Talk:Magic circle (virtual worlds)

Um, "Synthetic Worlds"?

A massively pretentious title. How about Magic Circle (games)? Huizinga wrote on the Magic Circle decades before anything resembling a videogame existed. Also, not only does Wikipedia not have a page on Synthetic Worlds, I'm curious if that term even has a broadly agreed-upon scholastic definition. Even the use of synthetic in this sense is not without its problems ("syntithenai" meaning "to combine/put in the same place"). I wonder why Castronova's arguments are presented so uncritically as to make up the foundation of the article; at least the opening sentence of "In regard to digital media ..." does a good job of announcing this article's skewed perspective. - Tzaquiel (talk) 00:28, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Moved to Magic Circle (virtual worlds) and rephrased the text a bit for consistency, that should do it. I agree that the whole thing is a bit heavily Castranova-centric though. MLauba (talk) 15:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's correct that Huizinga coined the term -- I think he was actually referring to the things you'll see if you do a Google Image search for "magic circle" -- pentagrams and the like. Post-Huizinga, the term has very recently become a sort of an inside baseball term in field of modern game studies, referring to the separation between the rules and reality of a game space and the world outside it. So there has been a great deal of writing about whether that boundary exists. It's important to Castronova because he's often a virtual world separatist and to Zimmerman & Salen because they are game theorists. I might do an edit at some point, but in lieu of that, thought I'd just add this to the notes. -- Greg Lastokwa. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.81.124.39 (talk) 16:51, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Name

I am also concerned with the name. This article focuses on virtual worlds, but the concept of a magic circle is much broader. I agree with User:Tzaquiel suggestion that we should move this to Magic circle (games) (also, decapitalize). Here you can find an academic paper discussing this context in the case of non-computer board games. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:02, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Good point about the broadness of the concept. Right now the whole article seems like a school assignment that someone wrote. Unsurprisingly, the "view history" page shows that very little editing has happened since User:Nis80 started the page. That was in 2008. Even the bizarre intro paragraph was written by User:Nis80, it seems.BrianPansky (talk) 02:29, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree this article is a mess. The term "magic circle" was not coined by Huizinga but, as can be seen from the quote, was used as an example in a list of "play"-spaces to show how play-grounds are interchangeable with sacred spaces. This use of magic-circle as an example of a play-space is part of a larger argument he's making for a play element which precedes culture and therefore shapes activities like games, rituals and institutions. Huizinga uses the terms "magic-circle," "play-world," and "magic world" (1949, p. 11) interchangeably for the space created by the rules of play. The term magic-circle was picked up by the game developer community via Salen and Zimmermans book and quickly became a useful conceptual tool for devs. Unfortunately the term was already in use as a shorthand signifier for how not to think about social relations by critical media theorists and this difference in use led to significant disagreement between game designers and academics working in media theory. One way of looking at this disagreement is that critical theorists had spent almost a century arguing for the uselessness of a concept but game developers picked up the term which referred to the concept and made it useful in less than a decade. Point is that the term at least is a contested space and the stakeholders are still figuring out who's using it to mean what. This article, as far as it sets up the term as a concept invented to define games, misrepresents a position in a discourse as a stable definition. Although the magic circle debate is interesting this article should probably be condensed and collapsed into another article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FB90:2C3D:7A21:F831:80B6:1C6C:60BB (talk) 14:48, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

References

Name (Agreement on change proposal)

It sounds like this article's title has already undergone some changes, but I agree with previous commenters that Magic circle (games) would be the best title.

I'm not sure what the process is for ensuring that a name change is appropriate, but I will look into it and then possibly come back and change it. CeraWithaC (talk) 06:08, 29 July 2017 (UTC)