Tag: RPGs

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.

Tuesday January 29, 2019

What do Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call that act of “calling to order” performed by instructors each day in classrooms? What if I were to introduce into this act a degree of self-consciousness by discussing the theory with students? Perhaps it’s as simple as noticing things along the way. Refunctioning the space we hold together, structuring conversation differently. Freeing one another to speak. Perhaps it’s a matter of organizing improvised collective speech into story, as would a dungeon master, but with the dungeon reformed into a zendo. This is what Kerouac models for us in The Dharma Bums: space to be crazy and free in life and speech. Perhaps I can’t recreate that space in our classroom. Perhaps I need to advance further in my study of Buddhism. Perhaps a class is just a class, and it needn’t be a democracy. But then the same would be true of our lives. No, my sense is that the conversation is developing, people are finding one another as voices in the classroom. I prepare as they do: by coming to class having read and annotated the material, with questions for discussion.