nostalgebraist:

oligopsoneia:

the last OOCQ was from a comment (not body) in this series, reviewing all the magic sets up to RTR, and while the entire thing is pro-read, the time spiral block review is probably my favorite

Thanks so much for linking this – I stayed up last night reading this series, finished it this morning (modulo some skipping/skimming), and it’s basically the kind of M:TG writing I’ve always wanted but never found.

I was heavily into the game as a kid, and I still play cubes/drafts with friends every once in a while, but I haven’t “followed the game” since I lost interest as a kid (ca. Invasion).  This means I have heavy nostalgia for the early sets, almost no knowledge of the non-early sets, and a strong interest in the mechanics of the game combined with an inability to understand most insider talk because I’m ignorant of so many individual cards.  These posts interacted perfectly with all of that: they started off with a pleasant trip down memory lane, and then gave me a primer on each unfamiliar set, emphasizing its impact and significance back when it was still new.

More importantly, the author approaches the game like an art critic in perhaps the best possible sense of that phrase (and with M:TG, there are a lot of bad senses).  He treats card design as an art form unto itself (which it clearly is!), and talks about it like a poetic form, with various approaches to creativity within constraints, a historical trajectory with several periods, later work exhibiting a self-consciousness about that history (in Time Spiral, and very differently in Magic 2010), etc.

That is, he’s taking a relatively formal, “internal,” New Criticism-like approach, rather than a historicist approach (relate the work to contemporary extra-artistic phenomena) or an esoteric/Freudian/high-Theory-like approach (take a few elements of the work, link them to some complex of big ideas, uncover an iceberg of ostensibly hidden structure).  I don’t think the former approach is strictly better than the latter, but it’s always refreshing because so much existing games criticism takes the latter two approaches.

To me, this often looks like embarrassment over the low cultural status of games – the critics are attempting to “elevate” the form by saying it’s really about big and important things.  But if games are an art form worth writing about as such, then no excuses should be necessary, so this approach concedes crucial ground to the very attitudes it’s trying to fight.  This situation is especially bad in video/computer game criticism, where the perceived fight is not between serious critics and skeptical non-gamers, but between serious critics and unserious gamers, so that “taking game mechanics seriously” is bizarrely associated with the “games aren’t art” side.  This horribly confuses everything.

But then, I’m not that excited by “taking game mechanics seriously” either when it comes to video/computer games, because often there just isn’t much there.  M:TG is a case where there is a huge amount there.

Reading these posts made me think about just how unique M:TG is, how it really is this exciting new art form that most of the world doesn’t know about.  It is, by orders of magnitude, the most complex game I’m personally aware of.  I don’t mean it has the most depth of strategy, or the most intricate rules.  I mean there are just so many cards, along with a sufficiently rich ruleset that the cards constantly reveal new possibilities as they cross paths with other cards.

(The way I usually explain it to non-players is that it’s like a version of chess where there are tens of thousands of different pieces, each with its own rules, and each player chooses 16 out of that multitude for their starting pieces.  This makes an already cerebral game vastly more complicated, yet it actually makes it easier to play casually and less punishingly hard for new players, since the space of possibilities is so vast that even the well-trained pros are constantly having to adapt to unforeseen situations.)

This kind of rich, interaction-driven complexity is a special thing, rare both in games and outside of them.  The closest thing that comes to mind is small-scale biology, pathogens interacting with the immune system and intestinal bacteria, genes coding for proteins that alter gene expression or edit RNA.  Or perhaps with language, where the denotation, connotations, history, etymology, spelling and sound of each word all play roles in how that word interacts with its neighbors in a text.

If people are making art in a totally new system of this kind, that’s an interesting event in the history of art, full stop.

Oh, and one last thing I liked about those posts – he doesn’t just focus on mechanics, and not just in the “Vorthos” way where you care about the official storyline.  There’s a lot more to the aesthetics of the game than that storyline – card art, visual design, mechanical flavor, card and mechanic names, and the sense of a fantasy world conveyed by the cards themselves without supplementation from other sources (which most players will never read).  He even shares my affection for the way the early cards, in particular, looked and felt like artifacts from another world.