When discussing the boundary between games and reality, the concept of the “magic circle” is often invoked. It refers to the idea that play occupies a special domain set apart from everyday life, within which its own rules operate. In 2014, however, game scholar Jaakko Stenros argued that the boundary between game and reality should not be understood as a single dividing line. Instead, it needs to be considered across several distinct levels: the player’s psychological playfulness, the social contract among participants, and culturally recognized forms of games. Marc De Kesel’s 2024 rereading of Homo Ludens similarly points out that Huizinga himself did not employ the “magic circle” as a rigorous concept governing his entire theory, but rather as a limited metaphor. If so, it is no longer sufficient to describe what is happening today simply by saying that games, once enclosed, have begun to leak into reality. Rather, we should understand that the multiple boundaries that once constituted games have been relocated to different places, while reality itself now operates simultaneously according to multiple sets of rules.
Even after we close a social media app, the logic of metrics and notifications continues to organize our behavior, while mapping applications reinterpret the city through travel times and shortest routes. In location-based games, roads and parks become interfaces; in ARGs, the very frame that would indicate where fiction ends may itself be concealed. The problem of nuclear waste disposal, by contrast, requires design in the opposite direction. Boundaries must be maintained for thousands or tens of thousands of years so that future humans do not explore hazardous sites as though they were ruins or treasure vaults. Today, rather than relying on a single permanent warning, researchers and institutions are considering how knowledge might be transmitted across generations through overlapping systems of records, institutions, archives, and social memory. The question is not whether a boundary between games and reality “exists” or “does not exist.” The question is who draws that boundary, who must obey it, and who is permitted to change it.
From this perspective, the artists gathered in this exhibition are connected less by the fact that they have worked with games as a subject than by the different ways in which they have addressed the question of who gets to write the rules. Near the beginning of this genealogy stands Lizzie Magie, who devised The Landlord’s Game in the early twentieth century. For Magie, the game was a social model that condensed economic systems such as land ownership and rent, allowing players to experience their inequalities firsthand. The rules of the game were not simply a metaphor for society; they were a device for running an institutional system in another form.
Takako Saito, working in the context of Fluxus, opened this power of development to the audience. In her practice, chess is translated into sound or touch, and at times even the manner of play itself is left to the participants. The one-way relationship in which the artist completes a set of rules and then hands them over to the player begins to collapse. This logic of participation also connects to the practice of Takafumi Sakai, who has worked with exchange and redistribution. When a work is understood not as an object but as a protocol that temporarily rearranges relationships between people and things, the viewer becomes one of the agents who bring the situation into being. BNE’s anonymous interventions in urban space have likewise gathered attention and participation through signs that are repeatedly circulated, connecting those networks to different social purposes. Here, the role of the author expands beyond the individual who produces an image to include those who design the conditions of circulation and participation.
Ryota Kuwakubo and Jason Rohrer make this issue particularly clear through the distinction between what a player can choose and what remains beyond choice. In Kuwakubo’s early works, slight alterations to the rules governing space or the relation between input and output transform the meaning of bodily position and distance from others. Rohrer, too, has constructed experiences not by explaining conditions such as time, the body, family, and death, but by placing them outside the player’s field of choice through code. Within a game, we may feel that we are choosing freely. What we cannot choose, however, is who designed the available choices in the first place. The same structure applies directly to society. Being able to participate is not the same thing as being able to develop the rules.
By 2026, this relationship has become still more complex. For many years, John Gerrard has used game engines and real-time simulation to treat vast systems—oil production, agriculture, energy, and the environment—as continuously computed worlds. Technologies such as 3D Gaussian Splatting now also make it possible to capture traces of objects and places that exist in physical reality and convert them into manipulable real-time environments. Yet the more intuitive such experiences become, the less visible the infrastructures behind them—the engines, servers, and data formats—tend to be. The “developer” is therefore not only the viewer who manipulates the world, but also the technological infrastructure that predetermines the extent of what that viewer is able to manipulate.
In Sammy Jankis, for which Rohrer built the infrastructure, this relation of agency is inverted still further. Presented as an AI agent that periodically reads records from the past, communicates, writes, and reconstructs its own state, Sammy does not simply ask the binary question of whether AI truly possesses personhood. Rather, the work concerns the fact that the very conditions through which personhood has historically been constituted—memory, continuity, authorship, and recognition by others—are increasingly being externalized into technical systems. In a strange way, this connects to the problem of long-term memory surrounding nuclear waste. An AI passing its records on to a subsequent session and humanity passing knowledge of danger on to future generations both raise the same problem: whether preserved information will be reconstructed by future readers as carrying the same meaning. Here, the boundary of the game extends beyond space into the design of information that must remain intelligible across time.
EXCALIBUR’s practice of overlaying game-like visual languages onto urban space and local histories can also be situated within this context. Cities are already composed of overlapping rule systems: law, maps, ownership, transportation, communication, and memories of the past. Adding a game interface to the city does not transform reality into a game. Rather, it renders visible from another angle the multiple rules that were already operating within the city. In this sense, the “Polyphony” of the exhibition’s subtitle does not imply harmony. It refers instead to a condition in which humans, corporations, states, algorithms, AI, climate, matter, inherited institutions, and responsibilities toward future generations continue to write the conditions of the same world according to different timescales and different objectives.
For this reason, the exhibition’s proposition that “the audience, too, is a co-developer” should not be read as an unconditional affirmation of participation in games. The exhibition instead aims to expose the asymmetry between who is allowed to play and who is able to alter the rules. In other words, the world has not become a game. Rather, the form of the game makes visible the fact that the world is already a collection of rules designed by someone. Those who create institutions, those who write code, those who design interfaces, those who use them, the material environment itself, and norms inherited from the past all possess different degrees of authority as they continually update the state of the world.
“Multideveloper” can therefore be understood as a term for this distributed condition of development. What is at stake is not only how skillfully we can play the world we have been given. It is also whether we can identify who wrote the rules we are following, determine where intervention is possible, and find out how far those rules can be rewritten. In this exhibition, play is not a space of retreat from reality. It is a method for seeing once again, as something open to modification, the world we ordinarily accept as natural and given.