🍄 The Magic Circle

Neuroscientists and psychologists now say that play at any age is vital for health, productivity and creativity. Is it time to take joy seriously?

Jan 17, 2025

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. We’ve always known that play was vital to child development, but research shows that engaging in antics of joy enhances brain prowess in children—and matters in our grown-up mental health. Research confirms that imaginative collaboration and connecting with others is a potent way of supercharging creativity and engagement. Evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists and developmental psychologists all agree that it’s time to pass Go and reposition play as so fundamental to human life that neglecting it poses a significant health risk.

Play is not just a way to let off steam and reduce stress says Psychology Today. “On the contrary, fitting playtime into your day is essential for working productively. Play is a basic emotional system, essential in both child development and adult creativity, and studies show it increases job satisfaction, creativity, and innovation.”

Ready. Set. Tag, you’re it!

"Think of the last time you had a really fun time or a good belly laugh and how you felt afterwards," Dr Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and founder of the non-profit, National Institute of Play tells Newsweek. "You have a different mood, a different sense of yourself. No one has measured the effect on neurotransmitters if you don't play. But there is a reasonable biological parallelism between sleep deficiency and play deficiency, which is why I think play is a public health necessity. Play deficiency, from my standpoint, is a very real phenomenon.”

And while the definition of play is elusive, there is a growing consensus that it is an activity that is intrinsically motivated, entails active engagement, and results in joyful discovery, explains experts in The Journal of The American Academy of Pediatrics.

Kidulthood

According to a study, intergenerational activities—like blowing bubbles together or hide-and-seek—can greatly improve the wellbeing of older adults, enhancing their self-esteem and reducing symptoms of depression. This kind of intergenerational play benefits everyone, reports Play Matters Australia. While children learn important skills like reading social cues, cause and effect, sharing and cooperation, “older adults build important social connections, improve their capability, and share joy in the moment.” Intergenerational play can also improve family bonds and community connections by creating opportunities for meaningful interactions between different age groups.

Raising the stakes

What separates play from real life is the lack of stakes, reports The Neuro Leadership Institute. Play provides a safe environment to learn cognitive, motor, and social skills and make mistakes without serious consequences.

The institute compares life in combat with a game of dodgeball—same body movements but very different emotions. “Perhaps most fascinating is how our brains respond differently between those real-life scenarios and play. When toddlers chase each other around the yard, their brains activate a faux fear response. It’s a sort of simulated emergency. They run like their life depends on it, except instead of being terrified, they’re laughing and having the time of their lives.”

Studies have shown that play triggers a gentler version of a threat state. As with a real emergency, the brain releases norepinephrine, mobilizing the body’s fight-or-flight response. But unlike the true threat state we enter in the presence of real danger, play does not trigger the release of cortisol.

Enter the flow

The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asked “what makes play so rewarding even to adults?” While investigating, he coined and characterized the psychological concept of "flow," as "simultaneous absorption, concentration, and enjoyment." It describes the highly focused mental state conduction to productivity.

“Being in flow is the way people described what makes it so rewarding to play," his long-time collaborator Jeanne Nakamura tells Newsweek. Nakamura, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University and director of the Quality of Life Research Center, believes it's possible to experience flow while working, cooking, singing and in many other activities that we don't typically label as ‘play.’ Flow happens with challenges that "fully engage but don't overwhelm you.”

Research has shown that while flow feels rewarding in the moment, it also has a positive effect on mood.

Flow-seekers

There is good reason to seek a flow state regularly. Research has shown that while flow feels rewarding in the moment, it also has a positive effect on mood. Dr Julia Christensen, a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, tells the BBC that “people who regularly experience flow have a better mental health, possibly better physical health, and are more in tune.”

Christensen is commenting on the surge in “speedcubing”—global Rubik’s Cube competitions. Solving the cube puzzle may elicit happiness because it taps into aesthetic emotions. “Awe, beauty, being moved, all of these are aesthetic emotions, and experiencing them gives us an extreme sense of happiness,” says Christensen. “For example, when a pattern is the right pattern, when a move is particularly amazing on the cube, these aesthetic emotions can give transformative experiences.” Some speedcubers have described this as experiencing a state of flow.

Neuro-flow

While studies on flow are still limited, research highlights what happens in the brain when we experience curiosity, creativity, humor or enjoy a piece of beautiful art—all activities associated with flow. Research at the National Institutes of Health indicates that creativity activates a distinct network of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network (DMN), also involved in daydreaming and internally directed thought.

Brain scans were taken of jazz musicians improvising, poets composing poems, and non-artists asked to imagine innovative uses for common objects, like a brick. The researchers found that when jazz musicians stop improvising and read from a piece of written music, or poets stop creating and turned to editing their work, the brain switches to a different network of neural structures known as "the Cognitive Control Network," which consists largely of executive functions involved in selective attention, working memory and critical thinking. But the real sense of success streams from our creatively-activated DMN when we are in the flow.

Designing the magic

Game designer and educator Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, in their book Rules of Play, use Dutch sociologist Johann Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle to explore the nature of games and how they function as systems. They propose that games can be seen as microcosms, with their own set of rules and boundaries that create a separate reality for the players.

In her interview with ALICE (2006), Salen explained that the phrase “magic circle” was a metaphorical way to think about the act of entering the state of play—and how to design so that you are always at play:

“…for game designers, you are thinking about “how is it that you get someone to enter into that state?” Which sometimes is physical, so they literally enter some kind of playground space. But it is more mental. So there’s a moment, and I often do this with when I am giving lectures, I will play some kind of simple game like Rock-Paper-Scissors. Because there’s the moment where when you mention to somebody, “Okay, we’re going to play Rock, Paper, Scissors,” where people literally become transformed physiologically, they get excited, their blood starts to pump, they start to feel weird, they decide “Oh, I don’t really want to play.” At that moment they have entered a space very different from the space that they previously inhabited…just as a kind of person in reality. So the Magic Circle refers to that kind of conceptual boundary that people take a step over once they enter the willingness to play. And during games, the idea is that boundary really begins to delineate a space separate in space and time from that of the real world. I love the word “Magic Circle” because I find games and play totally magical. This idea that once you enter into that space you are given permission to do things that you would never do: ways of behaving, people that you might talk to, testing out limits of things that you wouldn’t normally have confidence to kind of test the limits of. So the Magic Circle describes that. And it’s also something that’s magical in terms that it rises out of nothing. Sort of people at play appear suddenly as a community together and play. And then there’s a moment where it just simply disappears, and people then kind of return to their senses, to their ordinary selves in the real world. So as a design concept it’s incredibly useful because you can begin to sort of ask questions about “What is it that I need to do as a designer to seduce somebody into stepping over that conceptual line? What is it that I need to do to keep them at play?” And then in thinking about this idea of an open culture which deals with the notion that the perimeter of that Magic Circle extends beyond just the moment of engagement with the game. I mean, as a designer, if you can stretch the boundary of that circle in time and space so that your player is always at play within the space of your game, then that’s an extremely powerful and successful good design.”

Sim your memories

Legendary game designer Will Wright, creator of The Sims and co-founder of its developer Maxis, is working on a new AI life sim game where players seemingly train an AI to create worlds from their memories.

Players record a memory through text, known as a "mem", which the game interprets and forms into an animated scene. These memories are placed into a private mind-world made of terraformable hexagons, while sentiment analysis will alter the world according to the emotions of memories placed within. Shared worlds will also be possible, constructed with others. Watch the trailer here.

On gaming and reality

ALICE in conversation with Will Wright (2003):
“I think gaming gives you a different way to experience the world. In some sense gaming is a prosthetic for imagination. We’re always building models in our heads of the world around us. Every minute of every day we’re imagining, what would happen if I did this or that, or should I do this or that? And we’re imagining the results of our actions. So we build a model in our head of the world and reality around us that says, If I do A, then B will happen. Or maybe C, or there’ll be a probability between the two. Those models are built through experience, they’re built through storytelling, they’re built through play. And I think that is something that science also has taken to great lengths. Science builds these models of reality to try and predict what’s going to happen under given circumstances. And they build these very elaborate models that we call theories, and they do experiments or observation to prove or disprove these models. And then when the model breaks, when it doesn’t predict reality, they say, what’s wrong with the model? And they change it and they revise the theory. I think people do that in their daily lives also. They have these models about the way people are going to behave, or what’s going to get them ahead in their job, or what will make them happy. And you’re continually rebuilding that model when your existing model doesn’t work. Well, I got this, that and the other and I’m still not happy. What’s wrong with my model? I think games in that sense are one of the ways that we build these models in our head of the reality around us.”

What else we are wandering…

🔍 The great play deficit
Researchers estimate that over the last two decades, children have lost an additional eight hours of free play per week, prompting the American Academy of Pediatricians to call the decline in playtime a "national crisis."

“Technology has changed the way kids play,” Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told Vox. “There’s been a big disappearance in general neighborhood play—in our research, we found that kids were spending a lot less time outside. They were spending a lot less time in traditional forms of play because they were playing with devices.” She notes that replacing physical play with phones and iPads can be bad for kids’ gross motor skills and social development, including their ability to read faces.

🔍 Playing closer attention
Public health experts have scrambled to find the cause of the rising rates of anxiety, depression and hopelessness among young Americans, which are up 40% from a decade earlier and often blamed on smartphones and social media. But according to Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, we should also be paying closer attention to the changing way kids play.

As more recent generations have lost that unstructured time and freedom, Gray said they have also lost chances to build that internal sense of agency, which leaves them more vulnerable to sadness, worry and hopelessness.

🔍 Auntieverse
Created by Singaporean AI artist Niceaunties, “Auntieverse” is an art project about aging, beauty, freedom and fun—and an attempt to understand and challenge the stereotypes of “auntie culture.” The series explores the playful and surreal adventures of aunties that exists across southeast and east Asia and features fantastical women transformed into frogs, donning costumes made of plastic bottles and sushi-bedecked cars with legs.

“There are high-rise living quarters built from stacks of Tupperware, spas where you can immerse yourself in a giant bowl of ramen and an altar where you can pay your respects to the Supreme Perm Goddess,” reports The Guardian. “Welcome to Auntieverse, a world built by, and ruled by aunties, filled with everything aunties love.”

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