PERSPECTIVE

Shoot first, ask questions later

STEVEN POOLE

Has magic lost its magic? People have been saying so since the sociologist Max Weber popularised the idea of the “disenchantment of the world” over the previous several centuries in a 1917 lecture. The growth of the scientific method and the industrial revolution removed humanity from a world in which spirits mediated between humans and the divine. But Weber was unable to play The Elder Scrolls, Diablo III or Magic: The Gathering. So what do the ludic magic systems of videogames do for us in our own postmodern condition?

The question is posed by an intriguing new paper, Mikael D Sebag’s ‘A Definition Of Enchantment: A New Approach To the Analysis Of Magic Systems In Fantasy Games’. In the author’s view, games could make more of an effort to make their magic really magical, and to encourage in the player the ways of thinking that characterise premodern esoteric practices. Such ways of thinking depend on analogy and imagination – in the way, for example, that in D&D a copper coin is necessary to perform a telepathic spell. (A penny for your thoughts!) An onscreen demon could be both an intermediary spirit (able to control, say, storms at the player’s behest) and “a symbol for something else” (perhaps anger). The player could be challenged to understand such associations through symbolic puzzling.