Musings from Bristol
Magic circle may seem a curious phrase to use; It actually dates back to the book ‘'Homo Ludens : A Study of the Play Element in Culture' (Huizinga, 1955), and has caught on in academic work on play.
Its original use was:
"All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course… The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart."
As this quote says, the magic circle is a socially defined limited area (in space and time) within which different social rules apply, and which is separate to the rest of life.
Within a game context (e.g. Risk or Dungeons & Dragons), this circle means you don’t bring in elements of life from outside the game (e.g. attacking someone because you dislike the player), and you don’t carry over elements from the game back to real life afterwards (e.g. disliking a player because they attacked you in the game). This is the custom that allows people to compete within the limited context of the game, without it overly affected the rest of their life.
Last month’s article discussed different techniques for demarking the magic circle within a larp context – in the case of traditional theatre or sports, physical location is used as an important tool for defining the magic circle. Some of the same techniques are actually be used within a larp itself – characters may need to cast a magic circle of their own if they are going to conduct a religious rite, court case or magical ritual in-game.
When organising a larp, it can be important to consider if this concept of part of the ‘social contract’ that you expect players to follow; it isn’t normally stated explicitly, but that is also true for most social rules. For example, if one player dislikes another, is attacking their character with little in-game reason (or perhaps deliberately seeking to create an in-game reason to do so) acceptable? If the larp is part of a campaign, What if someone creates multiple characters that seem to end up attacking the characters of a particular player with each one? How would you handle a situation like this?
It should perhaps be remembered that the concept of the magic circle is regularly broken in larp, in many ways. For example, a player with certain dietary limitations may bring those into the circle from outside. A player with a phobia or physical impairment cannot help but bring it into play.
The term currently used on the Nordic scene for the circle being breached in this fashion is ‘bleed.’ (‘Blur’ is a similar term from America, and personally I’m fond of the more positive sounding term ‘blend’) To quote the ’Vi åker jeep’ group:
“Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa. With increasing bleed, the border between player and character becomes more and more transparent. […] Bleed is instrumental for horror role-playing: It is often harder to scare the player through the character than the other way around. […] A classic example of bleed is when a player's affection for another player carries over into the game or influences her character's perception of the other's character.”
Bleed then is when ‘thoughts & feelings’ (and possibly other things, depending how tight the definition is) seep through the circle. We might break this down into ‘bleed-in’ (from the player to the character, such as the phobia example above), and ‘bleed-out’ (from the character to the player, such as the affection example in the above quotation). Bleed-in can be a useful tool, in that it informs character portrayal. Bleed-out might be considered an indicator of strong character immersion, in that the immersion does not fully end when the gamed does.
To give a more mundane example, having a nightmare or jumping at shadows after watching a horror movie might be viewed as an example of bleed from the cinema. Some artforms such as advertising or propaganda are deliberately designed create a bleed effect (or perhaps, they function by not trying to define a magic circle in the first place, which means it’s not technically bleed at all?).
Coming back to a larp context, bleed is something we should be mindful of. Research suggests that many of the effects of bleed do naturally disappear once back in the ‘real world,’ without ongoing reinforcement. We may feel an attraction to the player of our character’s in-game love interest immediately after the larp, but that will disappear within a short time. One way to handle this kind of bleed can be post-event debriefing session, as is normal when roleplaying is used for training purposes in a business context.
It is possible however that we might not want bleed effects is disappear in this way. We might use roleplaying as a way to gain self-confidence or greater ability to handle traumatic events, and want that to become more fixed. In this context, the term magic circle is very apt indeed – it is the circle of the ritualist (or the priest, or the counsellor), the sacred place were personal development is made possible. The term bleed is still relatively new, and techniques to direct it are still being developed.
One might argue that if bleed never happened at all we wouldn’t want to spend so much time in completely separate circles, which we cannot learn anything from. The recent film Inception was based on the notion that fictional experiences within dreams can have profound effects of personal transformation; bleed made manifest. In recognising bleed happens and considering how to channel and direct it we actually argue that fictional experiences do matter as well as perhaps confirming what the critics have roleplaying have long said, that roleplaying can be dangerous.
