Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Again, I'm not seeing the slightest problem with magic being a bizarre intersection of science and spiritual mysticism in a story. Really, I can't see it as anything else. If nobody has the faintest clue how it works, people will lock down what patterns they can and work from there.
But what if there are no patterns? What if the gods that administer these things, that control these forces simply are not ruled by any logic or patterns that humans can discern, as it is in most stories of yore?
The problem is when the science is actually an element- when there is some understanding of how or why (the why doesn't deal with cause and effect, though) the magic works, it loses the mysticism because it's no longer, well, a mystery.
^ also that
^^ Then its pattern is explicitly "ruled by the gods themselves, what they say goes". It's no more or less a mystery than they themselves are. Science complete, though people will be trying to keep track of things as they go and adjust as screwballs are thrown.
^ Hell, if anything, the "gods dictate all of it" scenario would be one of the few I can think of that would strip the mysticism from it altogether. You don't get much less mystic than the whims of a couple dudes, however above our understanding.
But then it becomes about how these dudes do it and let other people harness these powers as well as why they allow for such and so on.
That's still mystic. You understand the whys, but not the hows, the whats, or even the rationale behind it. You understand the source of it, but that's it.
I have some thoughts on this!
/crowd groan
Okay, so two of the things I think separate folkloric magic and modern "superhero" or "fireball" magic are spectacle and time. Spectacle is the sensory result of the magic, not necessarily just the visual expression of it. A spell's smell, feel, sound and texture can all be considered part of the "spectacle". In this case, I use the term just to express the concept of observing magic. Time is self-explanatory; it's the distance between the beginning and end of a spell. Folkloric magic tends to be long-term, whereas modern magic tends to be instantaneous or at least very short in span.
So I suppose the question is, "how does one harness magic narratively?", which is an awesome question I'm not sure on how to answer. Given that video games form the bulk of the context here, I'll run with that medium.
One of the issues, most likely, is balance. Not necessarily internal balance, but inherited balance. It's pretty clear that most fantasy video games fall under the general auspice of D&D influence, which made wizards frail to offset their amazing powers. For better or worse, fantasy games provide a separation between magic and other skill disciplines with this balance methodology in mind. So then its a question of whether that kind of balance is really necessary, and I personally think it isn't. Surprise surprise.
Using magic to attack, heal, buff and debuff is the easy way out, because it standardises magic into expected ways to use the game mechanics. If we look at folklore, wizards and witches aren't feared for the damage they can wreak with a fireball (approximately zero) but for the influence their magic can have. In these historical folkloric settings, it's still swordmaster knights that rule the battlefield close-up, and mighty archers who bring death from afar. Wizards and witches tend to exist in less overtly violent contexts, however, and work magical influence moreso than the modern conception of a "spell".
This could mean different things depending on context. A single-player campaign has the benefit of providing length enough that a long-term spell could be set up, worked on, altered and consummated. Perhaps many. But I think the answer to multiplayer scenarios is more elegant and fits neatly into familiar gameplay mechanics. You don't see wizards cast spells on the battlefield in the old tales, if they ever step upon one. No, if there's any benefit for a caster, it's that they've prepared conditional spells to give them advantages unperceived by mortal eyes. To that end, why not use the standard CoD perk system to represent spells? One might give you a radar in a fantasy setting, or be able to see enemy lifesigns through objects at a certain distance. The point is, these should be passive support abilities that provide a benefit to you and your team rather than providing an alternate means to blow someone's shit sky high.
In all these tales, mundane kings and queens still rule the courts and knights still rule the battlefield. How on earth could this be true if spellcasters can summon firestorms at will? One of the differences between folklore and modern fantasy is that the former knows that the capacity to call down a firestorm would have major social repercussions and therefore alter the setting (which, to the teller, is more or less reality of their modern day). Modern writers tend not to understand what makes the medieval period tick, so they throw whatever shit they like in there. But there are ways to handle magic that doesn't fall into the fireball method, and some even fall under currently existing mechanics.
So I guess the issue is that fantasy game designers are un-fucking-creative and that most fantasy game consumers expect such a limited array of mechanics that anything that falls outside that purview makes them piss themselves with fear a la Demon's Souls, Mount And Blade.
dammit alex
why do you always make me think about game mechanics and stuff
'Cause it amuses me, duh.
suddenly, Alex wrote an essay.
he probably thinks we're a university class
IJBM: The University
oh my fucking god
but it makes me tl;dr my homework and run off to other forums to try and implement game mechanics while never actually being able to implement them
OH HELL NO! NO ESSAYS HERE! KEEP IT COOL AND CLASSY! NOT COOL AND CLASSEY!
Thread Hop!
I read the Google definition in the thread and that made me think, "Well, as soon as you understand it, it is no longer supernatural. Lightning ceased to be seen as supernatural once we understood it and it became natural"
...Which now leads to the hilarious image of a scientist going around in a heaven-like afterlife and studying the crap out of everything
That's pretty much what I was saying.
:< I was getting bored and decided to thread hop after the google part, ok?
Seconding Bee's post about not being an either/or question. Magic is in my opinion the most compelling when it has a ground set of rules, but holes in said rules for which there never is a definite explanation. A how, but not a why, with various speculations of the why adding a mystical/spiritual/philosophical/whatever dimension.
What Bee and InsanityAddict said; I've been trying to say, this whole time, that it's a matter of degrees, but people are looking at it in absolute terms. If there's no defined method by which it works, it's essentially writer fiat and/or a thing that people would be crazy to use, and if the methods of its workings are too easily defined, it's not magic anymore.
Also a good point.
Same with Protega's post last page.
And, I guess, this is the problem with holding half the discussion on #yackfest, all our discussion about cause and effect and the nature of mystery in fiction is lost.
>manipulate completely
>understand it completely
There are those absolutes again; I agree that magic shouldn't be entirely understood. If anything, magic, as a field of scientific study, would be the study of phenomena that defy the other branches of science, as they're known; it's a good way to account for things that don't make sense by current standards, and as the study evolves, phenomena that were previously thought to be magical could be reclassified. But the idea that magic should be entirely whimsical and chaotic (or in other words, entirely up to the whims of the author) is equally silly, and much more depressing and uninteresting, at least in the context of fiction. I already gave my opinion on the subject of chance as a driving force for plot in another post, though. Magic, or phenomena that can be described as magical, in real life, is another debate subject entirely.
Remember that the context under which that quote was written on the first place was in reference to the idea of an in-depth magic system where everything about it is understood and used as a tree of superpowers and where you can learn everything there is to know. So yeah, the absolute in that case was necessary.
This betrays a lack of understanding of how fiction works and actually ignores Protega's point, that is that fiction about magic should not be just about the superpowers and the outer conflict resolution, but about the spiritual journey and the inner conflict resolution. In fact, fiction as a whole should care more about the characters and how their lives and views are affected by the journeys they must perform than about how they achieve surviving at the end. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive, but as videogame fiction is these days, there's definetly a problem and it's that the second type of resolution is almost never seen. Hell, Bioshock, a game that is supposedly one of the masterpieces of game storytelling still engages on this problem.
And that's the problem at hand, really. What Malkavian, Cygan and me are advocating for is not for stories about magic to treat magic as something utterly senseless and impossible to understand, but for stories to not treat magic as a science, which is definetly a trend that is seen a lot in fiction.
Can magic have laws? Yes. Can it keep the mystery while doing so? Also, yes. It's been seen and done, even. And that's nice and all. But it doesn't mean that stories where magic is treated as a cryptic and mysterious are bad.
Which leads me to my next point. And it's that stories reflect human nature and the way we live. We might write about aliens, animals and many other non-human things. But we humanize them. We make them human because it's what we know. It's what we understand. And chance is a big part of living as a human person. We don't know everything. We don't control everything. There being unknown concepts in a history is nothing but an extension of this condition that human storytelling has upon itself.
I was more responding to it as it was being used by Cygan.
I'll get to the rest of your post later.
So there were some interesting points here (some shit ones too) and I'd like to try and generally respond rather than specifically quoting.
The first is that people seem to think I want magic to go on the absolute other specrum of order-versus-chaos. While I disagree that this version of magic can't be interesting (I promised myself I would stop sucking Micheal Moorcock's... moorcock but his writing did inspire this thread) I'm not asking for a level of complete chaos. I'm simply asking for magic to not be simple tools with a different set of window dressing. If all you want magic to be is a different set of tools to make people do cool things, fine. If you want to actually explore the idea of magic in a narrative context then a little more digging, a little more spiritualism (whether it be divine, infernal, or gnostic) needs be had and a lot less certainty
As for the argument that it would make magic work at the whims of the writer... well, yeah. Magic being something totally fabricated (unless you're Grant Morrison or Alan Moore I guess?) is always a work at the whims of a writer. Even if you have a detailed rule-set worked out, you can still make magic look like a deus ex machina or poor writing. If you can't make you magic seem like an extension of the world then that's your failing as a writer, not an issue with the attitude taken.
Also, I think very desperate or very unwise (I'm going to use this word in place of stupid) characters can be compelling. In fact, desperation is one of the key spices of melodrama. Too much can feel canned, but the point remains. There are plenty of stories of people compelled to a life of crime due to lack of options or poor judgment. There are plenty of great stories where people due the same with magic. (Hellblazer comes to mind)
You mean "can", right?
Indeed. Christ I hate when muscle memory makes me misspell one word so that it changes the meaning of the sentence. -_-
Heh, know that feel. But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. It kinda bothers me that a lot of the points in here were trying to say that bad writing = not letting the characters be in control of the situation.
See, I actually do agree with almost all of what Malk and Juan just said, or feel that it's stuff that was obvious in the first place. I just can't remember where I said things that imply disagreement in the first place; maybe people have misinterpreted me or something, I dunno. If I could be reminded, I might have more to say. Although I should probably admit that I tend to care much more about plot and character drama than the world in which a story takes place (and thus, its concepts), and as such I frequently care more for elements of the world as plot devices than I do as their own concepts. So I might be the wrong person to have this debate with, since I don't really care how magic is portrayed as long as it makes an intriguing plot.
See, I maintain that viewpoint while still agreeing with you guys on a lot of stuff. It's weird. Though I suppose I disagree with this viewpoint:
Or at least, it's not an absolute truth.
And I disagree with the notion that magic's spiritual quality and scientific analysis of it (or attempts at it, anyway) can't coexist. If anything, a plot point could be that scientists look at magic too objectively, or something.
But the thing is, if a story only focuses in creating a believable victory, then why should you care about them winning on the first places, if you don't even like these people?
The idea is not that they can't coexist per se, but that often times, the second isn't prioritized over the first, which makes it come off as a science, rather than magic.