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The Artificial Question
We now return to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter. The premise of the schema asserts that games can be framed as cultural environments, as phenomena that co-exist with real-world contexts. If this framing is carried to its logical extreme, the magic circle disappears altogether, and the game becomes synonymous with its surroundings. If this is the case, even for some games, this schema would force a fundamental reevaluation of our basic assumptions about what games are and how they function.
In the course of this chapter, we took a detailed look at three games that explicitly blurred the boundaries of the magic circle. In very different ways, A.I., Seasons of Darkness, and Suspicion played with their cultural environments, effacing the boundaries of the magic circle to a more extreme degree than more conventional games. Yet in each case, although the magic circle blurred, shifted, and blended in with its environment, it still in some way remained intact. In A.I., the players never forgot that the game was really a promotion for a Hollywood film. In Seasons of Darkness, the game sessions took place within strictly delimited physical and temporal boundaries. And in Suspicion, play boundaries, such as the restriction on using money, nudged the game in the direction of being a closed, rather than a more open system. In these three games, the magic circle never entirely vanished. If it had, we probably would not be able to call them games.
So the magic circle did not disappear after all. But each game, in its own way, played with its possible disappearance. The rigid structure among which the play of the games took place was in fact the conventions of games themselves. A game framed as a cultural environment plays with the very definition of what a game is. But some part of that defining game structure remains intact, even as it is transformed through play. A game that plays with the possibility of its own existence offers game designers potentially rich approaches. As a design strategy, understanding a game as a cultural environment can create entirely new forms of game experiences.
Designing a game as a cultural environment is also an effective way to mount a powerful cultural critique. During the twentieth century, most forms of art and entertainment have engaged critically with their cultural contexts, from Marcel Duchamp's readymades to Hip-Hop's sampled tracks. As a new century dawns, it is time for games to recognize their role within larger cultural environments, in order to celebrate their complex relationships with the rest of culture.
Yet the question of the artificiality of games remains. If we are calling for a more culture-centric approach to games, why would we still maintain the idea that they are artificial? Don't cultural framings of games—framings that acknowledge their status as open systems—call the artificiality of games into question? If games are not separate from the rest of culture, are they still really artificial? Yes. Calling games artificial does not mean that they are wholly distinct from culture. No matter how integrated into culture games might be, there will always be some aspect of a game's operation that relies on its own system, rather than that of culture, to create meanings for players.
For example, Scrabble makes use of language, letters, and words borrowed from its cultural environment, but that does not mean it can't also designate its own set of meanings as well. The letter "Q" and the letter "E" both appear on this page. But in the context of reading this book, the Q is not worth more points than the letter E. In fact, neither one of them is worth any points. Only in the highly specialized context of a Scrabble game do we assign Scrabble points to letters. Scrabble is certainly not a wholly artificial system. But neither does it disappear entirely into its cultural environment. However we frame it, Scrabble will always maintain its artificial status in some measure.That is simply part of what makes it a game.
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