Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass: Weavings between the Magic Circle and Immersive Processes in Video Games

The paper contends that the "magic circle," the widely used concept from Huizinga and Salen and Zimmerman for describing the boundary between play and everyday life, should be understood as a graded cognitive mediation structure rather than a rigid barrier.

• The 'magic circle' boundary between play and everyday life should be understood as a graded cognitive mediation structure rather than a rigid barrier, with the boundary solidifying as immersion deepens.
• The authors use Juul's two axes (rules and fiction versus players' social practices) to argue that rules and fiction compete asymmetrically for player attention during play.
• Immersion is modeled as a staged process tied to Parasuraman's three attentional functions (selection, vigilance, and control), alternating between operational immersion, where rules drive selective attention, and narrative immersion, where fiction sustains it.