In my last post, I made reference to the “Magic Circle,” but didn’t explain it. It’s the idea that you don’t let game strategy influence nor be influenced by things that happen outside of the game. Or maybe you could say, “What happens on Catan stays on Catan.”

I don’t remember where I first heard of this idea of the Magic Circle. Maybe it was in a podcast, maybe it was from another gaming friend. Wherever it came from, it heavily reinforced for me an idea I had already held but never articulated. I adhere to it because it protects what to me makes games unique.

When I play a game, I usually play to win. That doesn’t mean that my enjoyment depends on whether I win, but most games play best and are most enjoyable for me when everyone single-mindedly seeks to achieve the objective set out for them. Sometimes, this means you have to do things that, outside the context of a game, would seem really mean. Like ganging up on somebody because they have the lead, or picking on someone much weaker than you because they have something you need in order to win.

As long as the game doesn’t have any stakes, I don’t see a problem with being “mean” in a game, because no one loses anything except the game. But this only works if everyone agrees that what happens in the game won’t affect their personal relationships with the other players, because once someone has hurt feelings because their significant other betrayed their treaty, now there are stakes, and you can’t play “mean” anymore because you’re afraid of sleeping on the couch tonight.

So it’s as if each game exists within a Magic Circle, a barrier that nothing passes through in either direction (except people, I suppose, but not their relationships). It may be violent and chaotic and cutthroat inside the Circle while the game is going on, but when the game ends and the players leave the Circle, life is still normal. Or things may be terrible outside the Circle, and you come inside to escape all of that for a while.

The philosophy of the Magic Circle supports a larger purpose of games, to provide an explicit structure that normal social interaction lacks. While you’re playing a game, I know (ideally) what everyone else wants: to win. I may not know how they’ll achieve that, nor even their win conditions (as with secret roles games), but at least that’s a known unknown. Games don’t have secret rules.

At the risk of sounding a little antisocial, I’ll admit that it can be a source of anxiety feeling like people want something every time they interact with me, but I don’t always know what it is, or that there are certain unspoken rules about how I should interact with somebody. Sometimes I don’t know these things because the other person doesn’t know either, at least not explicitly. But games tell each person what they want and what the rules are for getting it. For example, you want the humans to win while the difference between these two resource values is two or less, and here are the things you can do on your turn.

Ah, what a relief. Now I just have to make that happen, and fuck everything else please for the next couple of hours while I do.