However, besides the genuine attempts to disturb the games magic circles, there are actually accidental hacks within the games left over by the designers, which are usually known as ‘ glitches‘. being abusive, giving away ‘harmful’ information’ etc.) and many more. How do people be spoil-sports, aka cheaters, in modern-day games? There are many things and different kinds of people that can be called cheaters or spoil-sports now, and a lot of them do a lot more damage than just ruining the magic circle.įor example, there are hackers (which include things like aimbots, which is a hack which enables the player to continuously have perfect aim and wallhacks which lets the player see through objects and walls etc.), team-killers (who kill members of their own team for fun, and maybe for other reasons which I can’t seem to think of), griefers (these are very similar to the team-killers, their main aim however is to destroy the magic circle of a game by any means, i.e. These nihilistic players do not hesitate to destroy the magic circle of the game”. Salen and Zimmerman give their own definition of a spoil-sport, saying that they act as “a player that refuses to acknowledge the authority of a game in any way. Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.” He robs play of its illusion-a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. “The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. It’s likely that you’ve heard the term ‘spoil-sport’, it’s a term that is usually applied to young children playing games, especially when one of them happens to cheat… What about if a person spoils a game, rather than the game itself? Johan Huizinga called people who spoil the magic circle intentionally ‘ spoil-sports‘, as if it’s a group game it spoils the atmosphere for the other players. If any of these have too much of an influence, does the magic circle apply to that player (or even the game)? If you were playing a game, it is quite unlikely to carry on with the game/task if you happened to get too anxious because of your low-skill level, and if you got too bored in the game it’s likely that you’d switch off, which in itself would damage the magic circle. However, what if the magic circle comes to be broken or tampered with?Ĭan someone dismantle the magic circle in a game? When rules are broken, does it consequently break the magic circle? An Hungarian psychology professor called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who, for the sake of my sanity, will be called Mr C in this blog) created a chart (named ‘ flow channel‘) which showed the relationship between boredom and skill, and challenge and anxiety, and a perfect flow of these elements down the middle. The magic circle is meant to set up the whole atmosphere of a game, it is the environment, the space and the whole rules of a particular game. In my previous blog posts, I discussed the early theories on the ‘ magic circle‘ by Johan Huizinga, this theory will be quite important in this post to understand things that are mentioned later on.
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