![]() ![]() Our actions become the food for our magic cell. Only when played we can find, follow and forget the everchanging rules. Improv is not a magic circle but a magic cell. In improv, there is no fixed line to step into. It’s making up new ones that keeps things exciting.” As in our daily lives, it is advised to not behave like a jerk when playing with your fellow players, but everything beyond is not defined. In Improv there are not many fixed rules. They can find themselves in a Spaceship near Jupiter or in a social drama about the “Irish Potato Famine”. Yet the big difference is that the improvers know of the fictional nature of their presented meaning. And similar to the psychological experiment above, it is their task to find it. When entering the stage they don’t have any order yet in their world. The circle is alive!Ī similar situation is presented to improvisation theater actors. A magic circle that he refuses to give up even if presented with its fictional nature. In the truest sense of the word, the subject has thus invented a reality - a hidden order - that he assumes to have found. In fact, even when the experimental design is revealed to them, the subject occasionally wants to convince that he or she has discovered a regularity that the experimenter missed. A constructed story about the numbers presented to him. Because of this increasing success, the test subject forms a hypothesis. The positive answer of "correct" becomes more and more frequent as the experiment progresses. What the participants don’t know is, that the pairs of numbers are randomly selected, and the experimenter gives his or her rating of "correct" or "incorrect" based on a rising probability function. In a sense, the poor participants are thrown into a nebulous chaotic world in which they have to find order and meaning. In one of these experiments, the subjects get presented with pairs of numbers (“31 and 80”) and their task is to decide if the numbers "match". Our need for structure and meaning becomes clear in the psychological experiments, in which there is no causal relationship between performance and reward, but the subject is not aware of this. Like a group of army ants following each other blindly in a circle continuously until they somehow manage to break out or unfortunately die of exhaustion. If we forget the constructed fluid nature of rules like social structures and traditions, we become dogmatic, stiff and unable to adapt. If we read a novel from the front to the back ( rule ), we can experience the story (freedom).Ī problem might emerge when we become dogmatic about the circle. If u follow the western genre, u experience a cowboy experience. If u wear a parachute (limitation), you can jump off planes (freedom). Rules can create possibilities, not just limitations. In the same way, somebody that reads all the words in the book Dune in a random order doesn’t experience the novel. You lose the possibility of this specific agency experience. Yes, if you do not follow the rules, you can play more freely, yet you will not be able to experience the particular experience that has been sculpted by the author. ![]() ![]() Nothing really deserves our attention and respect. “Fun is giving respect to something that does not deserve it.”Īnd so is basically our life. The rules of games are often redundant, yet they allow us to dive into specific aesthetics of experiences. If you are playing video games, you might have heard about immersion in games, but psychologists generally prefer the term spatial presence which is generally defined as when the contents of media are perceived as real in the sense that you feel a sensation of being spatially located in the presented environment. ![]() If you play along with a certain storyline you can experience the tragedies, adventures & epiphanies somebody else imagined. By following the rules of games you can experience the agency somebody else designed. In this way, video games being enjoyable relies on our collapsed awareness. It’s an unique suspense of disbelief and logic that humans sometimes do for the sake of constructing a good time for everyone included in the circle. The same happens when you play a robot that wants to be a real boy for your high school theater. When you read a book you experience the feelings, thoughts & actions of a robot boy. Rules (in games) collapse your attention that you can experience a certain agency that was designed for you. You enjoy the limited agency for the pleasure of the adventure (even if he has tremendous unfair luck with the dice!!!). But you don’t because you entered a contract with your second-born family member. If you play Monopoly, you could theoretically just take all the money and cards from your smaller brother’s pile. ![]()
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