On a cold September day in Cleveland, Ohio, a group of men gathered for a hallowed day. It was the annual Lake Erie Walleye Trail (LEWT) fishing tournament. The air was crisp in autumn and a cloudy overhang casted the afternoon in a dull gray. All the fishermen had gathered around an RV-turned-weigh station, to watch the weighing ceremony. This altar was where fishers could prove their mettle by having the heaviest fish. The affair was no laughing matter, as this was the championship to end the LEWT series of 2022. It cost up to $400 for a team to enter and the prize was $28,000. More so, this tournament was the end of a series. It was the culmination of all the other LEWT competitions. As a result, the energy between the fisherman was tense. Soon the tensions would boil over. Within minutes, a crowd of angry men would be surging the stage. Some of them would demand violence - and it all began with five words:
"There's WEIGHTS in the FISH!"
Top fisherman Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky sky-rocketed in results in the fishing tournaments of 2022. Their meteoric rise was filled with multiple instances of their fish being pounds heavier than their peers'. This was followed by some justified side-eyeing from their competitors. That wasn't the only reason to be suspicious; the duo had been previously banned from competing in 2021, for allegations of cheating that had led to one competitor not being given his prize. Runyan had failed his polygraph test, and thus, was not allowed to compete for about a year or collect the fishing boat prize .
So when, once again, Runyan and Cominsky caught fish that were pounds heavier than everybody else, LEWT Director Jake Fischer (no joke) decided to examine the catch. Using his fishing knife, Jake gutted the fish to examine their innards. Within moments, he pulled fish filets and lead pellets galore from its gullet. Jake threw the incriminating evidence into a plastic container, echoing the guilty thuds. The crowd was in an uproar - many of them had dealt with the pair's antics from the years before, and this time, the proof was undeniable. Red faced men, either from a sunny day of fishing or in righteous fury, screamed at the pair to give up their winnings. Some asked for the police, while others approached Runyan and Cominsky, who had become sheet white.
Fischer, now understanding the tenuous safety that had existed at the Lake Erie Walleye Fishing Tournament Championship was now collapsing, urged the crowd not to touch the cheaters. He told Runyan and Cominsky to leave - they promptly did. I imagine to much of the bystander's dismay, there was no vigilante justice to be had on the gray, misty beach of Cleveland, Ohio.
But bureaucracy never rests. The Cleveland Metroparks Police Department was called and soon the Ohio Department of Natural Resources were on the case. On March 28th, Runyan and Cominsky pleaded guilty to cheating (a felony) and unlawful ownership of wild animals (a misdemeanor). They were forced to returned their winnings, as well as a boat won by Cominsky in 2021. It appeared the days of piscine banditry were over - the jig was up. In the end, it was a district court that stopped the years of fishing competition abuse.
In all honesty, Runyan and Cominsky were lucky not to be harmed at the event. The anger of the crowd was palpable. This begs the question: Why were so many people brought to violence over weights in a fish? Of course, the obvious answer is that the tournament was for money. But the money stands for something else - something more important. The money is an avenue to legitimize the tournament, a way to prove that there is value in the competitor's skill. Whenever someone cheats and breaks these rules, and thus delegitimizes the idea of fair competition, they threaten the idea of games themselves. They force us to realize that there are factors outside of our entertainment, a stark reality that won't ever truly go away. More so, they make us realize that although we are careful architects of our rules, it's frequently the ones who know those rules best who seek to squirm their way around them. All in service of more: the glory of competition. Games are fun and as a result, they are very serious.
The Seriousness of Games
I would hardly be the first person to take games seriously. Famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga defined "play" as:
"the free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious' but at the same time absorbing the players intensely and utterly".1
Huizinga's book, Homo Ludens, (written in 1955) would create the term: "Magic Circle". Johan's book was more about various spaces, so magic circle was a term used rarely. Instead, authors Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman developed it into the definition we use today.2
The magic circle refers to a special kind of space that we enter as players in a game - a world where chalk lines act as barriers and colored cloth separate friend from foe. At their most basic, games come with clear signifiers that 'allow' some actions and 'disallow' others. Within the game space, there are defined right and wrongs, actions that can always be condoned and can never be condoned. Additionally, they are rife with symbols that mean more than they appear and are often arcane to an outside viewer. Once on the inside, we begin to welcome this separation, almost trying to sanctify our own circle. Players will chant alongside team members in choreographed preparations for the ritual of the game, or have bizarre superstitions to make the rules bend in their favor.
Of course, as many critics have pointed out to Salen and Zimmerman, the magic circle isn't so hardlined. In a way, it becomes porous. Though we begin to separate ourselves from the world outside when we play, some ties cannot be severed. Inevitably, we'll complain about work to our friends during a Discord call. We'll lament to our parents about relationship troubles during a game of Wii Tennis - our reality always seeps in. Unlike a hard wall, the magic circle is a careful homeostasis. It acts like a cell membrane, carefully filtering in influences from the outside world while ridding itself of its woes and excesses before they become poison. After all, if the game is so serious it's no longer fun, it can hardly be called a game.
Competition takes the magic circle to a higher level. It creates a hierarchy among players and seeks to legitimize the best among them. In our modern day, we give players good reasons to be successful competitors in their magic circles. Cash prizes are accompanied with glory, both of which offer proof as to who is best at the game. This validates the player and the game itself. Increased prizes, either in social status or financial gain, give a tangible reason as to why the game "matters". It incites watchers to watch and players to play. More so, it invites the watchers to care and the players to win. The homeostasis of the magic circle becomes a tight and transactional dictatorship, as the walls become clearly defined and the rules crystallize. Fun is no longer a part of the equation, at least not as much as it was. I'm sure you've seen something to this effect once you're too many turns into Monopoly - the game suddenly becomes more serious than your prior friendships.
The concept of legitimizing the game past its boundaries far out-dates monetary rewards and social distinction. In many ancient civilizations, there was little difference between the ritualistic behaviors of a game and the rituals performed by their priests. As a result, the boundaries drawn by the magic circle begin to blur with reality. Ancient games were often tied to religion - look no further than the Birdman cult of the Rapa Nui people.3
Games & Gods
In Rapa Nui society, prophets would dream of a few potential Birdman (always affluent and male). These men would choose two tributes to perform for them, in a deadly game. Tributes would have to swim across open ocean and climb a high rock in the sea, to remove the eggs of a sea bird from a nest, and return to the village the fastest. Many would perish to sharks in the turbulent waters or to exhaustion on the one-handed swim back. Whoever made it first, though, would have their sponsor crowned as the Birdman. This elevated the figure into a godlike status, and hopefully, would lead to some reward for the guy who actually grabbed the egg.
While this method of governance is ridiculous, it makes a strange bit of sense if you look at it from the perspective of ancient peoples. The world was a brutal place in humanity's earliest days. Tragedies happened without explanation and people would die from invisible reasons. As a result, we turned to the supernatural for explanation - the Sun was carried by a chariot across the sky and the king was king because God picked exactly him. To the Rapa Nui people, the simple fact that the tributes failed to be killed is evidence enough that the sponsor was divine. You can imagine then, to cheat in these games would be to try to defy the gods themselves.
That's at least what the Greeks believed about their games. The most famous punishment for cheating in ancient times comes from the Zanes of Olympia.4 All that's left of these bronze statues are their pedestals and plaques. These plaques, long ago, were inscribed with the names of cheaters. Not the marriage kind, but for men who had cheated in games - bribing opponents in boxing and wrestling, for example. Ancient referees inscribed their names on the plaque under a fine crafted statue to Zeus as a form of religious shaming. These people, as the story goes, had used money instead of skill to win their matches. As punishment, they would pay for the construction of these statues to return the glory to Zeus. Glory they had stolen. To the Ancient Greeks, cheating in a game was so serious it caused offense to the Gods.
As it turns out, we aren't so different from our ancient ancestors. As spectators, we recognize that we can do little to affect the game inside the magic circle. It's out of our hands, so we do as our ancestors did, and we turn to the gods. It's not uncommon for a coach to lead his team in prayer before a football game. Competitors in the game recognize their own fallibility as well. While they can play at their best, there's very little else one can do. The only way to win the game is to be better than your opponent. When you enter the magic circle, you realize that there is nothing short of God that can let you beat a better opponent. Unless, you decide to cheat.
Listening To The Devil On Our Shoulder
The ugly truth is that cheating is a decision. It can be made on a personal level, for personal gain, to win a game. That kind of decision relies on our own insecurities - it's the fear of failing, of losing, that propels others to cheat. But that's not all. Whenever we see others cheating, we aren't just upset that they broke the rules of the game. We're upset because they've shown the game to be fantasy in the first place. We're upset because, even though we had that little voice in our head, telling us to cheat, we decided not to - and the cheater did.
This lapse of judgment, to destroy the game for your own benefit, is so deeply ingrained that we beg for intervention from a greater power. In the old days, we used the Gods to punish cheaters. Today, the approach is a little different. The Niagara Catholic Athletic Association (NCAA), lists many prayers for athletes and coaches in their "Play Like A Champion'' prayer book.5 Look at some of the key lines from three different prayers in this publication:
"When I compete with others, help me, win or lose, to play fair…" "Give me the grace to follow rules, to ‘fess up when I’m wrong…" "Keep me aware of the brotherhood/sisterhood I have with all athletes, even when they are opponents; free me from the temptation to fake, to foul, to cheat…"
Clearly, it's a primary concern of athletes not only to find and stop cheaters from ruining their game, but most of all, to have the strength to never cheat at all. This is a trend found in many athletes' prayers, if not an outright majority. Athletes are concerned that the little demon in their head will win. To have the strength to confront those thoughts and accept loss is no easy task. For proof, look at the amount of people willing to cheat to win. When faced with the demon of failure, they could not allow it. So powerful is this feeling, that we beg a higher power to destroy it completely.
Hey, remember when this article was about a fishing competition?
When Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky chose to fill fish carcasses with lead weights and cold filets, they were choosing to introduce the outside world to the magic circle. But they didn't start like this - Runyan and Cominsky were competitors for a long time in the area. In fact, Runyan even stated he was semi-retired before the controversy began. After years of mediocre fishing, it seems the pair decided it was time to cheat. The worst part is, I think I can understand them. I think we all can.
Changing The Rules of Engagement
Whenever you chose to enter a competition, you chose to abide by the rules of the game. You cannot punch your opponent in a wrestling match, nor can you throw the chessboard across the room. By removing outside variables and introducing "fairness", we can truly decide who is better than who at the game. But when you've done that and the sad answer is that your opponent is just better than you? That's incredibly hard to take. Imagine spending hours upon hours of effort, of dedication, of practice, only to lose horribly against a professional. There's no one to blame but yourself for entering the magic circle. That's when the justification starts: my opponent must be cheating, cheating is the only way anyone can win, etc. We can save our own skin by sacrificing the magic circle, but in doing so, we destroy it for everyone else playing. It's selfish and as such, very human.
When we see a cheater, we see the demon in our minds take form. Our prayers to avoid cheating were not enough, our own pride and insecurity have metastasized into someone willing to destroy the game for personal gain. Every fisherman on the Lake Erie Walleye Tournament could have cheated and probably considered it at one time, if only for a fleeting moment. Yet, it was only Cominsky and Runyan that pulled the trigger. As such, no longer do we simply face a "cheater", but we face the selfishness in all of us. It disgusts us, so much that we demand retribution. We demand statues to Gods and fines to the court, all to prove that the cheater is wrong. We demand that the magic circle's barrier be redrawn, so that we can enter our game again.
In the end, it speaks to our humanity that most competitions end without problem. With video game competitions, cheating is hardly easy. Unless you have vibrating anal beads, cheating in chess is going to be similarly difficult. Most of us just really want to play a game and see whose best. But those of us who put blood, sweat, and tears into the game can begin to see the magic circle as less of an arena and more like a vise. Our expectations of victory become a mocking fantasy as a superior opponent wins. Even though we step into the magic circle by choice, we then begin to seek ways to squirm around its restrictions. Leaving the game becomes expensive, as the legitimization of the circle with money and fame makes it feel more real and important than reality itself.
I love competition and I love games. I wrote this article because, while laughing at fishermen stuffing weights in a dead fish is fun, I understood the anger of the crowd. All of them had shown up, paid money, and put their effort into the competition. Most of all, though, they'd built a community around their event. The magic circle was carefully crafted over time to make it an enjoyable, and mostly fair, experience for all. While physical violence is probably overkill, I too felt the righteous indignation of those anglers. Instead, I wanted to look at the positive side of the exchange.
If cheating represents the most selfish parts of us, then what it destroys represents the best of us. Competitions are for fun and camaraderie. While they demand your effort, they can reward you with friendships and a new community. What makes the magic circle beautiful is its purity - as long as you can play, you can enter. I see games as more than just play. I see them as powerful totems that build culture and relationships. I see them as equalizing forces, measuring competitors to be in a true meritocracy. Most of all, I see them as fun.
And what's more important than that?
Huizinga, J., & Eco, U. (2002). Homo ludens. Giulio Einaudi editore.
Stenros, J. (2014). In Defence of a magic circle: The social, mental and cultural boundaries of play. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/10/26
Routledge, K. S. (1920). The mystery of easter island: The story of an exhibition. Sifton, Praed.
Pausanias, S., J. W. H., Ormerod, H. A., & Wycherley, R. E. (2014). Description of greece. Harvard University Press.
Hesburgh, T. (2016). God, Be in My Sport. Niagara Catholic Athletic Association. All prayers cited are from this selection.