When I was a kid, at any one time at least a couple of my friends were reading this little doorstopper called The Hobbit. You might have heard of it. It had a brooding dragon on the cover, but as they informed me in hushed, conspiratorial tones, “Everyone thinks the dragon’s the Hobbit… BUT IT’S NOT.” Little kids are so dramatic. Not to mention elitist. You see, in spite of some mild curiosity as to what this Hobbit thing was, I was too much of a nonconformist to investigate. Same reason I’ve been so late to the Twilight Saga. I’m on Team Jacob, BTW. Don’t spoil it for me.
Cut to a decade later, and the guy who directed that ghost movie with Michael J. Fox was handed the keys to the LotR juggernaut and off we went. I didn’t mind the first movie. There was a lot more talking than I expected. And jogging. A lot more pan pipe. Far fewer creatures. A lot less magic. Less fighting. Actually, it was basically a New Zealand tourism ad without the heli-skiing and jet boating and people rubbing noses. But overall I didn’t mind it. The Balrog was cool. That octopus thing. Liv Tyler was born to be an elven aristocrat. And we were dealing with pre-Kerr Orlando Bloom. But most importantly, you got the feeling that something might happen. Eventually. Next Christmas? Or the one after? Maybe?
Anyway, for any flaws, it was suitably pretty, and aesthetically consistent, and Middle Earthy - EXCEPT for one scene which stuck out like a gangrenous thumb: Gandalf v. Saruman. The two most powerful wizards of the realm having a wire fight chafed so painfully against the Anglo-Celtic roots of the setting that I just about choked on a Malteser. But artistic license aside, it’s worth considering why the scene made sense at all; why dolts like me immediately recognised that a couple of pensioners shaking their canes at each other constituted a rumble.
Not pictured: duelling wizards.
The thing is, the supernatural is tempered by sets of rules. The wizard fight makes sense because there’s a contemporary cultural understanding that magic can generate the equivalent of physical force. In 1977, when Darth Vader reached out his gloved hand, the audience had no doubt as to why Admiral Motti got all choked up. Nonetheless, The Force’s boundaries had to be clarified over time to make it function meaningfully within the saga:
- It’s an innate capacity requiring dedicated training to be wielded to the utmost.
- It permits superhuman reflexes and athletic ability without overcoming typical physical vulnerabilities such as blaster beams or Rancor bites.
- If used selfishly, it can corrupt.
- It’s harnessed by a symbiotic microbe called a midi-chlor[iiiiiiiiiiiiiiip].
The reason there was such a backlash against midi-chlorians is that George Lucas stabbed his own lore in the nards. Star Wars is a fantasy space-opera (or space-Western), not science-fiction. The Force was established as magical, not physical, and therefore Jedi as supernatural warriors, not the far, far away equivalent of Jamaican sprinters. They were rare and enigmatic. But in a universe in which FTL travel, “human” cloning, cybernetics, laser guns, lightsabers, advanced A.I., and underwater force fields are the norm, surely midi-chlorians could be grown in the lab and introduced to the body to create Jedi; or an army of Darth Mauls simply manufactured by those weird pinheads on the fish planet.
At any rate, though a terribly unpopular miscalculation on Lucas’ part, his motivation isn’t hard to fathom. In fact, I’m going to just come right out and say it. He was seduced by the dark side of The Force. He succumbed to the perversion of magic in storytelling - a heinousness perpetrated by none other than the insidious spectre of Gaming.
Indeed it is.
Close your mouths. I’m serious. Nowhere has the development of rules governing the supernatural been more strict and methodical than in gaming. Not just digital gaming, mind you, but competitive gaming per se, beginning with table top games like Dungeons and Dragons, and evolving into the matrix of hit points, tech trees and multipliers that we’ve come to hotkey and love. Tolkien’s books play with magic in the sense that it’s a capacity representative of the alignments of the “players” involved, however the fate of Middle Earth doesn’t rest on mana bars or the roll of a d20 - magic is merely a creative tool to present human qualities such as the desire for power, xenophobia, family ties, the sacrifices one must make for love, and so on. In the early 1950s, magic hadn’t yet been codified to suit gaming.
Thus, Gandalf and Saruman don’t actually fight in the novel because it wouldn’t have made sense. The Grey doesn’t engage the Balrog with anything more than a sword. From memory, the most gnarly thing he does in the whole story is turn his staff into a floodlight. Magic simply wasn’t thought of as being offensive or defensive, but rather transformative or revelatory (man to Ring Wraith; the palantír). The contemporary use of magic as colourful versions of the sword and shield speaks to the prevailing nature of games - that is, their combative tendencies, and the imperatives of stability and consistency.
Fun fact: before playing opposite Gandalf, Balrog appeared in little-known game Street Fighter II.
In essence, fighting is competition, and when competing - seriously competing - it’s a requirement that we are given the opportunity to strategise, rather than merely gamble. Competing is about pitting our skill and courage against another’s. Chance puts paid to that. The way magic has been absorbed into gaming, therefore, has by and large involved attributing to it mathematical and physical properties. Spells, for example, will have rates of fire and cool down periods like guns. They’ll require ammunition in the form of mana, or its equivalent. And they’ll be effective in alignment with the properties of various earthly matter. Fire will destroy flesh and wood but be lousy against water and metal - and so on, in a vast game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. When we consider the history of magic, however, it’s hard to find instances of Merlin and co. sitting around quibbling over whether they needed to grind out enough XP for their spells to have the HP to slay the dragon.
This is a modern spin on magic, making it game-able. But it’s certainly not the only way we play with magic. And this is because gaming isn’t always about competition - it’s about creative solutions to problems - which is why it’s strange that magic is seldom used as a creative force. The way time and space could be altered in the recent Zelda games, for instance, is one of the most fondly remembered game mechanics in recent history. Nonetheless, the tendency to ground things in the physical persists. The plot of BioShock Infinite, for example, is grounded in physics, not magic. And though this is consistent with humanity’s ongoing scientific enlightenment, it’s a shame to note that magic - pure magic - has become an endangered species.
The delicious question is "can science bring us super intelligent monkey butlers?"
So, what do you think? Is there room, today, for old-school magic in gaming? How best is it used? Is it okay to involve creative, non-combative, perhaps non-linear supernatural elements? Is the traditional uncertainty and tendency to backfire (à la A Midsummer Night’s Dream) desirable? Or has Merlin’s legacy really gone the way of the cave-troll?
Daniel Clark is an Australian freelance gaming journalist and writer. He recently wrote a piece on gaming and the brain. Why not follow him on IGN and join the IGN Australia Facebook community?
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