Breaking the circle

Today's discussion of Huizinga's "magic circle" (the protected game space) brought to mind an interesting instance of "trespassing" that took place during a game of Werewolf I played with a group of SFAI students last year.

In Werewolf, two players are designated werewolves in secret. It is their job to "murder" the other players, who assume the role of villagers. This is done at "night," i.e. when everyone has his or her eyes closed. During the day, the villagers (and the werewolves in disguise) must agree to "hang" one villager. Day and night continue as the village shrinks in size. The werewolves win if the number of villagers equals the number of surviving werewolves; the villagers win if they hang both werewolves.

In this particular game, which I was moderating, everyone was playing Werewolf for the first time. About halfway through, one player, who I'll call Maria (not her real name), accidentally opened her eyes during the night and saw the one remaining werewolf selecting its prey. The next "day," when the villagers were discussing who to kill, Maria admitted that she had peeked and said she knew who the werewolf was. Instead of excusing herself from the vote, she pointed to the werewolf. The werewolf was promptly hanged and the game ended, leaving many of us scratching our heads.

I asked Maria why she named the werewolf if she knew that she obtained the information by violating the rules. She replied that she wanted to save her fellow villagers and that it would have been immoral not to have said something. Maria believed she was behaving morally, but in reality she was committing the most heinous crime possible in the magic circle: She willfully broke the rules and destroyed the fiction of the game. She was, to use Huizinga's terminology, a "spoil-sport," a person who not only disrupts a game but "shatters the play-world itself." As Huizinga writes in "Homo Ludens," "By withdrawing from the game [the spoil-sport] reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion." (1)

The destruction of the illusion happens all the time in games, intentional or not, but what makes this case unusual is that Maria did so by applying real-world virtue to the fictional world of the game, thus piercing the boundary that protects the magic circle from reality. Huizinga states that “Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil.” It is a place, he claims, where “vice and virtue do not apply.” In Werewolf's magic circle, it is not evil to lynch a villager suspected of being a werewolf; it is, in fact, necessary for survival. Buying into a game's world means buying into alternative concepts of vice and virtue. This is one aspect of the "lusory attitude" that game players must adopt in order for a game to be successful. (The lusory attitude is the acceptance of the constraints and indirectness of a game in order to experience its pleasure. Salen and Zimmerman in "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals" attribute the term to Bernard Suits.)

Interestingly, I don't think we can accuse Maria of not possessing a "lusory attitude." Maria remained engaged in Werewolf and, if anything, was a little overzealous in buying into the game's fiction. Why else would she have gone to such extremes to protect her fellow villagers? There may even be reason to admire Maria. Consider Huizinga’s alternate names for the spoil-sport: “apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors.” These are people who question and cast aside old rules in search of rules of their own. It may be that by peeking Maria did us a favor by abruptly breaking the spell and allowing us to experience a sudden dislocation: We were just murdering and lynching each other a few moments ago? While such an experience might infuriate a room full of game players, Maria's trespassing facilitated a lot of thinking about what the magic circle's boundary is keeping in and out.

(1) Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (Beacon Press: New York, 1950), 6-12.