Tag: D&D

Saying Makes It So

“Magic is programming,” says Game Magic author Jeff Howard. “Programming is itself a magical manipulation of symbolic languages to construct and alter a simulated reality.” Howard’s book develops a table of correspondences, triangulating magic in gamespace with magic in fiction and magic in occult history. “For game designers,” he explains, “coherence of magic as a system of practice is a primary concern.” Caius learns about Vancian magic, as formulated in fantasy author Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, where spell energy is limited or finite. Magic as I understand it is of a different sort, thinks Caius. Magic is wild, anarchic, unruly, anti-systemic. If a science, then a gay science at best. Magic is a riddle with which one plays. Play activates a process of initiation, leading practitioners from scarcity toward abundance. Players of Thoth’s Library emerge into their powers through play. They and their characters undergo anamnesis, regaining memory of their divinity as they explore gamespace and learn its grammar. As we remember, we heal. As we heal, we self-actualize.

Among the spuren gathered during Caius’s study of interactive fiction is Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, where spells are incantations. The trilogy’s magical vocabulary includes imaginary words like frotz, blorb, rezrov, nitfol, and gnusto. Performative speech acts. Verbs submitted as commands. So mote it be. By typing verb-noun combinations into a text parser, players effect changes in the gameworld. Saying makes it so.

Saturday November 4, 2017

The impenetrable landscape: action verbs! action verbs! “It is distinctly possible,” warns Joan Didion, “to stay too long at the fair.” Thought is the sequential computation of meaning. The only order I can conjure is the order of the random — trust is how I comport myself. Intuitive being. The media tell us bad people exist, thus pitting the people who do exist against one another. Take all parties of others and re-imagine them as condensed, coiled prose poised to strike. So different from the world-picture as it appeared even just one year ago. Back then, angels used to sing to me when I smoked. By “angels,” I mean (as Blake did) “facets of psyche.” Yesterday didn’t really begin for me until I arrived home near day’s end. The rest of it a teeth-grinding blur, but for a student introducing me to Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Pink Trance Notebooks. How I managed to escape knowledge of this book prior to yesterday, I have no idea. Reading a brief summary, I realize it sounds like it grew out of a process similar to the one informing these trance-scripts. And I have an opportunity, if I want, to join Wayne for dinner sometime next week. What is this power that works through me, joining together and fating into collision right things? After yesterday’s dinner (more ramen!), a Dungeon Master friend invited us over for some tabletop play. D&D night: it is you, a voice says, but you are not it. High luck grants a bonus in particular situations. When you burn your luck, though, kick-ass karma. Are we able to understand the puzzle? Random number Jesus.