, see what happens." It would be ugly, yeah, and potentially disastrous. The games which did this would need to be careful - there's a lot that people don't want to have to bear with them. But we could do it, couldn't we. And maybe the game could reshape you with it.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I don't think that the magic circle is an idea we need to abandon. I still think that a ritualized playspace has its own uses, and there's a good reason to draw a line between ourselves and the outside - sometimes. Even De Los Angeles said that taxonomies are occasionally useful. But we shouldn't think of a magic circle as a fact of LARP, and maybe we should be finding ways to free ourselves from its constraints. A game I've been working on since the conference is Esoteric, a game about finding self-actualization through ritual. In it, you don't play characters - you play a nameless form, an ur-person who can undergo transformation. This ur-person resembles yourself, and I can imagine people argue that you're not roleplaying at all. 

In some ways, Esoteric is the ultimate magic circle - you literally cannot speak of what happened within the game outside of it. But on the other hand, the game pushes against player/character separation and explicitly examines the circle as a structural space. The purpose of Esoteric is to bleed into your everyday life. I want you to come away from the game viewing things around you differently, and to carry that and own that. But, it's still definitely a game about the magic circle. 

And that's okay! 

The magic circle isn't dead. We should just remember that it's one way of visualizing a LARP's relationship with the world, and it's not the only one, and it's not always the most useful one.