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.
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