From the Magic Circle into the Great Famine

Yuan-tsung awaited her fate, sure that it would be the same as that of her immediate boss, Director Wang, who had been driven to suicide, but Jack came to her rescue. They reconciled and got married in 1958. She lived a privileged life in his “magic circle,” which, up to that time, was untouched by either purges or famines. But in that magic circle, she watched with terror and apathy as the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the ensuing Great Famine unfolded. Feeling it morally wrong that she did not suffer with the others, she volunteered in 1960, the worst famine year, to go to a famine-devastated rural area, the Red Flag People’s Commune. To survive, she had to hunt for food like the other villagers.

Play, space, and the magic circle: Reinventing the game

In 2020, Dolanan, a collaborative practice exploring the architectural possibilities of play embedded in Indonesian traditional games, launched its pilot project titled Makan Kerupuk, which experimented on the spatial aspect of the crackers eating game often played during the Independence Day of Indonesia. Driven both by Johan Huizinga’s conceptualisation of the magic circle and the global pandemic, which prevented people from gathering in public space, this project probed into the limit of conventional play-arena by distributing the sites of play into multiple domesticities. Utilising both real and virtual means, Dolanan enacted a version of the game in which participants could engage with the physical experience of playing by employing a dispersal strategy, without dismissing the sense of publicness that marked the national holiday. Images produced by the participants are further analysed in this paper to reflect on the state of the magic circle as conveyed and experienced through this project.

Point of Contact

COVID-19 exposed the need to identify newer tools to understand perception of information, behavioral conformance to instructions and model the effects of individual motivation and decisions on the success of measures being put in place. We approach this challenge through the lens of serious games. Serious games are designed to instruct and inform within the confines of their magic circle. We built a multiplayer serious game, Point of Contact (PoC), to investigate effects of a serious game on perception and behavior. We conducted a study with 23 participants to gauge perceptions of COVID-19 preventive measures and quantify the change after playing PoC. The results show a significant positive change to participants' perceptions towards COVID-19 preventive measures, shifting perceptions towards following guidelines more strictly due to a greater awareness of how the virus spreads. We discuss these implications and the value of a serious game like PoC towards pandemic risk modelling at a microcosm level.

A Civics Primer for American History

This AHR Roundtable features four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but. The driving force of her narrative is the struggle of those excluded from this magic circle—really, the majority of the country’s population—to extend those truths beyond their narrow core of elite white men. The four reviewers—Ned Blackhawk, Matt Garcia, Mary Beth Norton, and Paul Ortiz—appreciate the “shared sense of national destiny” that clearly informs Lepore book. At the same time, they chide her for what they regard as significant omissions. These critical essays invite further consideration of how best to write a fully inclusive (and therefore dramatically reconfigured) national narrative

Truths . . . Audacious and Flawed

This AHR Roundtable features four short essays on Jill Lepore’s widely read synthesis of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but. The driving force of her narrative is the struggle of those excluded from this magic circle—really, the majority of the country’s population—to extend those truths beyond their narrow core of elite white men. The four reviewers—Ned Blackhawk, Matt Garcia, Mary Beth Norton, and Paul Ortiz—appreciate the “shared sense of national destiny” that clearly informs Lepore book. At the same time, they chide her for what they regard as significant omissions. These critical essays invite further consideration of how best to write a fully inclusive (and therefore dramatically reconfigured) national narrative