Games and Art: The Case of Magic The Gathering

Well, I might as well continue on the "games" theme. This time, I'd like to examine the rhetorical question most often asked by gamers, "Are video games art?" I call it a rhetorical question because the answer is almost inevitably "yes." For example, take a look at the Wikipedia page on this topic which, while theoretically neutral, pretty clearly ends up taking a stance. I think, to get a better handle on this issue, it will be useful to look at a non-video game--the trading card game, Magic: The Gathering.

This will be a bit long so I'll split it up into parts.

Part 1: Magic The Gathering

I used to play Magic: The Gathering a lot when I was younger. I will briefly describe the game, for two reasons: I want this to be accessible to non-players, and some of its particular features are important to highlight for later purposes.

Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game; indeed, it is the first trading card game. Like regular card games, such as poker, it uses cards; it's different from games like poker in that it has a much, much larger variety of cards, with many new cards being made and released every year (which is how its company, Wizards of the Coast, makes money off of it). Players choose 60 of these cards (well, technically you can have more than 60, but there's almost never a reason to), construct a deck out of them, and play against other people who have done the same. As a game, this feature gives it several advantages over games like poker, including:
1) Variety - There's a much larger range of possible game states, thus making each game much different, which naturally makes being able to adapt to new situations on the fly more important;
2) Identification - People often identify with the deck they made, since after all they made it, and thus care more about it and subsequently care more about the game itself;
3) Change - Texas Hold 'Em will never change its rules; the "rules" of Magic change with every card that's released, as every card that's released allows the players to do things they couldn't have done before.

Of course, there are several weaknesses of this feature as well. I think there are probably three major ones:
1) Difficulty - Poker is hard to master, but easy to learn; Magic is definitely not easy to learn. Poker can be simple and elegant precisely because of its lack of change and (relative) lack of variety; Magic by necessity is much more complex.
2) Innovation - The entire business model of Magic depends upon its continually changing with new cards getting added. This means that, well, new cards have to be made all the time. Poker doesn't have that problem.
3) Balance - Furthermore, poker is a symmetrical game, meaning everyone who plays it is in the same position (aside from the amount of money they have, of course). Magic by nature is an asymmetrical game, which means balance becomes important--if one card or one strategy is far more powerful than others, that is if one deck becomes the "best" deck, the game becomes degenerate. Avoiding this state of affairs while keeping the game fresh and fun with each new set of cards is the main goal of the people currently making the game.

One of the people making the game right now is Mark Rosewater. He's currently the head designer of Magic, meaning he's the one in charge of point #2 above (#3 is the job of other people, called "developers"; #1 is sort of a collective task of everyone--see here for more information). More importantly for this article, though, he's also the de facto face of Magic: The Gathering R&D (the name of those who make the game). He writes a weekly article for their website, and has been doing so since the website started in January 2002; furthermore, since his article has always been about Magic's design, most of what people know about how and why Magic is designed comes from him. This is why he tends to be blamed for just about every part of the game someone doesn't like. On the flip side, though, it means, in the words of Jesse Mason:

I still don’t know who the most important non-Rosewater designers are. I assume that they make some cool things and have intriguingly unique ideas about design, but our Magic design philosophy is so Rosewater-centric that no one knows anything that they didn’t in some way gather from Rosewater himself. . . . In Magic design, Rosewater is such an omnipresent figure in design, design criticism, design theory, and so on, that literally no conversations about it can happen that don’t involve people either flat-out rejecting him or attempting in some way to live up to his ideals. And the ones who publicly reject him make bad sets and don’t get hired by R&D.

Speaking of Jesse Mason, he has a blog where he reviews Magic sets. Here's his most recent review, where he calls Rosewater's writing "inherently bad" and ends by baldly asserting, "Magic design is art."

I suppose it's obvious, now, where the inspiration behind this post came from.

Part 2: Mark Rosewater and Advertisement

This is Mason's argument that Rosewater's writing is, by its nature, bad (though I should emphasize that Mason clearly admires Rosewater and his writing in many ways, which he more or less explicitly admits in the article itself):

Advertising, by its nature, is a dishonest medium. This doesn’t mean that what an advertisement says is fundamentally false, but that, as an advertisement, it can never be fully honest with the reader. It must phrase its statements, make its arguments, and work toward always convincing readers that The Product is supreme, that The Product is worth your money.

In one of my favorite essays, David Foster Wallace discusses a paid essay by a writer whose other work Wallace quite liked. The essay in question, a travel-writing sort of thing about the cruise ship he was getting paid by, was found by Wallace to be inherently bad. This wasn’t because the quality of writing was subpar, but because, as an advertisement, it was a piece of writing which did not intend to serve the reader. The writing works against the reader, in service of the company paying for it. It does this while attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader, who is reading the essay looking for genuine information on the topic.

It is with a similar line of thinking that I think of all Rosewater writing as inherently bad. This isn’t because of one specific line of argument he made, or his ideas, but that his writing for DailyMTG has never sought solely to serve the reader. It is in the service of Wizards, to sell Magic.

To someone unfamiliar with Rosewater's writing, the radical and indeed shocking nature of this criticism will likely be unclear. Here's an article of his summarizing his first 100 articles. I'll briefly describe a few of the ones he rated as his best work:
-#5, where he argues for why some Magic cards should/must be bad.
-#11, where he explains "player psychographic profiles"--that is, his assessment of the three main types of people who play Magic. This analysis has been highly influential in the community; I would be honestly surprised if any English speaker who's played for more than a year doesn't know about it.
-#41, effectively a comedy article about goblins.
And then there's this extremely long, extremely personal article, where he talks about ten mistakes he made in dating and compared them to mistakes made in designing Magic cards. It was very popular at the time.

What's my point? It's not like Rosewater spends most his time hyping up the newest Magic set, talking about how great it is, and urging people to buy it now now now! Actually, he spends relatively little of his time doing that--mostly just in the month or so when a new set is announced, which means about 3 months a year (give or take). Much more of his time is spent explaining his own views behind Magic design.

Rosewater also has a blog, and on it he responded to Mason's argument:

I’m a spokesperson. I’ve always been up front and honest about that. It’s my job to get you all excited for new sets. And guess what, I am legitimately excited. I’ve spent numerous years working on the set in question (usually) and I’m eager for you all to experience it and tell me what you think about it. Listen to my podcast. I am genuinely an enthusiastic person.

Do I focus on the positives? Absolutely! But they are things I truly believe are great things about the product. I never lie. And after the fact, I always go back (mostly through my State of Design articles but often in other things as well) and give as honest a criticism as I can about our past work. Note that I truly cannot know how something has performed until after I see it used by the public.

Now, is all my writing somehow dishonest because of the relationship I have with Wizards? I don’t think so. I go far beyond my role to do things like talk about game design and communications and creativity. I don’t understand how all those topics are tainted by the fact that I work in the field. I’m not giving false game design advice.

Now, I have a lot of respect for Rosewater, and I can see how Mason's criticism may very well have hit rather hard; writing about Magic is clearly a passion for Rosewater, and Mason has argued that he basically can't do it in a good, honest way. That said, I think he's misunderstanding Mason. Mason's point as I see it is not that Rosewater ever intentionally lies or that he gives "false game design advice." His point is that Rosewater's livelihood depends on Magic selling, and thus he is almost certainly never going to say anything that might hurt that. As Mason says, "It’s not the demonstrable presence of dishonesty that bothers me; it is the impossibility of complete honesty." I can believe that Rosewater fully believes everything he says in public, but I'm also (almost) positive that there are many things he can't say because saying them would damage Magic's bottom line.

(And criticizing past work is irrelevant as long as it's always in the context of "The last one sucked, but the next one will be fantastic, I promise!" See Jim Sterling's video The Molyneux Cycle for more information on this process.)

In other words, I basically agree with Mason's premise: the purpose of Rosewater's articles is to serve Wizards of the Coast, not his readers. Does that make his writing inherently bad or dishonest? Not necessarily--I think much of it is extremely valuable and insightful, not to mention well-written--but the basic advertising nature of it must be kept in mind, especially when Rosewater talks about topics directly related to Magic. Which is where the rubber really meets the road here.

Some Magic sets sell better than others. One Magic block (a block is basically a group of sets meant to be thematically similar) that didn't sell so well was "Time Spiral." Mason really likes Time Spiral, and in his review of that block he says:

When discussions of this block happen from current employees of Wizards, their starting point is always the same: it didn’t sell well. All their other reasoning flows from that. The job of a Magic set is to sell product, and Time Spiral didn’t.

This is such a spectacularly bad line of thinking that I’m amazed I even need to address it, but since they’ve been saying this same thing since 2008, clearly something has to be done.

Art is not sales. Art is not defined by commerce. The greatness of art is contained in the work itself; art’s quality is not the amount of money it made, and it’s certainly not defined by its accessibility. We’re talking about creative endeavors here, not making spreadsheets to use in a powerpoint presentation for 50-something executives.

This, I think, is the motivation behind Mason's critique of Rosewater. After leveling that critique and talking a bit about art, Mason says:

The difference is what end result we hold highest. Rosewater, as an employee of Wizards, cares about its status as a product, with the bottom-line measurement always being sales. I care about its design in the aesthetic sense, with the bottom-line measurement being whether it appeals to me. His is, obviously, a lot more easily definable and quantifiable. But I’d like to think that mine has longer-term impacts beyond quarterly profits.

In other words: Whenever Rosewater talks about Magic, his primary metric for determining whether a set was good or bad is how much it sold. Mason, on the other hand, doesn't care at all about how much money it made and instead cares exclusively about its aesthetic qualities. To Rosewater--or at least, to Rosewater in his public persona--Magic is basically a commercial product; to Mason, it's an artistic product. Hence his statement at the end, "Magic design is art."

But is Mason right? Is Magic art?

Part 3: Games and Art

It's actually a rather unique question--while video gamers talk about how video games are art all the time, few people who play Magic: The Gathering argue that it's art. Of course, I've also never encountered anyone who says chess or poker is art, either. To get a foothold into this topic, then, let's focus on video games first; specifically, arguments for why they're not art. One of the most famous such arguments is this, by Roger Ebert. Much of his article is discussing definitions of "art" and criticizing the artistic merits of particular video games, which isn't particularly relevant to my purposes here. What is relevant, though, is this paragraph:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This point is echoed in an article by Dan H, on Ferretbrain (a website generally devoted to reviews and criticisms of geek culture stuff and which I overall highly enjoy). He makes the point that, while a video game may have beautiful graphics or a great storyline, in the end a video game is all about the gameplay, and gameplay cannot be art:

The thing is that gameplay just doesn't leave much room for artistic expression. Even the broadest possible definition of "art" doesn't include things like resource management, reflex tests and strategic thinking. "Game" and "Art" are orthogonal concepts: there is nothing in gameplay which allows you to experience art, there is nothing in art which allows you to play a game. It is theoretically possible to imagine an entity which permits both the expression of art and the playing of games, but those two functions would be wholly unrelated. A beautifully hand-carved chess set does not actually let you play chess any better than one you bought from the Works for two pounds, or a free-to-download chess program.

The point seems simple enough. As Ebert says, you can win a game, but you can't "win" a novel or a film, right?

Well...aside from finishing the novel or film, that is.

This point will likely strike the reader as bizarre. To explain myself, let's back up a bit. What does it mean to "win" a video game like Final Fantasy? To play it through until I reach the "The End" screen, of course. This is functionally the exact same as reading a book until I reach the last page.

"But you have to do things to win a video game," someone might object. This is true. You also have to do things to finish a book: turn the pages, understand the language, etc. Again, functionally these are the same process, only the medium is different. One may object that the things you need to do to finish a book are the same for every book, i.e. are a feature of the medium, while I have to do different things to win each video game. Even if this is true, though, I don't see how this difference alone means finishing a book isn't "winning" it, while finishing a video game is.

Consider the following hypothetical example: Alice and Bob get into a discussion about Harry Potter. Bob explains how he liked the first book, until the part where Harry gets devoured by a snake. Alice is confused, since that never happened in the book. Bob explains that he stopped reading at page 127 and simply made up the rest of the story himself, and part of that includes a snake eating Harry.

We probably want to say that Bob did something wrong here, that you're not supposed to stop reading a book halfway through and make up the rest of the story yourself, that you're breaking some sort of rules of book-reading by doing so. That the goal of reading a book is to actually, you know, read it, with the outcome that you accept everything the book describes as being true within the context of the book's story. Or, to use Ebert's words, that reading a book does indeed have "rules," "objectives," and a sort of "outcome."

To be fair to Dan H, it doesn't have resource management or strategic thinking. Then again, video games don't involve turning pages, and I don't see any inherent reason why resource management disqualifies you from being art while turning pages doesn't.

(In this video, Dan Olson makes a similar point in the context of failure, arguing that you can "fail" a book, movie, etc by not understanding it.)

So, to summarize: Ebert is wrong that you can "only" experience books and movies. They, too, have rules and victory conditions; they too involve, in some sense, playing a game. Video games, too, one can obviously "experience." Part of this experience are its graphics and story. But another part--probably the most important part--is its gameplay. The gameplay of a game has a huge impact upon the type of experience one has playing it. So I see no reason to say that gameplay cannot add to the artistic merit of the video game it's a part of.

"Alright," you may be saying, "so what about Magic: The Gathering?" I'm getting there. Let's talk about chess first.

Is chess art? Well, "chess" is a concept, not an actual thing in the world. Let's talk about an actual thing: two people actually playing chess. Is their game of chess "art"?

Certainly we experience something when we play chess. A game of chess has a beginning, middle, and end. It has conflict. It can often be quite emotional. Certainly people are often quite invested in the game of chess they play. Given the above argument, I see no reason to reject the label "art" to their game. And inasmuch as the rules of chess impact the aesthetic experience people have while playing chess, those rules can be judged for their aesthetic merits.

Let's return to Jesse Mason and his Magic block reviews. Of all he's written, I think the following paragraph summarizes his starting point the best:

Storm isn’t just a card for combo. Storm has, by this point, defined what combo can be. Instead of just a dumbass combination of two cards like Pestermite and Kiki-Jiki, Storm provides a deck that functions as one holistic machine, each Sleight of Hand a glimmering cog to turn the Tendrils of Agony. These decks, to me, are the highest form of beauty that Magic has achieved.

When Mason plays a "Storm deck," he clearly has an aesthetic experience that is extremely meaningful and beautiful to him. I see no reason not to call that "art."

Part 4: Judging Magic

In another post on his blog, Rosewater defends his metric of judging a Magic set by how much it sold:

Was [Avacyn Restored] our best design work? No, but it was far from our worst. Plus, and somehow I keep getting criticized for saying this - it sold a lot of packs. A lot! And I’m not just talking in the first month based on the popularity of Innistrad. It sold well the entire time it was on sale.

That means that someone out there liked it. In fact, a lot of someones liked it. And I refuse to call something a total failure that made such a large amount of our players happy.

As I've said, I respect Rosewater. But this is a bad argument, for several reasons. First, just because something sold well doesn't necessarily mean a lot of people liked it, or that it made a bunch of people happy. And even if, in the short term, it made people happy, this may not be true for the long term. However, these are complex topics and this post is already very long, so I'll bracket those concerns (though I'll likely revisit them in a later post) and focus on the final reason: even if a game entertained a bunch of people, that doesn't necessarily mean it was good design work.

One of the possible goals for artwork is to entertain people. But it's not the only goal. Michael Bay's Transformers movies certainly entertained a lot of people, if box office receipts are to be taken as gospel; that doesn't make them good movies. Art is not supposed to merely entertain, but also to cause people to feel strong emotions, to allow them to experience beauty, to teach them about the world, and etc and etc. And since games are art, and since Magic: The Gathering is art, all this is true for Magic as well. If someone, like Mason, criticizes a magic set on an aesthetic basis, responding that it sold well is utterly beside the point. We all know it sold well, the question is should it have sold well? Did it sell because of genuine artistic merit, or because of (what we might consider) bad reasons, like how big dumb blockbuster movies do the best internationally?

It isn't Rosewater's job to think about this, of course. Rosewater's job is to sell Magic; in the context of his job, it doesn't matter to him why the product sells, only that it does sell. [Edit: This is obviously false. I should have said: it doesn't matter to him whether the product sells for a good or a bad reason, only that it does sell.] As a critic, though, it is precisely Mason's job to give his own viewpoint as to what kind of Magic design is good, what kind is bad, and why you (the reader) should agree. In other words, it's Mason's job to argue that while Time Spiral didn't sell well, it should have; while Avacyn Restored sold well, it shouldn't have; and so you, the reader, should presumably demand more Magic blocks like Time Spiral and encourage your friends to do the same.

Which is why, even if I don't always agree with Mason, I'm glad he exists--and I do think it's a problem that Magic design philosophy is so dominated by a Wizards employee like Rosewater, no matter how smart and insightful Rosewater may be.

Part 5: Conclusion

Anything that has the potential to offer an aesthetic experience is art.

Games are art.