Pervasiveness and the Magical Circle

In the world of computer games, a player usually knows exactly when they enter the game world. The click of a certain icon, the animated splash screen, the opening theme music. However, in the real world, this has not always been the case. When Roger Caillois first coined the terms and ludus and paidia to distinguish between formal game events and playful exchanges in 1958, he was getting at the sort of difference I'm thinking about. The liminal experience of crossing the threshold of non-game to game has been called the "magic circle" experience, and Nieuwdorp's paper "The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle" is all about how new digital experiences are crossing that threshold in new (and yet old) ways.

Nieuwdorp's emphasis in the interface experience, citing new and freeing innovations in technology that are taking games from the world of the stationary PC into the everyday world in the form of mobile gaming, augmented reality, and similar ludic experiences. He sees the innovation coming because the "geographical setting of a pervasive game is shared with an already existing environment with laws and conventions of its own." His example of "The Go Game" -- played in an urban environment by receiving text messages via cell phone -- demonstrates how everyday city streets can be turned into game elements by the introduction of a game setting and status. He turns to Johan Huizinga's definition of the magical circle as a "temporary world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart." In this way, ordinary objects are transformed by a game interface (no matter how metaphorical the transformation in the case of The Go Game) into ludic elements.

He cites Goffman's categories to find three axes of definition for such objects:
1. rules of irrelevance (game pieces as playable items not intrinsic value)
2. transformation rules (patterns that denote how much influence an item has within the game)
3. realized resources (availability of material and moves)

While debates as to the theoretical presence of a game experience may seem a little too far removed from practice to matter, they serve the important goal of informing designers. In order to design new games and experiences, one must know the rules of said design, and Nieuwdorp's paper helps formalize the sort of experience that is becoming mainstream and in fact almost defining of a new type of game: at once casual and formal, present and abstract. In case that needs defining I refer to game-like experiences he cites, such as alternate reality games like "I Love Bees" -- we participate in the "game" but fumble to know the rules of participation while its true impact on us is partially formed by its very ordinary-ness and normalness as a regular-seeming website within our web browser.