Abstract
In the seminal 1938 text, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga invokes the concept of the magic circle as a third space reserved solely for play. It is a space where play follows its own rules without regard to physical or imaginative constraints. With the advent of 21st-century digital technologies, the once clearly delineated contours of Huizinga’s circle have blurred and have come under increased scrutiny. This piece, through the use of autoethnographic narrative and the self-reflexive analysis of two girl gamers, argues that analysis of the 21st century magic circle should acknowledge the blurring of the circle’s contours, but analysis of that circle must also take into consideration the physical, social, and familial contexts in which digital play happens. In other words, contextualized physical space shapes how that still significant magic circle functions.
In the seminal text, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga (1950) invokes the concept of the magic circle as a kind of third space reserved for play. One that is separated from the physical realm but also situated outside of a purely imaginative one. It is a space where play happens for its own sake, with its own rules, its own gravity, and its own geography. The magic circle is that space occupied by the chessboard itself. But that sacred space only exists while the game is in session and is only meant to be a temporary state (p. 10). This circle has come under increased scrutiny in the 21st century— particularly since digital technologies have blurred the online/offline divide to such an extent that “[We] find human society on either side of the membrane” (Castronova, 2005, p. 147). This meeting point between the imaginary and the real is heavily scrutinized in game studies, specifically because Huizinga emphasized a kind of purely delineated existence between the world on the chessboard and the world that places the chessboard on the table. But, as game theorists have long known, virtual worlds are created as an amalgamation of the real and the virtual (Bartle, 2004; Castranova, 2005) and that membrane that marks the circumference of that circle is permeable.
But there is a catch. Game designers build these synthetic worlds and game theorists often interrogate the ways in which those worlds affect the people who play. But it’s not just where we play online that affects the nature of this circle. It’s not just about how well these virtual worlds are constructed as play spaces. This piece argues that analysis of the 21st-century magic circle should acknowledge the blurring of the circle’s contours, but analysis of that circle must also take into consideration the physical, social, and familial contexts in which digital play happens. In other words, contextualized physical space shapes how that still significant magic circle functions.
The use of autoethnography as a method in which this argument is proved goes beyond the scope of most gaming research. By using the elements of autoethnography including self-reflexivity, fragmented narrative structures, multigenerational perspectives, sensory descriptions, and multiple shifts in points of view, the goal is to argue how messy the 21st century magic circle is. This piece is limited to two people’s voices although those voices hardly exist in a social vacuum. It’s concerned with family trauma, as well. And with the ways in which our gaming has evolved because of those traumas. As a self-identified female gamer and as a mother of a barely teenaged girl who also self-identifies as a gamer, the use of an autoethnographic lens can illuminate contexts of virtual game play that don’t usually get stressed within game studies. The gendered aspects of virtual play and gaming have been studied extensively (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Kafai, Heeter, Denner, & Sun, 2008; Taylor, 2006). Numerous theorists have shown how virtual identity can be a powerful tool in shaping (or not shaping) offline identity (Thornham, 2008; Turkle, 1995). But my focus on mother–daughter play space as a function of mother–daughter life space can be a crucial aspect of understanding the significance of the gaming experience. My daughter’s use of physical space morphed into our use of physical space. Our use of the room we have come to know as The Femme Cave. Our approach to gaming. Our identities as gamers. As parent and offspring. As killers. An autoethnographic lens allows for not only that emphasis on our but also a way in which to expand the personal story into a public and therefore political one.
Yesterday 2011
The previous owner kept potted rubber trees in this too small room during the winter. There is still a slight whiff of cat. We mask it with incense and Lysol. When we first saw this room, there was a cot along the back wall where we presently keep dusty board games on dusty shelves—Space Monopoly, Jenga with the missing pieces, Scrabble, Operation. The first time we saw this room we thought it resembled a jail cell. It’s small for even one person, let alone two. No one remembers exactly how we staked out this territory for gaming, but it seemed like a natural fit considering how enmeshed we were. Are. Enmeshed. A reaction to family trauma sometimes creates this sense of overinvolvement in a child’s life. They warned us that it might happen considering our circumstances. The circumstances for an 8-year gap in the age between her and her younger sibling. The contexts that allowed for a Femme Cave to exist in the first place.
Contexts. Circumstances. There are other claustrophobic spaces that have followed their own rules, own physics. Huizinga’s magic circle is reserved for play. But a play can sometimes be tragic.
Summer 2000
You wait, your huge belly exposed, while the nurses talk to each other outside of the office. There is a rocking chair in the corner. A baby scale. On the walls, pictures of smiling toddlers dressed as sunflowers. They bring in heavier equipment, hook up the really accurate ones and there, on the screen, you see the spine. It’s beautiful, you think, so straight, so symmetrical, like delicate fish bones. It’s not moving. And the nurse says something like, oh, the baby could be sleeping, they do that just to scare us sometimes. They focus in on the heart—a shadow the size of a pearl—and it’s proved the baby has been dead for three weeks. You nod as you watch the nurse turn off the monitor.
Yesterday 2011
Understanding virtual worlds requires an understanding of the ways in which immersion within that virtual space functions. And immersion and presence and flow all depend on the ways in which a player’s identity is established. “When player and character merge to become a persona, that’s immersion; that’s what people get from virtual worlds that they can’t get from anywhere else; that’s when they stop playing the world and start living it” (Bartle, p. 156). But living it also requires an understanding of the rules established for that space. Those rules of interaction dictate, for example, that one does not bring in personal baggage to the public chat channels. One does not discuss politics, religion, or family traumas. They are there to play—not be reminded of real world contexts. So playing there, with those rules and with those limits on confession, allows one to develop other social personas. Ones formed by the players’ imaginations. Not the bodies they were born with.
Yesterday 2011
Listen. Green Day’s 21 Guns is playing on her computer. I can hear clicking on the keyboard. A Facebook IM chatsound blip. More clicking. More blips. Her 5-year-old brother opens the door and steps into this room.
“Go away,” she growls before he even gets a word out. I watch her fingers blur across the keyboard. She doesn’t even look away from the screen. She cycles from Facebook, to her favorite casual game, OurWorld, to her favorite massive multiplayer online game (MMOG), World of Warcraft (WoW), to YouTube. She kills, listens, gossips, giggles, and eats in this Femme Cave and yet her level of immersion into virtual space stays limited. She doesn’t play that deeply the way I do. Her multitasking keeps her present in the room with me, not in the virtual world.
I am here on my computer across from hers. Our desks face outward so in order for us to see what the other is doing, we have to sit at an angle. But I know better. There is a trick to occupying this space with her. This is the only game space she uses regularly. The only place for her computer. The only access point to her virtual life. I am her mother, game mentor, and stalker. This cave of ours is the smallest room in the house. One has to squeeze past the chairs to get to the phone. We push and pull.
Yesterday 2011
The Femme Cave isn’t our first game space. Our first house, the one with the perpetually flooding basement, had my computer in the too long, too narrow living room tucked in the corner next to the bookcase. My daughter was far too young to consider herself a gamer at that point. But I became one there. Sporadic virtual play at first and nothing that didn’t have an end game. They were first and third person shooters. Tomb Raider. Quake. Unreal. Games that could be beaten. Those games gave limited attention to avatar creation. They were someone else’s images. I was Lara Croft. I was a space marine without a face. They were temporary embodiments that focused on playing the game in a straight line without deviation, and immersion into those worlds had a clear limit. Then, after the still births (first one, then two, then three, then . . .), I discovered MMOGs like EverQuest, EverQuest II, and WoW. Games with strong narratives. Games with strong immersion. Virtual spaces that allowed one to be anything within a defined parameter of virtual existence. They allowed for a level of presence within a virtual realm that allowed one to disassociate from the physical spaces surrounding it. That allowed one to take on the body of someone and something other than a physical body that couldn’t be trusted to do its job. No avatar mothers there. Just killers. I consumed these games. They were therapy. They were a gestalt method of problem solving. I created my first male character at this time. Whenever I was in grief mode (rather than pregnancy mode), I played him. I still have him. He’s a zombie and he doesn’t have a mouth.
Summer 2000
You hear too far along for a D and C. Must be a vaginal birth. You’ll be awake. As you half listen to the nurse, you imagine yourself in the hospital later, waiting for contractions, informing your husband that you will not get pain medication. You will imagine it’s bravery, pragmatism even. Who knows if I’ll get another chance, you will think, but you know it will be more like wanting to hurt as much as possible. Just to see how far pain can go before it swallows you whole and just spits out fragments of you afterwards. Like bones or scales or dust.
Yesterday 2011
“I really liked that one game I used to play, Watchmen. I liked playing it when I had a really bad day at school. It was fun beating stuff up in the game.” I turn my chair and watch her female rogue backstab an orc as she’s talking to me. She’s playing WoW. We are still in the Femme Cave playing on the computers when she gets a phone call. She says it’s her art teacher reminding her of a project. But the answering machine recorded the conversation on accident. It’s the school counselor wanting to meet with her. She sometimes gets into Facebook fights with school bullies. The latest one targets the girls who stick up for themselves or for others. He calls her a bitch, ass fag, lesbian, mother fucker. He tells her to go cut herself. One bully used to tell her she wished her brother had died like all of the others. She always calls them out. “I didn’t want to tell you because I cuss at him. I’m going to get in trouble at school if they see what I said to him.” I read the transcripts. She called him a jackass and a racist homophobe. She prints out the Facebook conversation and puts it in her backpack for her meeting. It’s eight pages. She goes back to playing her game. “You know you’re awesome, right?” I tell her. “Yeah. Can you show me where to learn lockpicking? I can’t find the trainer.” She just leveled her rogue.
Yesterday 2011
One of the earliest gaming memories I have is a LAN party. I was the only female who lugged her computer into the basement of a fellow gaming friend to play Quake Tournament. The only girl gamer there surrounded by a circle of personal computers and a local area network hub designed so that friends could play in multiplayer mode. And I was pregnant with my daughter. She was genetically soaked in gamer code because of those trucks down to the gaming basement. It was my first pregnancy. Flawless. I was whole, then. But those LAN parties introduced me to the gendered aspect of game space (Lin, 2008, p. 67). The smells of unwashed gamer dudes. Cheetos. Farts. Smack talk screams of Fucking Pussy! Cocksucker! All conversations that took place in the basement revolved around game play. It’s another kind of code. Play space does not acknowledge the world outside of that circle, or in this case, basement. The girlfriends and wives stayed upstairs and complained about the lack of social interaction. When food was ready, they would go to the basement door and shout down to us from the top of the steps. Gaming was for guys—their women merely bitched about it upstairs. I took a side and stuck with it.
Self reflective note
I didn’t want to admit this part. It feels like betrayal. I liked these women. I am still friends with some of them. But they hated gaming. For them, gaming separated these men from their families. This focus on the public space of male coded game play getting absorbed into the private realm of female coded domestic space has long been understood as a defining tension in the rise of home gaming (Flynn, 2003, p. 572) My taking sides was less a reflection on them personally and more on viewing gaming as a territory. If I was a gamer, that meant I couldn’t be like the women upstairs. It meant I had to align with the men downstairs. I enjoyed that circle, that smack talk, that separation. I played by their rules and they ignored my girl status, even if my daughter kicked more when I gamed than when I didn’t.
Those LAN parties stopped with the convergence of digital technologies and stillbirths. Once the gamers in that LAN party basement no longer needed their physical presence to play together, we migrated to persistent online game spaces—mainly with the advent of MMOGs. There, we weren’t held back by the physical weight of our computers breaking our backs making the trip from our cars to that smelly basement. And I was not confined by the reminder of a body that couldn’t be trusted to behave itself anymore.
In some ways, the Femme Cave is just like that LAN basement. But it’s girl space. And that has made coming to terms with gender betrayal easier.
Summer 2000
The nurse leads you out a side door instead of through the waiting room filled with other pregnant women. You wonder about that. For privacy, she says. As you sit in your car in the parking lot, you imagine in fast forward again. They want you to name the dead baby. Chris or maybe Sean—something gender neutral. There is a ceremony, the nurse had said. You might regret it if you don’t.
Yesterday 2011
She watches me type up my observations. We agreed on the blog and how she could edit anything I write if it makes her uncomfortable. I know it’s a risky proposition and I fight the urge to self-censor. And I question whether this power dynamic is going to work. Whether I’m performing an ethical obligation by giving her this editing power or by taking it away (Ellis, p. 20).
“Can I help you?” she says when I hear the IM blip and I twist my chair to see what she’s doing online. This is one of our codes. It means back off. She’s with her friends and I’m to go back to my own screen. We negotiate everything about this room. We abide by the rules of this space. We cannot stay here together too long. The chair squeaks, the wheel falls off again, the cat that stealth sleeps on my lap decides it wants out, her computer locks. Temporal and physical reminders of the limits placed on us both. She slams the Femme Cave door on the way upstairs to put the dishes away.
Yesterday 2011
My take: privacy
This is the biggest issue she has with this room. She says she hates it. That if it was up to her, the computer would be in her bedroom or even upstairs in the living room. Anywhere but in the basement, although this is the most lived in spot in our wired home. We’ve been here for all of her brother’s life and all of her gaming life. There are four computers in this wired basement—two for us and two for the other half of the family, which consists of her brother and her father. The Femme Cave is the only area with two doors—one that separates us from them and one that separates the cave from the laundry room. It’s a nexus between domesticities. It’s our own magic circle. But it’s contested and on far too many occasions, one has to wonder whether that initial observation of its jail cell nature isn’t entirely accurate. The doors to the Femme Cave don’t have locks so we can pretend that privacy doesn’t exist.
Summer 2000
The windows are up in the car. You only hear breathing, but you feel pokes in your side like clockwork. Muscle spasms, this whole time, not kicks. You lean forward until your stomach is pressing hard against the steering wheel and you keep it there until you see stars.
Yesterday 2011
She remembers Lara Croft, but not as the iconic character with the cool guns strapped to her thighs. She doesn’t remember the low cut, form fitting body suit or the impossibly large, unmoving breasts. She remembers two long brown braids. Flat chest. Demure white t-shirt. In Tomb Raider Chronicles, the game is split into multiple adventures that can only be completed in sequence. The third adventure portrays Lara as a child and this is the version of Lara that my daughter remembers. It was the first time she wanted to play a computer game and it was the only part of the game she wanted to play. My daughter was 4 years old and it’s her earliest gaming memory. She doesn’t remember much about the game outside of the experience of getting to play an adult game with a child avatar.
Yesterday 2011
My daughter is the only girl in her class who self-identifies as a gamer. The boys in her class acknowledge this. They talk strategy over school lunch, but she does not ever play with or against them. They just know she’s a gamer without ever requiring proof. She will take the Xbox to her room to play alone sometimes. She practices there. During slumber parties, she tries to show her girlfriends how to manipulate the controls and shoot zombies. They seem to hate it. Most of them are cheerleaders. They are “boy crazy.” They perform their own identities in a way that our culture recognizes and values. They are all very good girls and I am perfectly aware that I judge them based on these qualities. I privilege my own daughter’s performance at the risk of marginalizing these friends of hers. I try hard not to place them in the same context as the wives and girlfriends at those LAN computer parties. I see their futures and there is a part of me that wonders how long it will take for my own daughter to latch on to these behaviors and whether she would be happier. They just seem so cheerful. When it is one-on-one, she will bring a female friend to the Femme Cave and take over my computer. I get banned from the room at that point. The Femme Cave no longer belongs to just me and her. The friend inevitably plays on Facebook while my daughter plays WoW and no matter how hard she tries to get her interested in gaming, it fails. But she’s happy with this set up, this identity. She’s “the gamer girl” in her class and I know exactly why that distinction makes her feel confident and not just alienated. It’s a lonely, painful space to occupy, but sometimes a girl can’t play the way she’s supposed to.
Yesterday 2011
“I don’t want to be a mother. I can’t deal with pain. If I do decide, I think I’m going to adopt or be a foster parent. But that’s a long ways a way.” She mentions this in passing. I just nod.
Summer 2000
You imagine after the labor, they will put that dead baby in your arms. You will inspect him, not really there, not realizing exactly what you hold. A sleeping puppy, maybe. Wet, limp, red, scowling. You will poke your finger at his doll head and your husband will whisper stop, please, honey, stop it.
Yesterday 2011
“Fuck off!” My daughter is freaking out about clean clothes, or walking her brother to school. She’s a wall of screaming teenager. And it’s the first time she has said this to me. To my face, at least. We’re not in the Femme Cave when this happens. The room is far too small to handle that level of animosity. Our personal space is already compromised there. No—this fuck off takes place upstairs in the kitchen. After slamming my hand into the table hard enough to leave a bruise on my palm, I ground her for 2 weeks off of all technology. No computer, Xbox, or Wii. Lockdown.
Self reflective note
I didn’t want to write this punishment down. I didn’t want to admit the bruise I gave myself because I lost my cool. I wanted to lie about both. I wanted the good punishment to be code for good parenting. I don’t know if a 2-week tech break is enough. I suspect that my parenting skills kind of suck, actually. Especially since we didn’t even get close to the full 2 weeks. Horst (2010) refers to this technology lockdown as one of the reasons why mothers get portrayed as the moral arbiter of media usage in the home environment. It’s why fathers get cast as the playmate and the subverter of house rules (p. 174). It might be why fathers and sons are more often than not considered the primary gamers in gaming households (p. 165). Mothers are the outsiders here. It reflects on me, not her. Gabb (2010) interrogates this kind of guilt when discussing how family research should or does function. She stresses that it’s this “emotional messiness” that should keep us ethical. That we must present these lived lives as they are, without pandering because of a misunderstood ethical obligation (p. 474). So I don’t embellish on the weak punishment and hope, instead, that the messiness of our life space can at least be understood as honest.
Summer 2000
You look in the rearview mirror and flinch. You realize why the nurse didn’t want you to see the other women in the waiting room. It wasn’t for privacy. You would have scared them. You are somebody else now, someone far away from the woman you woke up as. You pick up your cell phone and call your husband at work. For one brief moment, not even a second really, you see your voice and your words trail through the phone up to the closest cell tower. You see sound waves fly, glancing off of light like sparks, through the atmosphere, bouncing off relays, banking off satellites, and you see your husband’s hand picking up the phone, putting on his business voice and then you know how far it really is before everything dissolves into light and dark and the shadows in between. You know exactly how far it is between here and there.
Yesterday 2011
I asked my daughter what she liked about her online gaming. What she would do if she was a game designer. If she had control over her online presence and the construction of the inside of the magic circle, what choices she would make. She has no interest in making it a girl-friendly space. She barely knows what that even means. When she first started showing an interest in online gaming, I showed her “girl games”—those videogames designed specifically for what niche marketers assumed a girl would want to play. The disks were pink and flowery and completely hit or miss. The one with the horses and the veterinarians? Negative. Barbie as a secret agent? Yes, but only because of the elaborate puzzles. For her, being a gamer isn’t about denying or embracing her gender. It’s about her age. She described a virtual place where young people could go to play the same game that others play. She wanted a space just for them, the ones just starting out and learning how to navigate the virtual terrain without getting harassed for being young. She wanted an online space that was hers—not mine. This aspect governs all of her virtual play spaces and choices. Even if we both play in the same virtual environments, we do not play in the same way or for the same reasons. She tolerates my online involvement on her terms. It’s this lack of acknowledgement that there are aspects of game play other than gender that Yee (2008) warns could cause game designers (and theorists) to lose sight of the multiple reasons why and how gamers play the way they do. Gamer identity is multifaceted and should not be viewed through just a gendered lens (p. 286).
Yesterday 2011
Her take:
I would change everything! No mom, no brother, JUST ME. I think she likes it ’cause it’s torture to me. I think she would make it so she’s facing me. The only thing I like about her in the same room is that there’s an extra computer for when friends come over.
She wrote this on a piece of paper and threw it on the table. I had asked her what she would change about the Femme Cave. I asked her to be honest and she had smiled while signing her name at the bottom of the note. When I asked her why, she said she wasn’t worried about stalkers. That note wasn’t just for me. I leave her name out of it, though. Her virtual space is not nearly as contested as this physical space.
Today 2011
Here and there. When I first started this project, this focus on our narratives was missing. I originally envisioned an analysis of my daughter’s game space aligned closer to Leon Anderson’s interpretation of what autoethnography should entail. It was going to be objective and focus heavily on theoretical analysis (Denzin, 2006, p. 419). It was supposed to be about a 13-year-old self-identified girl gamer and analyzing how she uses her physical game space as a way of allowing her virtual game space to function. It was supposed to be all about her, my daughter, complicating Huizinga’s 21st century magic circle. Watching her use the computer. Watching her navigate the claustrophobic terrain of the room in the basement designated as the Femme Cave. The office chair with the broken wheel that tips her off kilter every time she moves and inevitably causes her to scream bloody murder when it does. It was supposed to be about the wooden door that separates me and her from the rest of the basement—the door with the fist mark punched into it although no one remembers how it got there.
But something happened. Self-reflexivity wouldn’t allow for distance. But it’s that messiness that is exactly the point. It began the minute I started questioning my motives. Why was the Femme Cave the center of our gaming lives? Why was it constructed as a gendered space if my daughter doesn’t perceive it as such? Why does this space matter so much to me if the focus was supposed to be on my daughter? Self-identifying as a girl gamer, whether this happens as an adult or as a newly minted teenager, can be a singular experience. But whereas my gaming experiences were heavily steeped in focusing on the gendered aspects of the term, “girl,” her own experiences allow her to perceive that distinction as one of age, instead. It has never been a case of gaming while female, for her. It’s gaming while young.
The Femme Cave has had a significant role is fostering both of our self-identifications. It’s the first game space where I have come full circle. For such a long time, gaming while female meant shutting a part of myself off as a coping mechanism for trauma. I needed those highly gendered online spaces at that time in my gaming life. It allowed for a certain level of disassociation that made healing possible. Because gaming meant denying, I negotiated those spaces as needed. While there has been extensive research showing that there is, indeed, a growing female presence in gaming and particularly in online gaming platforms such as MMORPGs, they are all but invisible and tapping into a female community presence is even more invisible (Flynn, 2003, p. 570). But occupying this physical space with a gamer who doesn’t have these gender hang-ups, these screwed up ideas of what it means to be a girl who likes games, is liberating. Even if she hates my bearing witness to it.
This analysis of game space does go beyond personal narratives, though. There is an ulterior motive. A political one that transcends our immediate gaming relationships with each other and with our environment. This deeply personal focus on the ways that our traumas have shaped the way that our own magic circle functions does have the potential to go beyond the personal. Miller (1992) stresses, for example, that mother–daughter conflicts stem, in part, from the constant push and pull between a mother’s desire for identification and a daughter’s desire for differentiation (p. 10). This is usually framed within the context of the nurturing caregiver (p. 16) and familial moral center of that domestic space (Horst, 2010, p. 174). But what if identification and differentiation as gamers replaces these usual performances? Identifying as a (female/mother/daughter) gamer might address the “growing need to become independent of the typical female model, thus challenging the basic tenet of the family role” (p. 16). This retooled family model might account for why my daughter doesn’t see gaming as a gendered issue. The Femme Cave has allowed her a physical space where she could focus on other aspects of the magic circle that do not require her to negotiate her identity along a gender matrix. Instead, that identity is negotiated along one that is age specific.
This wooden door with the enigmatic fist mark separates the Femme Cave from the rest of our lives, but it’s a ruse. The push and pull that my daughter and I have here, in our own magic circle, is really just a zero sum game. Neither of us really wins. When one gains, the other loses and in the end we just break even. We don’t experience our game space in the same way, and therefore we don’t play within that magic circle in the same way. We can’t. Our own narratives have shaped us in a way that requires a constant negotiation of what it means to be a mother, daughter, girl, gamer, killer. These spaces we occupy are mutually constitutive. But that doesn’t mean our magic circle is a good place to be, either. We are outgrowing it. Our slowly un-enmeshing lives have not only shaped our physical sense of place in the house, but our sense of place in the family unit. Our mother–daughter relationship binds us to these hybrid selves. We’re between worlds, between chessboards, between here and there.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.