Sean Bouchard

This idea that there is an explicit boundary between the game-world and the real world - and that events and actions have a different meaning within the game-world that doesn't translate to the game world - is frequently described as the magic circle, a term taken from this passage of Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga:

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course... The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.2

The magic circle describes the constructed reality that players create when they agree to play a game. Ideally, perhaps, this constructed reality is separate from the real world. In Game Design Workshop, Tracy Fullerton states that "the rules and goals that are driving the players apply only within the game and not in 'real life,'"3 and goes on to say that "the act of agreeing to play, to accept the rules of the game, to enter what Huizinga calls the 'magic circle,' is a critical part of feeling safe that the game is temporary, that it will end, or that you can leave or quit if you don't want to play anymore."4

This sense of safety is vitally important to our understanding of game-playing, and its relationship to the explicit boundaries placed on the magic circle is instinctively understood. Movies like The Game (1997) or Saw (2004) play off the audience's intuitive understanding of this relationship by describing games that extend beyond established boundaries in order to elicit anxiety from the audience.

Chris Crawford, in The Art of Computer Game Design, asserts that this notion of safety is one of the fundamental properties of games. "In short, a game is a safe way to experience reality... This is not to imply that games are devoid of consequences. The penalties for losing a game can sometimes be a significant deterrent to game play."5 It's worthwhile to note that even when Crawford is talking about the potential consequences of a game, he limits himself to the case where the penalties associated with losing the game affect a player's willingness to participate in future games. To some extent, it is taken for granted that games are self-contained worlds, the events of which have little or no effect on the reality outside of them.

In most cases, perhaps, this is true. But the nature of negotiation games causes a greater interaction between the internal reality of the game and the external reality of the real world. In fact, the genre of negotiation games is built upon ideas that depend on the permeability of the magic circle. This interaction between the real world and the constructed reality of the game taps into the same discomfort and anxiety as The Game and Saw, and this emotional resonance can heighten the experience of the game for the players. It also means that the events of the game can have greater consequences in the world beyond the boundaries of the game.

Negotiation games are frequently classified as a sub-genre of strategy games, and certainly there are similarities. Strategy games are based on rational decision-making and a player's ability to outwit his opponent to gain an advantage. Fullerton describes them as "focus[ing] on tactics and planning as well as the management of units and resources."6 Because of the focus on tactics and strategy, these games generally involve highly formalized systems that regulate the way players interact.

Negotiation games typically focus on exactly these same elements, but also add negotiation, a channel of informal interaction between players that allows them to bargain, make deals, and trade favors in order to attain a mutually advantageous position. This introduces the concept of social play to the game, which fundamentally changes the dynamic systems that emerge. Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schriber describe the effects of introducing this type of element to a game in Challenges for Game Designers: "Whenever multiple players are working together toward mutual goals, a whole host of social choices come into play. There's the mix of cooperation versus competition. Alliances can be forged and broken. Promises of future considerations in exchange for help at present can be made."7

The archetypal example of a negotiation game is Diplomacy (1959), a board game set in pre-WWI Europe. Diplomacy is, in many ways, reminiscent of the classic strategy game Risk (1957): players in both games act on behalf of an international power, amassing and deploying military forces, in an attempt to gain control of territory. The greatest difference between the games is that the design of Risk only recognizes interaction between players through movement of pieces on the game board, while Diplomacy includes an explicit period of verbal negotiation between players as a part of every round. The purpose of this negotiation is to allow players to coordinate their actions to achieve short-term goals. The design of the game means that a move which is not well-supported by other players is likely to be negated. Accomplishing anything, then, depends upon a player's ability to successfully arrange support for his moves, generally by forming alliances or making agreements with other players. This is a selling point of the game; the marketing for Diplomacy states that the game "challenges players to rely on their own cunning and cleverness, not dice, to determine the outcome[.]"8

The key to understanding Diplomacy is the fact that effective action requires cooperation in the short term, but cooperation is a bad long-term strategy. As Salen and Zimmerman describe, "Only one player can ultimately emerge as victor, and it is usually just a matter of time before deceit festers and player alliances are broken, reshuffled, and reformed. Which of your allies are going to betray you - and how? In the game of Diplomacy, as in the diplomatic processes it depicts, social skills are at least as important as strategic thinking."9

This point is important. Negotiation games are performative in a way that pure strategy games are not, involving social interaction that is not regulated by the rules of the game and, specifically, acts of persuasion. Persuasion requires a certain amount of rhetorical skill and a certain amount of trust. In order for any persuasive argument to be effective, the persuader must first convince the listener that he can be trusted, even if, in reality, he can't.

This is all well and good as far as the design of the game dynamics goes, but the involvement of trust is important for two reasons. First, trust between individuals is inexorably tied to the interpersonal relationship between those individuals. Second, trust is emotional.

Game Design Workshop reminds us of the earlier assumption that games are completely self-contained and completely isolated from the real world when it says, "Players are not precisely bound in a physical sense by any of the rules... They are, however, conceptually bound by the social agreement that they are playing the game and that they will not leave the game with some of the cards or add extra cards to the deck."10 In truth, however, players bring things to the game and take things from it all the time - although not necessarily physical materials like cards.

The idea that games exist within a larger context that affects and is affected by the behavior of player's while they play the game is called metagaming. Rules of Play describes it like this: "In metagaming, players engage with the game and each other through activities and interactions outside the confines of explicit game play."11 Metagaming was described by Richard Garfield in an essay titled "Metagames" in four broad categories: What a player brings to a game, what a player takes away from a game, what happens during a game other than the game itself, and what happens between games.12

It is worth considering these categories with respect to the specific issue of trust as a key element in negotiation games. In this case, what a player brings to a game is a set of existing relationships with the other players. Arguably, this is something that negotiation games have in common with every other type of game. In negotiation games, however, the significance of this fact changes. As Brathwaite and Schreiber put it, "There are even metagame considerations of the social relationships of the players outside of the game itself; one plays the board game Diplomacy differently with close friends than with total strangers."13 One plays differently with close friends because of the trust that is tied to the preexisting relationship between the players. What the player takes away from the game is essentially the same thing that he brings to it: his social relationships to the other players, based on their mutual trust.

Garfield's third category concerns what happens during a game other than the game itself. Rules of Play says:

This category of the metagame is quite diverse, and refers to the influence of real life on a game in play. There are many factors external to the magic circle that enter into the experience of play, factors that are always present and often quite powerful. Among the ways that the metagame occurs during play are social factors such as competition and camaraderie, or the physical environment such as good lighting or a noisy atmosphere. Trash talking, playing "head games," and exploiting player reputations all affect the metagame as well.14

In the case of negotiation games, playing head games and exploiting player reputations are built into the dynamic systems of the game. Specifically, these games call for the agreements and understandings based on the trust inherent in the pre-existing relationship between two players, and then create incentives for those agreements to be broken and that trust to be betrayed. Because the trust that underlies the interpersonal relationships between players was not created within the confines of the magic circle but rather was brought in by the players from their social relationships in the real world, breaking that trust within the context of the game has the potential to damage the relationship that persists past the conclusion of the game.

Another passage from Rules of Play describes this mixing of the real world mixing into the formal system of the game through social play:

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 the 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.15

This potential shouldn't be overestimated. People play games, including games with strong components of social interaction, even negotiation games, without destroying their friendships with other players. Keep in mind the way Fullerton describes the alternate-reality of the game-world: "The boundaries of the game serve as a way to separate everything that goes on in the game from daily life. So while you might act the part of a cutthroat opponent facing off against your friends within the boundaries of a game... you can shake hands at the end of the game and walk away without any real damage to your relationships."16 Usually, the boundaries that separate the game world from the real world operate the way that they're supposed to. A betrayal of trust within the context of a game of Diplomacy is understood to be an emergent element of the game design and an action limited to the context of the game, not reflecting the real-world relationship between players.

But this is the point when it is prudent to recall the emotional nature of trust. Emotions can be difficult to predict, or to control, even when the rational mind understands the distinction between the game-world and reality. Popular amateur game critic and humorist Matthew Baldwin describes negotiation games like Diplomacy as "friendship-enders" because they are capable of "wreak[ing] complete and irreparable damage to your hard-won friendships."17

Because negotiation games utilize the established trust of players' existing relationships, they tap into an emotional core that can serve to provide tension and heighten the intensity of play. This is a powerful tool for game designers, but there is a potential danger. The nature of the magic circle is fundamentally the creation of a shared, constructed reality within which players agree, implicitly, to follow a certain set of rules and associate a certain set of meanings with particular events and actions. This understanding of the game-world as a separate reality, and each player's willingness to cross that participatory boundary, is based on each player's trust that the other players will uphold the rules of that constructed reality and its distinction from the real world. When the procedures of the game call for breaking trust, it can call into question the mutual trust on which the construction of the game reality is based - and hence, the legitimacy of the understood boundary between the game and reality. If a game tries to tap into this particular emotion without becoming a "friendship-ender," it must be carefully designed to make sure the players do not lose their sense of separation from reality, the safety which, as Crawford said, a game is meant to provide.

Works Cited

1. Salen, Katie and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2004. p. 96.
2. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Beacon Press, 1971. p.10.
3. Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. Elsevier Inc, 2008. p. 32.
4. Ibid. p. 78.
5. Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design: Reflections of a Master Game Designer. Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984.
6. Game Design Workshop. p. 416.
7. Brathwaite, Brenda and Schreiber, Ian. Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers. Charles River Media, 2009. p. 90.
8. "Wizards of the Coast Diplomacy." 2008. Amazon.com. 22 October 2008 .
9. Rules of Play. p. 429.
10. Game Design Workshop. p. 32.
11. Rules of Play. p. 540.
12. Garfield, Richard. "Metagames." Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Essays on Roleplaying. Jolly Roger Games, 2000.
13. Challenges for Game Designers. p 90.
14. Rules of Play. p. 483.
15. Ibid. p. 485.
16. Game Design Workshop. p. 79.
17. Baldwin, Matthew. "Friendship-Enders." 2008. Defective Yeti. 22 October 2008 .