The Here and There of a Femme Cave

Abstract

In the seminal 1938 text, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga invokes the concept of the magic circle as a third space reserved solely for play. It is a space where play follows its own rules without regard to physical or imaginative constraints. With the advent of 21st-century digital technologies, the once clearly delineated contours of Huizinga’s circle have blurred and have come under increased scrutiny. This piece, through the use of autoethnographic narrative and the self-reflexive analysis of two girl gamers, argues that analysis of the 21st century magic circle should acknowledge the blurring of the circle’s contours, but analysis of that circle must also take into consideration the physical, social, and familial contexts in which digital play happens. In other words, contextualized physical space shapes how that still significant magic circle functions.