Strange Gaming Diaries: The Magic Circle, by Question

so it turns out, I have so much to say about this game that in the process of writing this blog post, I needed to scrap it and start over because I realized I was writing something more on the scope of a video essay script than an informal just-for-fun diary entry. which, it turns out, was the most thematically fitting thing I could've ever done.

blanket spoiler warning on this one again, folks. I've got a lot to talk about.

so, the magic circle is a Game About Games, the kind of thing a lot of people made a lot of things about around the time of its 2015 release year. this is the same time period as games like undertale, the stanley parable, pony island, doki doki literature club, and oneshot were making their respective creators' names for their metanarrative themes, and I was expecting the magic circle to be a game in that sort of sphere. this might be a bit of a disservice to the game seeing as all but one-and-a-half of the ones in that list (the stanley parable and oneshot's original freeware release) were made after the magic circle, but such are the biases of a late arrival.

the thing about all of those other games, though, is that there are a few particular wavelengths they operate on. these games use the real-world language of video games and their composite parts as a vehicle for storytelling, and usually rely upon an assumed method of engagement from the player that it can proceed to subvert and comment on. sometimes these games have a point they want to make about how people engage with fiction and the realness of fictional worlds, and sometimes they just do it because it's cool when the video game knows it's a video game.

the magic circle does have things to say about fictional worlds and the way non-fictional people engage with them, but it isn't using the same metanarrative language of its self-aware peers. it's a lot more concerned about more formal practices of game design—it's a game called "the magic circle" for a very specific reason—and spends more time analyzing the nature of the video game as the lines of code and polygons that people spend years of their lives agonizing over rather than the video game as a form of artistic expression and emotional connection.

one very obvious parallel to the real world that can be drawn is between the player's actions and those of modders, the people who take a thing people worked on and make it their own medium to change or fix or express whatever it is they want. these actions are given justification by the old pro, essentially a personification of the last overbloated victim of development hell who was quietly shelved and never saw the light of day, as the only meaningful thing there is left to do with something that simultaneously brims with potential and is being run into the ground by incompetent self-obsessed hacks. the fact that this character is voiced by stephen russell, instantly recognizable as the voice of lucan valerius, clavicus vile, and about fifty other people from skyrim, is beautifully fitting.

and before I get too into the weeds here, I want to congratulate the hell out of him and all the other voice actors! stephen's basically doing the exact same voice as the one I remember getting annoyed by in skyrim like every other generic voice actor in that game, but here he's able to really sink his teeth into his lines, and the old pro's dialogue is perfectly suited to his rough and sleazy register. the three other main cast members nail their roles too, bringing just enough naturalism into the game's dialogue to maintain its grounded narrative focus while being willing to lean into the theatrics of the larger-than-life, parodic writing of their characters.

indeed, true to its billing as a comedy-focused game, it does a lot to exaggerate and magnify archetypes surrounding its topic so it can give itself more opportunities to dissect them. the magic circle (the in-universe game) isn't just a hopelessly overscoped mess of broken promises and wasted crowdfunding money in the vein of star citizen, it's also the baby of a former breakout game-dev celebrity whose cosmically large ego demands that the game be his perfect uncompromised magnum opus and something everyone else on his dev team has to worry about the realities of. also the entire game is what he's doing about the complex he's developed over learning that he's sterile instead of just going to therapy about it or something. when I said that this game is his baby earlier I used that word very on purpose.

the stuff about ishmael's overwrought complex about babies isn't the only narrative trend the game employs, though, because that magic circle the game is named after? it talks about that a lot. circles and loops are extremely prevalent throughout the game's visual language and dialogue, and it has some interesting things to say about how creators and players interact with the worlds of any given video game. for the uninitiated, a "magic circle" is a phrase first coined in homo ludens and popularized by subsequent researchers in the field of game studies, used to describe the concept that when one is playing a game, the space of the game becomes imbued with certain properties by the nature of the game that those spaces facilitate.

the spaces on a chessboard don't mean anything until you start playing chess, and once you are playing chess, you start interacting with that chessboard in a very specific way because that's how the game works. there's nothing physically restraining you from doing otherwise—you could totally flick one of your opponent's bishops off the table if you want—but that causes the game to break down, and suddenly you're no longer two commanders of these abstracted armies, you're just sitting at a table being annoying to the other person sitting at the same table. either you pick that bishop back up off the floor and redraw the circle, or you stop the game entirely and its magic is completely gone.

the magic circle (the real-world video game) draws a connection between this concept and ideas of player freedom in video games. the extent to which a player is able to perform an equivalent behavior to flicking that bishop off the chessboard is variable and depends on the amount of freedom allowed to the player by the structure of the game as defined by its creators. this unique property creates a similarly unique relationship between player and creator, because if we're to extend the logic of the magic circle to video games, then it would follow that the one who draws that circle isn't any of the people playing it, it's the people who make the game and bind the player with laws written in code.

but one of the strongest narrative themes of this game is the idea that that isn't actually true, and that players frequently create their own magic circles within the scope of a video game. there's the aforementioned connection to modders, but I think this is even more strongly shown in speedrunning communities, where an entirely new game with sometimes drastically different goals and guidelines is nestled within the greater work. the magic circle is an acknowledgement that no matter what you do and no matter what your intentions are as creator, somebody's gonna want to break the rules and mess around, and it frames attempts to stymie this as both futile and selfish. this theme is even visually enforced by the player's main power to edit and fuck with the game world taking the form of a circle players draw on the ground!

there's another major theme to this game's narrative, though, and it's what gives it its gritty, textured quality unique to anything I've found in its niche. the magic circle isn't just about game development, it's about development hell, and it demonstrates the many ways in which a collaborative work can be absolutely mangled by the meddling hands of deadlines, personal squabbles, and the blinding light of ego. not only do the main three developers get up to all kinds of drama, but there are also other characters who you occasionally see communicating with each other or just generally dealing with the miserable experience of working on this bloated disaster through the in-game changelog collectibles.

it's very clear to me that all of this was written by people who know exactly what it's like to be working under these kinds of conditions—throughout playing the game I was getting vivid memories of the many, many, many times my best bud o.d. would come to me after a soul-crushing day of their post-graduate game design program, which you may recall me having extensively interviewed them about in the inscryption video. and it turns out that the dev team for this game, question, is primarily a three-man band of two former members of irrational games and one former member of arkane studios. these are people who have worked on games like the bioshock series, dishonored, and thief: deadly shadows, and who went out of their way to channel various experiences in working for such definitive triple-a projects into the making of this game.

and on the whole, the main thing that the magic circle has to say about big-budget game development is that it fucking sucks.

sure, the project is being run into the ground by the whims of its egomaniac of a producer, but the game has a very burn-it-all-down rhetoric that identifies the specific example of its in-universe game as just being a single instance of a greater pattern—"think it's just these gods who fell short? nah. they're just adding bells and whistles to the same damn machine," to quote the old pro in his last few lines of dialogue. these methods and this scale of game development routinely rewards self-important assholes while putting countless people through unspeakable amounts of hell that's consistently hidden or obfuscated from the public eye, and multiple characters in the game think that they know how to fix it.

ishmael, of course, just thinks he needs to crack the whip harder and kick his team into overdrive, which is doomed to fail on account of his own insatiable perfectionism. coda (if I had a nickel for every independent pc game released to steam in 2015 that provides metanarrative commentary on the development of video games and prominently features a character named coda...) is of the mindset that the passion and emotional commitment of herself and fellow superfans means that they're most deserving to continue the franchise's legacy, but they're unable to reconcile that raw passion with the cold, capitalist reality of the game series they've pledged their hearts to.

and then the player is given a chance to do what the others couldn't, and right this ship themselves. after the climactic final confrontation with the E4 demo, the player is given some level editing tools and a contemplative acoustic guitar track with a powerfully melancholy emotional character. on its surface, there's something peaceful and subdued to the experience, and I found myself having fun in a way I hadn't at any point previously in the game—not in the subversive, mischievous way encouraged by the rest of the game, but in a more pure and heartfelt way. the whole thing is framed as an opportunity to break these abusive cycles, enjoy the act of creation, and recognize that spending a little bit of time making something will always be more important than spending a lot of time making nothing.

then you ship the game, and the old pro says his goodbyes and says that he hopes that this has empowered you, the player, to give your ideas form and to make your own worlds, to move beyond basic satisfactions and put something out into the world filled with meaning and with feeling. then comes the last thing he tells you: "oh, and boss...hope you've got a plan b."

you're shown a computer screen with a level editor and a documents folder and other stuff—you're a game developer now, and you've kept the lights on at the studio! you get a call from maze (the third of the three main developers you've been seeing throughout the game alongside ishmael and coda) and it's revealed that she works for you now, along with the other former members of ishmael's team. you're then contacted by those various members, one after another, each beginning to voice contradictory suggestions that you now have to deal with. you start receiving messages at the same time, each one a new voice talking in your ear. they accelerate, it all dissolves into chaotic noise as the screen is overwhelmed, and then it goes black and the credits roll.

the message is clear here: this business is rotten all the way down. any attempt to continue it in its current paradigm, even a well-intentioned one, even one that actually succeeds, is only able to sustain itself through the destructive exploitation that brought about the misery this was all supposed to replace. there is no reforming mainstream game development, and it wears down everything it touches, from the people in the industry to the games and concepts being explored, until either dysfunctional chaos or meaningless slush is all that's left.

out of curiosity, I looked into question's releases as a dev team following the magic circle, revealing two other games: the first is the blackout club, a cooperative stealth game with some neat suburban horror aesthetics that apparently was pretty alright but mostly hampered by not having quite enough meat on its bones. the second is south park: snow day. I found myself giving a grim sort of chuckle.

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