BENGALURU: A magic circle, in gaming terms, is a space where you can suspend the day-to-day and immerse yourself in the gameplay. While this primarily refers to online games, the fact remains that every game has a magic circle. It’s a point where you leave behind the cares of the world.
The advantage of this magic circle is that nothing that happens inside the game matters in the real world. You can make mistakes, restart and get it correct again. You can try different strategies.
Indian traditional games are of a wide variety, allowing us to think, strategise, and plan across different situations as it were. For example, the game of ‘Chaupad’ or ‘Daayakattam’ requires you to take your four game pieces around the board and bring them safely home. You can play an attacking game stopping your opponent from going home safe or you can play a defensive game merely protecting your game pieces.
When you think about it, these decisions are like life itself. A balance of choice and chance.
When it comes to the game of ‘Aadu Puli Aatam’ or the tiger and goat game, the focus is different. Tigers try to kill the goats and try various approaches of moving around the edges of the board and attacking them where they are the most vulnerable and far removed from other goats or going through the centre of the board, scattering the goats and breaking them up.
The goats on the other hand, sometimes try to focus on herding the tigers together, to be able to overcome them, while other players try to isolate each tiger to prevent them from ganging up together. When you think about it, this too is like life itself. Sometimes, we isolate problems and deal with each one separately. At other times, we try to club problems together to overcome them at one go.
These concepts and many more can be learned by playing traditional games. But the charm of traditional games is not that you get to learn something. The charm is that learning happens by osmosis as it were through hours of fun and play. Truly a magical and fun experience in that magic circle.
(The writer’s views are personal)