Lots and lots...

I've been doing some reading for my assignments. All about the 'Magic Circle' and I've just read a paper called "Abandoning the Magic Circle". I had high hopes for this as I was looking for some writings against the use of the 'Magic Circle'.

Now I don't consider myself an expert on academic writing - far from it - but I do expect a little more than what I go from this paper. In talking about the notion that the Magic Circle (i.e. the 'area', physical or otherwise, in which 'play' takes place) can be closed or open (i.e. influenced or affected by the 'outside' 'real' world), his main criticism seemed to focus on the fact that 'geometrically' a circle has no end/beginning and there for it cannot be described as 'open' it must always be closed. o.O Therefore, he argued, the concept of the Magic Circle, in describing the 'area' in which play and games take place, must always be closed and cannot be open and linked by the outside world. A notion he rejects as he believes that play and games are influenced by the 'real world'.

If your academic and intellectual criticism of a concept is based on using mathematical geometry to attack a metaphor then you need to rethink.

Though I hear his next paper is entitled "Abandoning the Snow Blanket" in which he attacks the notion that the description "a blanket of snow" to describe heavy and covering snowfall is incorrect as snow does not have the physical properties required to bind and hold together in the same way material would need to in order to create a blanket...