antithet

The Magic Circle is a concept articulated by Johan Huizinga in the naive and racist Homo Ludens, and later codified by Salen and Zimmerman in the even more naive and utterly wrongheaded Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, which posits that the rules of a game create what is effectively a separate reality that exists within our own, one wherein the concerns and realities of our lives do not intrude, where the work envelops us in its entirety.

Like a lot of game theory that I've read, the Magic Circle is more of a wishful thought than something that is actually observable and true to the reality of the experience. Play does not exist as separate from reality, it is a product of it, just as we are. Game designers can't make a game wholly separate from the person they are, and the person they are cannot be separated from the circumstances that made them, and neither can players. You aren't entering another world when you read The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, you're just using an object to try to shut the world out. To put it simply, we've all got baggage, and we're carrying that shit everywhere with us, whether we want to admit it or not.

Which hasn't stopped us chasing the idea of the Magic Circle. The dream of a game we play becoming a world we inhabit has forever been intoxicating, from when tabletop wargame Chainmail transformed into role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, to the modern rhetoric of The Metaverse, there's an argument to be made that all of this speaks for us attempting to wish the Magic Circle into existence: to create a space we can truly escape into, where the failings of the physical no longer apply. And no vision is more intoxicating than VR.

The eternal non-starter, the future that is always coming but always failing to arrive, VR, in our modern conception of it, is something I have almost entirely experienced vicariously. I am poor, I have always been poor, and I have never been in a position where I am capable of dropping the absurd amounts of money these things routinely ask for in exchange for what is - still! - largely a method to play Beam Saber, VR Chat, and Half-Life Alyx. Like the Metaverse that attaches itself to VR for a shred of credibility, VR continues to insist that it is The Future from atop a house built on sand, sinking down below more and more with each year that passes where Half-Life: Alyx is still the only game that truly gets people talking about VR.

But perhaps this is unfair. I don't own one, after all: this is all the speculation of an outsider. So, let's pick another VR game, more of a median example of this sub-medium. Consider this mu report from observations of an expedition, undertaken by a braver explorer than I, into the Magic Circle as conceived by Justin Roiland: Trover Saves the Universe.

I'll give TStU this much: I actually like the idea of the central gameplay loop. It's a fairly rare example of "second-person" gameplay, wherein you control a character controlling Trover, and teleport to various points in the levels, from which you can observe Trover as he does the sub-Lego Game third person platforming action that this game is made up of. It felt, weirdly, like a more player-authored version of the fixed camera angles of Resident Evil et al, a language of cinematography that we unfortunately lost when it become expected that the player would take full control of the camera. I'd like to see another game explore this concept more, and more purposefully.

That's the end of my praise. You hardly need me to tell you this, but yes, Trover Saves the Universe is fucking terrible, in the same way Rick and Morty is, in the same way every Justin Roiland production is (though, subtracting Dan Harmon from the equation does remove the part of *Rick and Morty* that I think is truly intolerable, that being its cloying and manipulative sentimental streak that never reads as sincere). It is a 4-hour session of the worst improv comedy class imaginable, tolerable only to baked teenage boys and those who share their disposition, made worse by adopting the exact same tenor, writing, and observations that every hack comedian who thinks they have a Wry Eye on Video Game Cliches deploys. All this game has as a selling point is Justin, and all Justin has is sub-Cake Is A Lie 2009 webcomic jokes processed through a work determined to explain every single joke at length, whilst engaging in gross-our humor that always finds a way to make fat women the butt of the joke, with increasing viciousness that is genuinely sickening.

Every moment of Trover Saves the Universe was excruciating. Sometimes it was excruciatingly annoying, sometimes it was excruciatingly dull, and sometimes was excruciatingly offensive, but it was always excruciating. If I was playing it, I would have turned it off and refunded it within minutes. If I was watching it, I would have found something else to watch within seconds.

But I didn't. I watched this for nearly 4 hours. I saw the whole thing, beginning to end. I sat there for every moment of the playthrough because I was with friends, and they were making me smile and laugh, because for whatever stupid absurd faux camaraderie it was, I wanted to be there for my friend until they ran over the finish line and could free themselves from this self-inflicted torment. Is that dumb? It sure sounds dumb, to read it written out like that. But it's true. And I'd do it again! But only if, like this time, I am allowed to break the Magic Circle, and bring with me myself, and everyone I carry with me, in my head and in my heart.

The Magic Circle does not posit the non-existence of the people I care about within it, but it does argue that they are ultimately supplicant to the rules the circle creates, that the game provides a wholly separate context for them to exist in. But if that was true, they wouldn't have made me laugh the way they did. They wouldn't have made me smile and roll my eyes and groan the way I did. Because they - and that - are the product of this world, not Trover's world.

Proponents of the Magic Circle will push back against the interpretation I've made of it, here, but I do think this kind of preclusive argument is where the fantasy The Magic Circle leads you: if the world is truly entirely separate, maintained until it is fractured by the breaking of it's rules, then the participants must also agree to cease the continuity of their lives, to suspend them, for the sake of the game. And I wouldn't want to do that, even if that were possible. None of Trover's jokes were funny, but I laughed anyway because my friends brought their worlds into this one.

VR is not the future that exists in the present, it's not the gateway to tomorrow. It's just a way to experience play, to engage with rules and visuals entwined together, like the unique gameplay loop of this game (which works perfectly well without VR but it is undoubtedly informed by VR). No matter what way we interface with them, nothing we can do will make Games into something that will let us escape reality. They are not other worlds, they are not places to become wholly different people separate from ourselves, they are not the means by which we can seal ourselves off from the stings of reality, as much as we might wish them to be. And that's for the best. Because if Trover Saves the Universe was a Magic Circle where I left everything behind at its door before entering, I would not be able to survive it. I did so because I brought people into it with me, people who I care immensely about, people that TStU, in however a slight and silly manner it may have been, let me see in new lights and appreciate in new ways. It wasn't a doorway to another dimension. It was a funhouse mirror. And when I laugh at a funhouse mirror, I'm not laughing at the material of the mirror itself. I'm laughing at the reflection of me and my friends in it, provided by the mirror's context.