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No Work, all Play:
Social Values and the ‘Magic Circle’
Abstract
In today’s western society, play and games are commonly seen in antagonism to work and the
seriousness of daily life - they are widely regarded as to be free of purpose, productivity and
material interest. In social sciences this perception manifests itself most clearly in Huizinga’s
notion of playful activities taking place in a ‘magic circle’, a social construct setting games apart
from real life through clear and unambiguous spatial and temporal borders. This paper intends to
shed a light on some of the social dynamics that have led to this antagonism and how this perceived
dichotomy might impair our analysis of current digital game and media phenomena that seem to
transgress the hermetic boundaries of the ‘sphere of play’.
Keywords: games, work, play, cultural sociology, cultural history, social values, magic circle
Georg Lauteren
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Franzensgasse 6/1
A-1050 Wien
[email protected]
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How is the term game closed of? … Can you specify its borders? No. You can draw some:
because none have been drawn yet. (But this has never bothered you, when you have used
the word ‘game.) (Wittgenstein, 1960, p. 325)
A Dichotomy of Work and Play
It is a common practice of industrialized society to divide time between work and leisure, with
games and playful activities constituting a very relevant subset of the latter. Work and leisure/play
are thereby commonly defined through antagonism: work is where you don’t play, play is where
you don’t work. Within sociology the social construction of such a division has long been made out
as an area of investigation, leading to a longstanding discourse on the historical circumstances of
such a conceptual separation, its ideological motivations and their implications for the social
sciences.
The analysis of the relation between work and play is also highly relevant from the perspective of
game studies and digital games research, not only as it concerns one of the most fundamental
questions of the discipline – the definition of its subject matter itself – but also because of what
appears to be a growing number of videogame and digital media phenomena transgressing the
boundaries of play and real life: not only comparatively marginal game genres such as alternate
reality and so called serious games but also very popular phenomena such as intelligence tests
marketed as games (Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training), the sizable virtual economies of World of
Warcraft or Second Life, the high growth rates of online gambling or even the mimikry aspects of
social network systems such as Myspace.
One of the most influential and by far the most often reproduced definition of games and play stems
from Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938/1987). Huizinga’s understanding of
play is based precisely on the dichotomy of work and play by setting play apart from the
seriousness of everyday life through an invisible spatial, temporal and social barrier – the “sphere
of play”, commonly referred to within the field of game studies as the “magic circle”. Within the
recent discourse of ludology, Huizinga’s model has been applied to a number of the aforementioned
phenomena – from “play in cultural environments” ” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003) to serious games
(Rodriguez, 2006) to “pervasive (mobile) games” (Montola, 2005; Harvey, 2006). This hardly
comes as a surprise, given the prominence of Huizinga’s concept and how closely it matches the
gaming practices analyzed regarding their area of sociological interest. What is however more
surprising is how much effort is spent reconciling an almost 70 year-old model of thinking with a
contemporary subject of investigation with only rare attempts at justifying its validity or at
addressing any of the criticism that has been aimed at Huizinga’s theory within the last decades1.
This negligence appears even more troublesome in the field of digital games research, whose
arguably most influential publication – Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext – vocally cautions researchers
against the dangers of “theoretical imperialisms” when applying theories from different areas of
1
A notable exception is to be found in Marinka Copier’s Connecting Worlds. Fantasy RolePlaying Games, Ritual Acts and the Magic Circle.
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study to the field of computer games. (Aarseth, 1997, p. 16) While Aarseth aims his criticism
mainly at the – at the time prevailing – “colonization” of the field by literary theory and – to a
lesser extent – semiotics, couldn’t it be entirely possibly that Johan Huizinga’s understanding of
games is just as remote from a contemporary MMORPG as e.g. Vladimir Propp’s formalist analysis
of the Russian folk tale is from a narrative adventure game such as Fahrenheit? This is not to say
that choosing Huizinga’s (or Propp’s) theory as an analytical lens may not yield interesting results,
but as with any cultural theory, stripping it from its original subject matter as well as its historical
context runs the risk of producing blind spots in our analysis. I would like to outline some of the
theoretical problems a literal application of Huizinga’s work to historical and current gaming
practices might face and further illustrate potential blind spots of his theory by analyzing a current
example from an alternative perspective on the relationship between work and play.
The ‘Magic Circle’ and the Idealized Game
Huizinga’s argument in question can be summarized as games taking place in a self-enclosed
“sphere of play” which is separate from “ordinary life” through temporal – games have a beginning
and an end – spatial – games take place on a playing field, real or ideal – and social – games are
played according to rules – boundaries. While similar boundaries might be attributed to a number of
human activities, Huizinga explicitly sets games apart from “’actual’ life” by stating that the goals
of playing “lie outside the area of material interest or the individual satisfaction of life necessities”
(Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 18) – in short: play is an activity that “has its goal in itself” (p. 37). While
this “sphere of play” is in itself fragile and unstable in nature, prone to potential disruption by
everyday life, it is nevertheless a hermetic construct while it is in existence, which “contains its
own course and meaning.” (p. 18) Only at the breakdown of the magic circle can ordinary life
continue to exert its influence on the player. The “magic circle” is an area where the player is
shielded against real-life consequences of his actions, it serves as a “protection from danger”, as
Roger Callois (1958/2001, p. 49), expands on Huizinga.
For Huizinga the hermetic characteristics of play are not a product of some form of social accord
but rather stem intrinsically from the nature of play itself. Play for him is not a function of sociality
but rather the underlying principle of all culture. As such, play constitutes a “primary category of
life” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 11), relating it to the sphere of the sublime and the holy. Even
though Huizinga never references Kant or Schiller directly, the way he views games is closely
linked to the tradition of idealist philosophy, where beauty – “Playing, so we say, has a certain
inclination to be beautiful” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 19) – and freedom – “All play is first and
foremost free action” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 16) – lie at the heart of play, which is regarded as a
fundamental aesthetic category. As Friedrich Schiller famously phrases it: “…man should only play
with beauty, and play only with beauty. Man plays only where he is man in the fullest sense of the
word, and he is only fully man where he plays.” (Schiller, 1794/2000, p. 62 ) The
phenomenological 20th century game theory of Huizinga and Buytendijk dismisses Schiller’s notion
of a “play instinct” negotiating between the opposite poles of nature and reason, form and matter,
but at the same time retains the idealist concept of playing as an inexplicable “last”, which remains
ultimately resistant to empirical investigation and can only be described rather than explained.
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Interestingly Huizinga – just like Schiller – rarely refers to any contemporary games to illustrate his
understanding of play, the goal of his analysis clearly being to emphasize the play element in
cultural areas where it isn’t immediately evident to the casual observer – from music to fashion,
from poetry to politics. An area of actual games he does however focus on are games of antique and
traditional societies which are closely linked to or originate in ritualistic practices – the Greek
Pankration, the Potlach and Kula of native american and pacific tribes, or the riddle contests of
nordic mythology. While these examples illustrate Huizinga’s argument of games’ importance in
the formation of culture and serve to document their ritualistic origins, they tell us little about the
gaming practices of Huizinga’s time, which he undoubtedly must have been aware of when writing
Homo Ludens. In his novel The Secret Agent Johan Huizinga’s contemporary Joseph Conrad
describes a London whist-club, which can be seen as a somewhat representative example of the
gaming practices among adult urban middle-class men at the beginning of the 20th century:
At the sound of that name, falling unexpectedly into this annoying affair, the Assistant
Commissioner dismissed brusquely the vague remembrance of his daily whist party at his
club. It was the most comforting habit of his life, in a mainly successful display of his skill
without the assistance of any subordinate. He entered his club to play from five to seven,
before going home to dinner, forgetting for those two hours whatever was distasteful in his
life, as though the game were a beneficent drug for allaying the pangs of moral discontent.
His partners (…) were his club acquaintances merely. He never met them elsewhere except
at the card-table. But they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers, as if
it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence (…). (Conrad, 1907, p. 98)
Conrad’s description is quite illuminating regarding the gaming practices of his time: He depicts an
activity distinctively separate from everyday working life, restricted to certain hours of the day, to a
certain location and social community, serving the sole purpose of facilitating play. Skill at playing
appears to be an element of much higher value than luck or monetary gain, which Conrad doesn’t
even mention, even though it can be safely assumed that Whist was generally played for sizeable
amounts of money. The description also calls to mind that Huizinga regards playing as an activity
which “promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy
and to stress their difference from the common world” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 22) – a valid
observation given the seclusive nature of 19th century (game) clubs.
Conrad’s portrayal of Whist-playing must however be regarded as a representation of a highly
socialized and specialized practice, rigorously shaped by 19th century social norms and values. The
social changes brought about by the 18th and 19th century – such as the rise of the middle class, the
process of capitalist industrialisation and the spread of protestant work ethics and enlightened
philosophy – have exerted a strong influence on the practices of popular culture in general and the
practices of playing of games in particular. Not only had it become socially acceptable for the
common citizen to engage in activities formerly reserved for nobility, but also had protestant
middle class values developed a claim of universal validity across all classes and professions,
questioning all common cultural practices for their compliance and transforming them as necessary
(Kühme, 1997, p. 288; Strouhal, 2006 , p. 57).
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Strategies of Transformation
During the 18th and 19th century several ‘strategies of transformation’ can be made out, trying to
influence cultural practices incongruent with dominant social values – practices that unsurprisingly
included a wide range of common games: Gambling games like Faro contradicted values of
frugality and restraint, the flirtatious or erotic nature of the popular Blind Man’s Buff or Games of
Forfeit conflicted with chastity and temperance (Kühme, 1971, p. 288) and in general the purposefree nature of games was frowned upon as an idle pastime by an industrious society, for which
passing time became synonymous with wastefulness and sloth. Of the strategies towards illregarded cultural practices the most radical – prohibition – seems also the most easiest to trace
since it is apparent to the historian through often well documented and precisely dated legislation.
(c.f. Zollinger, prohibition of Pharao, Habsburgerr) Most common are bans or legal regulations
imposed on gambling, an exertion of power over gaming practices with a continuous history from
antiquity until the present, whose motives lie only in part in the participation on earnings through
governmental control but mostly in the enforcement of moral values, upholding a dominant “culture
of merit” (Caillois, 1958/2001, p. 110) and in keeping individuals from burdening society through
financial ruin. While bans on gambling can indeed be dated back to ancient Rome, where it was
officially restricted to the time of the Saturnalia, we can find evidence for a distinct change of
attitude among a powerful moral minority towards gambling between the 17th and 18th century.
Even religious moralist of the 17th century seem to have regarded gambling as an activity suitable
for children, adolescent and adults alike, useful for associating with higher classes and even a valid
way to earn a living (Aries, 1978, p. 151) – a general attitude that significantly changed over the
following century. Interestingly the ties of gaming to the real world economy is an area where the
sphere of play seems most permeable and it is peculiar to note that Huizinga denies pure games of
chance (i.e. gambling) any value in the process of cultural formation, therefore effectively
excluding them from his understanding of games (Huizinga 1938/1987, p. 58).
Bans not necessarily influhential on practices.
A more subtle strategy than their outright ban can be found the functionalisation and didactisation
of games (Kühme, 1997, p. 288; Strouhal, 2006 , p. 57). Functionalisation as a strategy can be made
out in the instrumentalisation of games for a higher social goal, foremost the upholding of the
capitalist work order. The historic development of the concept of ‘spare’ or ‘leisure time’ within
industrialized society is closely linked to the realization that recreational periods increase workers’
productivity. Games – so far as they are not immoral or endanger the worker’s physical health – can
therefore be regarded as an activity in the interest of society, provided that they do not interfere
with the worker’s duties, which in turn implies that they have to take place within a strict spatial
and temporal frame – an observation that we shall return to shortly. Related to functionalisation is
the strategy of didactisation, which refers mostly, but not only, to children’s games, reflecting the
growing importance of the education system for the upbringing of a unified work force. Playing is
seen – except from the most radical Calvinist perspective – as a natural childhood activity, albeit as
one that can be instrumentalized for the purpose of learning. Existing games for children and adults
are being scrutinized for their educational values, their rules often altered for the purpose,
formalized, documented and publicized for didactic use (Kühme 1997).
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Another effective method of stripping games from their moral ambivalence can be found in the
form of their aesthetisation – their profane elements are culturalised, their actual practices ignored
or distanced from their historical and cultural context (Fiske, 1987). Games are seen as an
“aesthetic way of life”, justifying their merit through an elevation into the higher sphere of the
artistic or the sublime – e.g. through the attribution of fundamental idealistic values such as
“freedom”, “truth”, “beauty” or “purity” to games with little regard to the actual cultural practices
they involve. A prime example for the practice of aesthetisation can be found in idealist philosophy,
foremost Schiller’s writing on games, in which he proposes a post-revolutionary social philosophy
based on the concept of play. Such an elevation and attribution of value necessarily requires an
implicit precedence of play over game, undoubtedly facilitated by the German language signifying
both concepts with same word “Spiel”. Not only does declaring play a constitutive aesthetical
category imply the “exclusion of all materiality of games” (Pias, 2002, p. 204), but also the
distancing of all actual, socially conditioned practices of playing games. Schiller seems well aware
of this when he asks if beauty, by associating it with game/play, “is not degraded to the level of
frivolous objects which have for ages passed under that name?” (Schiller, p. 61) and goes on to
justify his approach by stating that “we must not indeed think of the games that are conducted in
real life, and which commonly refer only to the material plane.” (p. 61f) Schiller’s distancing of the
actual material conditions of game playing resonates in two centuries of game and play theory,
including the anthropological and phenomenological view on games laid out in Homo Ludens; and
while the utopian claims of aesthetisation seem overtly separated from the strategies of social
control, they ultimately contribute to relativizing and deliminating the social impact of actual
cultural practices.
The most interesting correlations between what Huizinga regards as intrinsic and invariable
characteristics of play and the social factors shaping actual gaming practices can be however be
found in regard to the strict separation of games from daily life and their construction in strict
opposition to work. Temporal and spatial, social and economic boundaries of the sphere of play are
certainly no invention of the era of industrialisation, but their strict enforcement and hermetic
nature have without a doubt been promoted through its intentions and socials effects: The technical
and economical prerequisites for our modern understanding of leisure (time) can be traced to the
first wave of industrialisation and its intent to dissolve all pre-industrialised conceptions of free
time – through separating working from living space and, aided by electrical light, by dividing
working hours from what little time was absolutely necessary to replenish a worker’s strength. “The
cycle of work … came under the template of mechanically divided labour time. And where it ever
had existed, the unity of work and play dissolved”, as Jürgen Habermas (1958/1968, p. 220)
observes.
In Johan Huizinga’s line of reasoning a “unity of work and play” that Habermas proposes for preindustrialized society seems hardly possible. In Homo Ludens the “significance of the term
‘earnest’ is defined by and exhausted in the negation of ‘play’, earnest is equivalent to ‘notplaying’, and nothing more.” (Klabbers 2006, p. 4) Huizinga however regards play as a concept of a
“higher order” than seriousness, and while “Seriousness seeks to exclude play, play can very well
include seriousness” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 50). If seriousness is “used in the sense of work”
(Klabbers 2006, p. 4) or is “in a more specialised sense arguably also work” (Huizinga, 1938/1987,
p. 55), as Huizinga somewhat carefully phrases, this inclusive characteristic of playing can lead to
some confusion: if play can indeed incorporate work, games can neither be completely free of
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“material interest” nor entirely “unproductive” (Caillois, 1958/2001, p. 10). Gert Eichler points out
this contradiction in his study “Spiel und Arbeit”:
This treatment of “seriousness, in a more specialised sense arguably also work” on the basis
of the “autonomous and primary” character of play is from the perspective of empirical
science a play with words, which draws its sole legitimacy from an antecedent attribution of
meaning, which has not been put up for discussion. How else could one imagine that
“seriousness” seeks to exclude “play”? Either both realities, however operationalised, are
compatible – but then not one at the expense of the other. Or they are not compatible – but
then they really are not. (Eichler, 1979, p. 44)
For an example of where this problematic notion comes into play one might turn to French cultural
historian Philippe Ariès describing the upbringing of children in pre-industrialized France. Ariès
states that “for centuries, due to the cohabitation of children or adolescents and adults, education
was based on an instructive relationship. It [the child] learned the things it needed to know by
helping adults in their performance.” (Ariès, 1978, p. 46) Such an “instructive relationship” can be
very much imagined, if not as a “unity” then certainly as a pre-industrialised congruence of work
and play up to a certain age of adolescence. The child’s activity could either be regarded as earnest
play, as Huizinga regards all child’s play as earnest – but then it must be unproductive – or strictly
as work without including an element of explorative or imitative play. The problematic conclusion
to be drawn from this observation is that – according to Huizinga – we have to deal with two
separate meanings of seriousness: seriousness of work and seriousness of play, with the former
adhering to the (ideological) principles of necessity and productivity while the latter does not.
Through this duality, play as a conceptual social reality becomes resistant to the empirical
investigation, especially regarding possible relations between work and play. Such a division of
seriousness of work from that of play brings with it far-reaching consequences for social sciences
as Eichler (1979, p. 46) points out, not the least of which being the legitimisation of an educational
separation of “learning” from “play”.
We can summarize that some of the traits Huizinga describes as intrinsic and invariable
characteristics of play may at the same time appear to the sceptical sociologist as functions of an
interrelation of gaming practices and the enforcement of social values throughout the last two
centuries: play’s localisation outside the area of material interest, its equation with freedom,
harmony and beauty and, most notably, the hermetic nature of its temporal and spatial, social and
economical boundaries. Huizinga’s phenomenological approach distances the concept of play from
the social conditionality of actual gaming practices and, while this by itself does not falsify his
argument, produces blind spots in his analysis that any theoretical investigation strictly adhering to
his conception of play runs the risk of reproducing.
Structural similarities between work and play
One of the most interesting aspects Huizinga’s phenomenological approach cannot sufficiently
account for is the area of structural similarities between work and play. Adorno regards, just like
Huizinga, repetition as a defining element of structured play, but far from assigning games a
“character of freedom” (Huizing, 1938/1987, p. 16), he considers the element of repetition within
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games “as the after-image of unfree labour” (Adorno, 1977, p. 471). The idealist practice of
viewing games as the “actual humane” for their freedom of purpose means for Adorno to declare
“the opposite of freedom freedom” (Adorno, 1977, p. 470). We might not want to follow Adorno’s
argument in its somewhat radical nature – too much does it reflect Adorno’s general scepticism
towards popular culture by ignoring the steady oscillation of game playing between the two poles
of structured play (“ludus”) and unstructured play (“paidia”; Caillois, 1958/2001, p. 13). It is
however easy to question the idealist equation of “freedom” and “play” when we consider the
“element” (Huizinga, 1938/1987, p. 18) or “enforcement” (Adorno, 1977, p. 470) of repetition
present in games, the formalized and binding character of their rules, which may be regarded as a
covert “after-image” or “contraband of [working] practice” (Adorno, 1977, 471). For Gilles
Deleuze all existing games are always “compound phenomena”, which “inevitably refer to a
different type of activity, to work or morals, whose caricature or counterpart they represent,
however also assembling a new structure from their elements.” (Deleuze, 1969/1989, p. 84)
An entirely new structure underlying both fields of work and play has in any case been introduced
in the form of the digital computer, which, as a universal machine with limited symbolic inventory,
states and rule-based access, itself resembles the structural materiality of a game system. It is this
characteristic of the computer as an “Über-Spiel” (Pias, 2002, p. 9) and the realization that all
modern sciences are, directly or indirectly, computer sciences which serve as the basis of Claus
Pias’ exhaustive study on the history of the computer game, Computer Spiel Welten (2002). In line
with his premise, Pias does not concern himself with phenomenological deliminations of play, but
rather analyzes “common elements and formations of knowledge” (Pias, 2002, p. 9) on the
structural level underlying computer-mediated work, play and science within such diverse areas as
ergonomics, behavioral science, graph theory, operations research and numerical meteorology.
Pias’ findings are highly relevant in regards to the structural relationship between games and work
in exposing correlations between computer games and phenomenologically unrelated historical
discourses: the element of action in computer games e.g. is for him localized in the same discursive
field as ergonomics and scientific management concerning their requirement of “time-optimized
selection chains from a repertoire of normed actions” (Pias, 2002, p. 11). The constituting elements
of the adventure game on the other hand can be linked to the discourses of decision-making
processes, such as that of the labyrinth, graph theory or object-oriented programming languages.
Strategic elements in games are finally tied to discourses of optimized configuration: meteorology,
the military war-game and operations research.
A current example for a game title that lends itself well to discourse analyses is the highly popular
Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training for Nintendo’s portable DS platform, which could – depending on
perspective – be either classified as a game or an educational software application. By completing
strictly timed daily intelligence tests the user/player gradually increases her/his efficiency in their
completion while her/his progress and accomplishments are measured and mapped over a period of
time. Despite being based on the research of a Japanese neurologist, who is almost exclusively
known in his home country, and its unusual concept, the software has proven its universal appeal by
selling over 8 million copies worldwide, over 2 million of those in Japan. A follow-up title for the
Nintendo DS and an adaptation for Nintendo’s home console Wii are currently in production as
well as a similarly structured title for the Wii titled Wii Health Pack.
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Brain Training is an interesting case on a variety of levels: historically the origins of intelligence
testing can be traced back to the experimental psychology of the army mental tests introduced in the
United States after WWI, which had originally been designed to evaluate the suitability of – often
illiterate – prospective soldiers for military service. (Pias, 2002, p. 20). Brain Training seems to
transgress the borders between utility and game from the side of the game: Brain Training is
marketed as a game software for a dedicated game platform, the practices of its use are almost
indistinguishable from those of traditional video games, but while it is game-like in the fact that
passing or failing the test bears no real-life consequences (as it would in an army mental test), its
(advertised) purpose clearly lies outside the sphere of play, namely in the improvement of mental
skills.
While we might have difficulties reconciling such characteristics with a phenomenological
approach to games, we might instead focus on similar formations of knowledge within the
discourse of ergonomics, whose concept of (technical) measurability of human actions can be
regarded as one of the central prerequisites for the study of cybernetic feedback processes and the
emergence of computer games. Around 1920 Frank B. Gilbreth, an early pioneer of motion study
and scientific management, employed light bulbs and extended exposure photography to analyze
and optimize the motions of assembly line workers in the interest of improved ergonomics and
productivity. By discussing the resulting film footage with the workers themselves Gilbreth found
that his method was met with genuine interest from the side of the workers who seemed to
experience the process of self-measurement and optimization as a pleasurable and entertaining
activity – an observation that lead Gilbreth to the memorable statement: “This way of working
seems like a game.” (as cited in Pias, 2002, p. 41). Claus Pias concludes:
The game, which had been a form of learning for life since its pedagogisation in the 18th
century, but which had known no external finalities of seriousness, is now suddenly present
when instead of “freedom” optimization is concerned, at the same time work, and work
being at the same time a game. (2002, p. 41)
Conclusions
So how can these observations benefit the analysis of contemporary digital games? We have tried
to show that the localization of games within social reality is not fixed but rather linked to shifts in
cultural values and subject to constant transformation. Spatial, temporal and social boundaries of
the sphere of play seem likely to be as much the result of such transformations as they are intrinsic
qualities of play itself and not of a strict hermetic nature as phenomenological approaches would
lead us to believe. Especially the construction of seriousness and work in antagonism to the
freedom of play seems a contradictory and idealizing concept, which hides the structural
similarities of work and game playing from view and which is prone to encouraging ideologizations
and producing blind spots in its application to game studies.
Within recent years we have seen a steady rise in interactive digital media phenomena that
seemingly transgress the classical understanding of object- and goal-oriented computer games or
introduce game-like qualities to practices of work or communication. While these phenomena have
certainly been facilitated by widened audience demographics for computer games and digital
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entertainment in general as well as the increasing ubiquity of networked computing, we can only
speculate on further correlations between ongoing long-term social transformations and the use and
structure of games. The popularity of phenomena on the borders of work and play such as Second
Life or Myspace may well be interpreted as relating to shifts in working practices within an
increasingly ludic society, in which more numerous and more permeable ‘magic circles’ are bound
to intersect the spheres of work and play, but ultimately such a question will have to be left to
future cultural historians to answer. The field of game studies will however have to be aware of the
influence of such shifts on the practices and structure of gaming in order to develop a
methodological basis for future investigations and empirical research on the borderlines of work
and play.
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