[MUD-Dev] Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

------- Forwarded Message
From: "Ren Reynolds" <ren at aldermangroup.com>
To: "'Games Research Network'" <GAMESNETWORK at uta.fi>
Subject: Has the circle gone rusty?
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 17:21:30 +0100

At this yeas AoIR I presented a paper on the ethics of cheating in
multiplayer games (for those that were there - sorry I really was on
death's door, but I hope the pics looked nice).

In my paper I argue that, in purely abstract conceptual sense (give me a
break I'm a philosopher) we can understand cheating in relation to play
by using Huzinga's magic circle.

I think that the Magic Circle is a good tool for some uses - but serious
and sweeping serious objections / weaknesses in the model were brought
up - I really want to understand people views on this and have a wider
debate - it seem that we are ripe for a re-evaluation,,,

Now in the paper I do note that I don't think that the circle is or
needs to be a full description of play (well the state of playing) but
rather all it needs to do as a conceptual tool is to provide sufficient,
seemingly valid, understanding of play for one to get an ethical handle
on things.

I guess what the Magic Circle does for me is to provide a way to talk
about the thing that is play, or to put it another way the state of
being in play. For me this is a state that is delineated from the state
of not-play. It is a state that is established (in multiplayer
scenarios) between two or more people and has roughly the
characteristics outlined by the various play theorists (actually Jull:
The Game, the Player The World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness is a
very good distillation of a set of essential elements).

For my purposes I am only really interested in one characteristic - the
social / trust bond that is established between two or more players when
they in play. It is my feeling that some bond is essential for those
people to be in play (not covered the case where one person plays and
there other is just there, I guess I would not see them as a player but
almost an artefact).

In the paper I go on to talk about how cheating can be understood as a
breaking of this bond of trust and thus is open to ethical analysis on
this basis.

But,,,

At AoIR a lot of objections seem to be raised to the Magic Circle, both
in response to my paper and in others. From memory to of the main
concerns were:

1) Play cannot be separated from non-play in any simple fashion, play is
a much more permeable state that is constantly being negotiated.

2) The magic circle fails as an account as it does not incorporate
pleasures

I think there were more objections but by this time I was fading fast,
so please, if you have them pitch in.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
terranova.blogs.com
------- End of Forwarded Message


-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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