8 The whereabouts of play, or how the magic circle helps create social identities in virtual worlds Thiago Falcão and José Carlos Ribeiro This chapter considers the process of online social identity construction and how it is presented in virtual worlds – environments that although carrying a solid heritage of the pure online interaction tools, such as chat rooms, are still orga- nized around a very specific logic, portraying objectives and structural repetition dynamics inherent to the game as a system. We posit that the presence of what is called the ‘magic circle’ by Salen and Zimmerman (2004) exerts a mediating power, not only by circling, limiting the game environment, but specially by trans- forming social identities formations processes, attaching it not only to the dynam- ics built in by the contact with technology – in the form of computer-mediated communication – but also in particular to the dynamics imprinted by the game structure present in such worlds. The whereabouts of play There is a certain agreement in the study of various aspects of media when it comes to considering the spheres of work and play. As Yee (2006) has coherently pointed out, these activities remain conceptualized as separate poles of the same dichotomy. Such framing has received wide support, along the course of history, figuring also in the ideas of some of the classic game theorists: Huizinga (1955) and Caillois (2001), for instance, believed that in order to play a game, the indi- vidual has to consciously step outside ‘normal life’ (Huizinga 1955) and voluntarily engage in an activity considered ‘not serious’ – suppressing both time and space. This place in space and time in which the play activity happens received a thorough theoretical treatment – and a proper terminology – when Salen and Zimmerman (2004) published their treatise on the general analysis and develop- ment of the constitutive processes of the game. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) inspired by a passage in Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens utilize the term the ‘magic circle’ to identify and describe where the essence of play is located. According to the authors: Although the magic circle is merely one of the examples in Huizinga’s list of ‘play-grounds,’ the term is used here as shorthand for the idea of a special place in time and space created by a game. The fact that the magic circle is