Act Like a Baby, Feel Like a Man - Theros Pre-Release Edition

Great guy alert!

I don’t play much paper Magic these days, but I like to play pre-releases. Part of that is I can’t wait the extra two weeks for the cards to come out on Magic online, but mostly it’s because I like pre-release buzz. I am fully taken in by spoiler season – I see sweet cards, I want to play them, I want to figure out the limited environment, so I bustle on over to the game store, plop myself in my chair, and feed off of the buzz in the room generated by people who share my excitement. This is the most fun I ever have playing Magic, and probably my life in general, really. It feels the most like Christmas anything has felt since I stopped feeling the way I used to feel about Christmas (I just won a Nobel prize for this sentence, by the way). Plus, occasionally I like to swap out the cold anonymity of Magic Online and encounter some personalities.

However, it’s usually only a couple rounds into my first pre-release tournament that I am reminded of one of the reasons I normally prefer the cold anonymity of Magic Online: some of these personalities are pretty garbage. No, I’m not talking about nerds and smelly weirdos – I like nerds and smelly weirdos. Heck, I am one. I’m talking about sore losers. I’m talking about sore winners. I’m talking about sore-the-game-isn’t-even-over-yet-ers.

I’m talking about babies. Magic is full of them. It’s hard to go a few matches in a row without running into someone who gets sad over some part of the game. Randomness is a defining part of Magic, and occasionally that randomness is cruel. Most of the time, though, it’s just fine. It may be clunky, it may be less than ideal, but rarely is it so bad that it causes you to lose the game on its own, and it’s definitely the case that randomness is blamed for losses more often than it is truly responsible.

This is rampant on Magic online, but it is mostly confined to the chatrooms rather than the in-game chat between players. In real life, you are forced to absorb your opponent’s slumped shoulders, their narky comments, their accusations of lucky top decks, lucky card pools, and not-unluckiness, which they, of course, possess in abundance. At the Theros pre-releases I went to, the most egregious episodes of this came from players that I like, respect and are better than me, which made it kind of better but also kind of worse. You lose to a person so often that when you beat them, you feel proud of yourself, and since they’re usually the only witness to your victory, you want some kind of confirmation from them that you did good. That confirmation would be especially meaningful since you value their opinion, because they’re better than you. Instead, they blame luck for their loss and rob you of credit for your win. You and your victory simply do not matter to them. The only thing that does is saving face.

Why does blaming luck, or some other game minutiae  save them face? Firstly, it absolves them of responsibility for building their deck a certain way, keeping a certain hand they kept, and making the play choices they made throughout the game. Second, it’s a form of demonstrating mastery over the game and their opponent despite having just lost. They may have lost to you, but they know better why they lost than you do, and guess what? It’s not because of any quality of yours.

Players love bitterly telling stories about their opponents’ clueless victories. “Afterwards he said he was pleased with his deck, but he didn’t even notice that I only had three lands in play.” This practice validates the bitterness they feel because it suggests that they, the player who notices fundamentals like numbers of lands in play, have a moral right to win, because they are the better player.

This is 100% dogshit. No player has moral ownership over the outcome of a game. No-one deserves to win. This is especially true of Magic, where there are so many factors out of the players’ control that can influence the outcome of a game, but it is even true of games like chess and Star Craft, where the better player almost always win. Low stakes games of no consequence do not enter into the realm of morality, which is at best a murky realm to begin with.

So why do people resort to morality when making themselves feel better about their loss? I think because it provides a universal baseline for considering themselves good. In my last post I suggested that, for me, Magic is a testing ground that provides an opportunity to make up for some serious perceived internal deficiency. In short, in the past I have felt powerless, and Magic affords me the opportunity to feel powerful via dominating my opponent. If that doesn’t happen, I have to dominate them in some other way, namely by showing that my knowledge of how I just lost is better than their knowledge of how they just won. This has the added bonus showing that I have moral ownership over this victory, so, in the eyes of the universe, I have proven my mastery. Not only is this mode of feeling good about myself hogwash from a logical standpoint, not only is it unreliable, but it requires the suffering of my opponent to function.

This is not acceptable. I need to find another way of enjoying Magic, one that does not lean so heavily on mastery.

Also, I realise now that earlier in this article I suggested that players who act like babies, including the ones I like and respect who did so after games against me at the pre-release, have garbage personalities. Okay, I take that back. I don’t think those guys do have garbage personalities, but also, I am as guilty as they are of this behaviour, and I don’t think I’m garbage either. However, I am grown up enough to admit that I sometimes act like garbage, and that I don’t want to do that.

First step: next time I lose, allow the bad feeling to be there, acknowledge it, and tell my opponent good game anyway.

Why Do I Play So Much Goddamn Magic?

Tres cosmique.

If you know me, this is probably a question you’ve wondered to yourself, except exchanging the “I” for “you” and the question mark for a frowny face. It’s a reasonable question. I play Magic a lot. I do it more than I do almost anything else. The only thing I can think of that I do more is spoon my dog, and that’s only by virtue of doing that all night while we’re asleep. If I didn’t sleep, sorry dog, no spooning, I’ve got Magic to play.

Even if you know me, you probably aren’t aware of just how much Magic I play. Here’s how much: when I wake up, the first thing I do is shower, take my dog for a walk, get a coffee as a reward for taking my dog on a walk which I find boring and pointless, then I come home and fire up Magic online. If I don’t have anything else to do, I’ll play until the evening when I take my dog on another stupid, boring, waste-of-time walk, which at least in the evening I can usually parlay into hanging out with other people’s dogs down at the dog park, then when I get home I play some more Magic until I feel so bad about myself for losing that I just want to lie in bed crying into my dog’s disgusting face.

I’ve come around to this way of life after searching for a passion of some kind. I used to want to be a writer, I used to want to be a hanger-on in a local music scene, I used to want to be an academic, but none of those things stuck. I wanted to be the kind of person who was passionate about those things, but even though I was interested in them, I wasn’t passionate about them. Working on them felt like work. When Magic came along, it stuck. I was compelled to participate in Magic, whereas in every other theatre in life I was compelled to shrink away. I worked hard on getting better at Magic, but it didn’t feel like work.

Does Magic count as a thing to want to do? This is a serous question. If someone asks me what I want to do with my life, can I expect to say, “play Magic” without being ridiculed, or regarded with contempt or confusion? I cannot. In fact, when I told a friend that I’d changed my PhD topic from something about Australian history to Magic, her response was to frown and say, “that seems like such a … ” and then trail off, with the likely end of the sentence being “dumb thing to do your PhD on”. Whether she was right to be silently disgusted with my life choice, I don’t know. I am still figuring out whether or not I want to defend my decision to play a fuckload of Magic or shrug and agree that it kind of is a waste of time. While I’m figuring that out, I continue to play a fuckload of Magic. The question you, person I know who knows that I play a fuckload of Magic, is why I consume games of Magic in such levels of fuckloadery.

Here are some possible reasons:

1)   Fun. Nope! Magic is not fun. Well, sometimes it is, but fun is nowhere near the predominant feeling had while I play Magic. The predominant feeling is concentrating really hard in a dispassionate way. Also, Magic is often a very unfun game. Your opponent is incentivised to make the game unfun for you because that usually means you aren’t doing anything and they’re winning. But even if I am winning, I don’t feel like I’m having fun. Instead, I feel a sense of satisfaction, like I’ve solved a tricky algebra problem, or I feel relief, like I’ve dodged a bullet, which I have: the bullet of humiliation, fired from the blunderbuss of self-hatred. This leads us to the second possible reason, a much more plausible one:

2)   Weird psychological reasons. Now we’re talkin’. It sort of seems like I enjoy putting myself in a situation where I risk being humiliated, but then narrowly avoid it. Either that, or I do humiliate myself, and then I’m filled with impotent rage. This reminds me of when I was in primary school, I’d play marbles against this kid who was two years older than me, and I kept losing and losing and playing and playing, because I thought one day I’d win and absolve myself of all my terrible losses. I never did, and that kid was Leon Davis, a famous and successful AFL player. He once shook me down for lolly money on my way home, and I never again felt safe again walking around town by myself, even when I was much older. Northam was a harsh place to grow up, you guys.

3)   Lead designer of Magic Mark Rosewater would call the above reason enjoying proving myself. He organises Magic players into three groups, according to the different ways they use Magic to have fun: Johnnys, who enjoy playing kooky strategies, Timmys, who enjoy the thrill of playing crazy or powerful cards, and Spikes, who simply enjoy winning. For Rosewater, the important thing about Spikes’ idea of fun being winning is that they get to show everyone what they’re capable of. They prove their mastery over this complex game, thus they prove something about themselves, thus they have fun. This is treated implicitly as a positive thing, insofar as there is a virtue in being “masterful”, but for me playing like a Spike is not necessarily positive.

Firstly, as we’ve established, I do not always have fun. I feel a need to prove myself, but that does not correlate to pleasure per se. It correlates to a need to make up for some kind of long-established deficiency, the origin of which coincides perhaps with those millions of lost marbles, perhaps something earlier which even the marble playing was meant to assuage.

Secondly, although Rosewater frames Spike-type playing as proving my mastery over something, in fact it reveals a deep insecurity about the feeling of powerlessness that permeates the rest of my life. If I win, that insecurity does not go away. It is in fact a necessary component of proving my mastery. I need to constantly reinvoke it in order to have the feeling of being masterful. If I lose, that insecurity is proven, deadening any future feeling of success as pure luck or outlier. Being a Spike is a murky soup of pain and pleasure, where every experience is tainted by the hidden belief that you are garbage.

At this point, what with the words “deadening” and “garbage” being thrown around willy-nilly, you may be wondering if playing Magic is the best thing for me. I am with you in wondering that. However, Magic’s status as a card game designed for thirteen year olds lends itself to such scepticism. If I were to express my deep-seated insecurity by doggedly pursuing a career, or by furthering my education and going nutso applying for research grants and whatnot, or by committing to a long-term relationship, or even by having a lot of sex, I would be immune to scepticism. This behaviour would seem about right for a person like me. 

Playing little cards with feisty lizards and battleaxes on them, however, does not seem about right, and must be explained away, and the cycle of insecurity I’ve identified is simply a validating veneer for the sentiment, “stop being a weird loser”. Therefore, while I cannot deny that I am playing out some unhealthy psychological drama when I play Magic, I do deny that Magic is the source of that drama. I deny that I would avoid that drama if I were to divert my energies instead to something more constructive, and I deny that playing games is non-constructive, and that anything outside of game-playing is automatically constructive. I also believe that while Magic provides a stage for me to rehearse this unhealthy psychological drama, such rehearsals provide an opportunity to interrupt the chains of association that enable the drama to repeat, and it is only through seizing such opportunities that this drama will end.

            And that is why I play so much goddamned Magic.