Xie, Y. (CM) – Crop Circles of Play: Forces and Formation in the Dyadic Magic Circle

Cooperative two-player play produces distinctive social experiences between players: intimacy, trust, cooperation, communitas. Since Huizinga, the frame within which these experiences arise has been called the Magic Circle: a temporarily-set-apart space through which play does its social work. It has been a central organizing concept across game studies, performance theory, and HCI because it points to a basic human capacity: the way play transforms activity that, on its own, would mean nothing into shared experiences of intimacy, trust, and communitas. Yet a century on, after generations of theoretical elaboration and equally vigorous contestation, the Magic Circle remains theoretically rich but empirically elusive, invoked by Huizinga, Goffman, Stenros, and others but never located in observable interaction. Locating it empirically would let us observe what shapes any given Magic Circle and how that shape develops over the course of play: the game itself, each player’s prior experience with games and streams, the histories they bring to each other, and whatever else is pressing on the shared frame. It would help explain why two dyads playing the same game produce different experiences, a particular concern for educational games, serious games, and art games that aim to deliver a specific message or outcome to players. This proposal argues that the dyadic Magic Circle becomes observable when two players meet over a shared game and must negotiate their individual senses of “what this play is” into a shared frame. It treats this negotiated frame as a Crop Circle: a pattern pressed into recorded interaction by forces (player pulls, designer prescriptions, external audiences), reconstructable through close multimodal reading. The proposal therefore asks: where, in the recorded interaction of dyadic play, can the negotiated Magic Circle be caught taking shape, and what does its observable form reveal about how a designed game becomes a lived experience between two people?

This proposal examines the dyadic Magic Circle through five connected studies. Study 1 conducts a PRISMA systematic review of two-player game scholarship in the ACM Digital Library, showing that the field has already documented Magic Circle phenomena and closely related interactional dynamics without naming them as such. Study 2 applies Interaction Analysis (Jordan and Henderson, 1995) to publicly available stream footage of two-player cooperative gameplay performed for an external audience. Study 3 conducts a controlled lab study of dyadic cooperative gameplay, using multimodal recording and post-session stimulated recall to capture the negotiated Magic Circle under private play conditions. Study 4 conducts a comparative reading of the Study 2 and Study 3 corpora to examine how the audience-versus-private frame, as an external force, imprints on the dyadic Magic Circle. Finally, Study 5 reads across Studies 1-4 to identify what gives the Magic Circle its “magic”: the configurations of force and trace that produce the distinctive social experiences a century of play scholarship has been chasing, and to articulate “design for the Magic Circle, not for the experience” as a generative principle for cooperative game design.

Event Host: Yi Xie, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media

Advisor: Elin Carstensdottir

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94258671135?pwd=qEkTZAQKI5avLf060hOycY1hgER2tX.1

Passcode: 650205