While this thinking is true, the distancing of experiences must be finite, meaning the spaces such as saferooms, condition players in an emotionally intimate state that bridges the worlds of real and the fiction by the display of meta-game of objects, conversation with the characters, and exploration of spaces.

I argue that this seemingly secondary mechanical extension creates a highly discursive, uncanny space that disrupts the continuity of the magic circle through the blurring of the player frame, character frame, and even personal frame by situating the safe room as the middle ground (Bateson).įor a horror game to be successful, Bernard Perron asserts that the players must temporarily distance themselves from the game experience to create the feeling of thrill in the suspense of fictional narrative (76). This suspension however goes beyond the fictional narrative of the game, as ıt produces a liminary threshold between the real and virtual. In terms of the game narrative, these spaces pose no potential threat to the protagonist, yet they do produce a sense of suspension where players can reflect on their character’s vitality, strength, and other qualities that may affect their gameplay. Starting in the early survival horror genre video games, such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and The Evil Within series, safe rooms are constructed as an in-game space where players can gain a momentary suspension from the fictional time of the game. Affect theory thus emphasizes the interconnectedness of the people who make and play games while retaining awareness of how games reflect and perpetuate the world around us.īLURRING FRAMES IN THE BOUNDARY SPACE OF SAFE ROOMS Drawing from Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms and Aubrey Anable’s Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect, this paper posits that games-be they played on a PS5 or in the theater of the mind-are an innately physical experience, embodied in the movements of players’ bodies and expressed through sweat, tears, and the electrochemical reactions of the mind. I argue that game creators should look to affect theory if we are to replace the magic circle with a more just design framework. While there remains no miracle cure for these issues in game design, moving away from the magic circle’s conception of a purely virtual world will at least dispel the notion that games are somehow exempt from reality. The magic circle, then, acts more like a gate, allowing certain elements of reality in (patriarchal capitalism, toxic masculinity, playbour, racism, sexism, homo/transphobia) and forcing others (disabled, queer, non-White, non-Western, not “one of the boys”) out. This fantasy ensnares those caught within it with the undue weight of the phrase “it’s just a game,” when faced with toxic, abusive behavior and also justifies rampant microtransaction-based economies that drain players of mental health and funds. Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle”-a phrase used off-handedly to describe the ability of the human mind to demarcate locations such as the playground or the courthouse in which specific rules applied-entraps digital and analog game design with the promise of safety from outside influence.

Our collective projects present affective relationships in games as an alternative to the magic circle that allow us to imagine games as spaces of possibility that are held accountable to the broader lived and cultural experiences of players. Our application of affect theory to the examination and analysis of games and play foreground the embodied experiences of play that emerge through digital and analog games in ways that disenchant, blur, and negate the idea of games as closed and bounded spaces.

These presentations push back against the idea of games as separate through the application of affect theory. However, using the magic circle in this way has created a defense for toxic and predatory behavior on the part of players, developers, and publishers through the deployment of phrases such as “it’s just a game.” The magic circle has also been taken up by the field of game studies to provide a formal definition of play and games. The magic circle is a concept taken from Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens and is used to describe the bounded spaces where play occurs separate from everyday life.

The magic circle theory