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The Limits of Social Play
The metagame and social play bring us to the brink of the magic circle and beyond. In our RULES-based explorations of games, we kept our understanding of game systems firmly closed. In PLAY, things shifted. We sometimes viewed games as enclosed, internally driven systems of experience, at other times as systems that interact with the world at large. Nowhere has this double-framing been as evident as in our discussion of social play. Whether it is bounded and unbounded play communities or the ideal and real rules of games, social play is at once contingent on the formal structures of rules, while also very much a product of larger social contexts. What are those larger social contexts? They are, of course, the cultures of games. Every Magic duelist, every homemaker card shark, every Spin The Bottle kisser doesn't merely exist in a play community, but is part of myriad cultural contexts, from spheres of nationality and ethnicity to ideologies and political beliefs. It is to those contexts we now turn, to the cultures in which games are played. In doing so we leave behind the sometimes open, sometimes closed territory of PLAY to take up instead the wonderfully open-ended landscape of games as CULTURE.
