Design games as a tool, a mindset and a structure Kirsikka Vaajakallio

ut it still has all the essential characteristics of play, particularly “the
ability to transport the participants to another world” (Huizinga 1950, p
18). Schechner’s’ view (1988/2003, p 107) differs from that of Huizinga
and Caillois, who sees seriousness as essential to play and vice versa, for
example when he states that “... when the play elements are taken out of
work, work becomes drudgery and less efficient [...] and when the seriousness
is taken away from play, then playing grows sloppy and dull, not fun.”
Playgrounds as temporary worlds within ordinary world
One of the main characters of play Huizinga mentions is “limitedness”
(1950, p 9). According to him, “Play is distinct from “ordinary” life both as
to locality and duration. It is “played out” within certain limits of time and
place. It contains its own course and meaning.” Hence, play can be considered
as a temporary sphere of activity in which the laws of ordinary
life no longer count (ibid. p 12). One aspect of limitedness is special playgrounds
which are marked off beforehand either materially or ideally.
These temporary worlds within the ordinary world are also called “magic
circles” (ibid. p 19) or referred to, in regard to exploratory design games,
as a “game universe” (Brandt 2010, p 132). In regard to performances, limitedness
may also refer to rituals or initiation rites with steps of separation,
liminal phase and reintegration. “During initiations, persons leave
their ordinary lives behind (separation), undergo ordeals by means of which
old behaviors are erased and new behaviors and knowledge learned (liminal
phase), and emerge reborn as new or at least profoundly changed beings
ready to rejoin their society but with new identity and at a new level of responsibility
(reintegration) (Schechner 2006, pp 236).”
One quality related to the magic circle is the varieties of performance
time adapted to the event that, according to Schechner (1988/2003, pp
8–10), includes: event time, meaning that all the steps of the activity need to
be accomplished no matter how long it takes, for example, rituals or scripted
performances; set time that gives the boundaries in which the activities
need to fit in, i.e. the gathering should start at a given time and it also
should end at a given time no matter whether all the planned activities are
accomplished or not; symbolic time where the span of activity represented
may be shorter or longer than the simultaneously elapsed real time.
Since in magic circle the laws of everyday practices do not count, it
needs rules that determine what holds in the temporary play world, rules
that tell what players can or cannot do. Schechner (1988/2003, pp 15–19)
thinks games are closer to the theatre performance than play in the sense
of child’s play with dolls, or rituals based on the rules directing them: as
he sees it, play is “free activity” in which the player makes his/her own
rules. In rituals the rules are given from “outside”, and games, sports and
theatre mediate between these two extremes, since in those activities
rules exist as “frames”. The frames give boundaries to the performance/
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