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Bounded Communities
Earlier in this chapter we introduced the concept of the play community, a term borrowed from Bernard DeKoven's book, The Well-Played Game. We like his terminology and use the idea of a play community in the spirit of DeKoven, even though our use of the term does not exactly coincide with his. For our purposes, a play community is a group of players engaged in play. This play may occur within the space of an individual game or across a series of games. It may seem like play communities are social phenomena that spring up mysteriously and autonomously around a game. However, game designers can have an impact on the play communities generated by their games. It is therefore important to understand what a play community is and how it works. A play community arises out of the operation of a game. It is a function of the rules of the game, the personalities of the players, the interactions between players, and the larger social context in which the game takes place. Play communities emerge from play. Although some play communities become quite official, such as professional sports teams, most play communities are informal, temporary affairs. A play community is not usually like a housing development, requiring extensive advance planning and preparation before it can be properly inhabited. Instead, a play community is often more like a conversation, in which the improvisational act of communication itself creates the conversational context. This emergence of a social play context is not unlike that of the magic circle, which also arises spontaneously and is experienced temporally. The social boundaries of a play community are tied to the boundaries of its game or games. There is a paradoxical relationship between a game and the play community it generates. In a sense, the play community is an effect of the game, an emergent property of the game system. At the same time, the game has no life apart from the play that activates it, and is dependent on the play community for its sustenance. One would simply not exist without the other. To understand the beauty of this paradox, we can revisit systems theory and the concept of closed and open systems. A closed system has no exchange with its outside environment, while an open system does have some kind of exchange. As RULES, games are closed systems, as CULTURE, games are open systems, but as PLAY, we can frame games as either closed or open systems, depending on which aspects of the experience we highlight. As artificial social systems with their own special rules of meaning, games are closed systems of play. But as transformative systems that affect and are affected by what the players bring into the game, the play of a game is an open system. Similarly, a play community can be framed as bounded or not bounded by the magic circle of a single game. A bounded play community is a closed system: it arises from the social play that takes place strictly within the space of an individual game. When we frame a play community in this way, it exists only within the time and space defined by the magic circle. However, we can also frame a play community to include more than one instance of a game. With this framing, we are considering a group of players across a number of games or across a number of sessions of play. These communities are not contained within an individual game and are not bounded.A play community that is not bounded is an open system. Both framings are useful, and in the sections that follow we look at each, focusing first on bounded play communities.
