The Magic System: How Magic Became Technology in Modern Games. A Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling Speaker Series Event
The Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling Speaker Series hosts Mikael D. Sebag, Ph.D. candidate, UC-Irvine for a presentation of his work, "The Magic System: How Magic Became Technology in Modern Games."
Abstract
"Fantasy games are among the most beloved in the world, capturing the imaginations of millions of dedicated players and generating billions of dollars in annual revenue globally. Yet despite the genre’s prevalence in modern gaming, the magic systems within fantasy games remain a critically understudied domain, even as game scholars, journalists, and consumers bemoan the failure of most magic systems to feel magical at all.
Left to unfold as they have, magic systems—which represent a rare opportunity for combatting the Weberian disenchantment of the world—remain poised instead to further advance modernity’s mechanistic worldview.
But how did it come to be this way?
Through a critical exegesis of the literary and wargaming prehistory of the first modern fantasy game, Dungeons & Dragons (1974), I attempt to historicize the problem of the magic system’s disenchantment. I argue that magic has come to be progressively reconceptualized as technology in modern games as the result of three discrete yet interleaved historical processes unfolding in the interwar and Cold War periods—rationalization, mathematization, and computerization.
These intellectual currents have flowed from the source material that inspired Dungeons & Dragons, into the design of the game’s analog systems, and ultimately into the game’s many subsequent digital transmediations and imitators. Though the same processes that have technologized magic in fantasy games can also paradoxically resuscitate enchantment in secular modernity, it falls to designers to understand when and where the values that subtend technologization either erode or uphold conceptualizations of magic amenable to the modern imagination."
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
Open to the Public
Interpreter Requested?
No