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Yorke on Games #10 – Jessica Jones Shows Us That Dumbing Down Magic is Bad

Like some of you reading this, I’ve just finishing binge-watching the new Marvel series Jessica Jones (beware: spoilers below). Throughout the story, I noticed that the main villain Kilgrave (aka the Purple Man, for the comic book purists out there) was primarily engaged in playing a peculiar game of solitaire; a game he couldn’t keep himself from playing because his life lacked the valuable commodity known as difficulty. I will argue that it is precisely this good of difficulty which makes Magic a leisure activity worth pursuing, and that this constitutes the reason why initiatives to dumb down the game will always fail.

The bad guy always plays black? C’mon, Marvel…
The bad guy always plays black? C’mon, Marvel…

Kilgrave’s Predicament

The Purple Man has the power to make people do anything he wants them to, simply by telling them to. This puts him in an interesting philosophical predicament: he can easily acquire anything he wants, but he is bored due to the ease of acquisition. Because of his power, he’s also socially isolated from other humans, who are compelled to behave like robots around him, and have the same moral status from his perspective. It’s like he’s trapped in a one-man utopia of material plenty, with many possible diversions but no truly meaningful activity available to him. His experience is that of complete alienation, which at least partially accounts for his sociopathy.

Jessica’s Solution

Due to a trauma suffered while in Kilgrave’s service, Jessica Jones somehow finds herself immune to his powers. Almost immediately, Kilgrave becomes morbidly fascinated with Jessica, who also possesses superhuman abilities, because he recognizes her as his only equal in the world. The ultimate conquest — or, perhaps more charitably, the only possible meaningful activity – for Kilgrave would be to have Jessica fall in love with him without him using his powers, due to the fact that he could not (even accidentally) influence her decision to do so. In any other case, he couldn’t be sure that his powers didn’t override his partner’s ability to give willing consent. However, because he principally still sees other humans as objects, his attempts at seducing Jessica come off as inconsiderate, inappropriate, and often insane. It is unclear whether he is pursuing the seduction simply to prove to himself that he can do it, or if he hopes for some sort of potential salvation in the love of an uncoerced partner.

Either way, Kilgrave’s fascination with Jessica is a one-sided affair, as she would like to see him die for his earlier transgressions against her, which causes him to indulge in a great number of inefficient and elaborate ploys to gain her affections: replicating her childhood home from old photographs; erecting a shrine to her image in an upscale apartment; becoming a hero for a day to please her. None of these actions bring him any closer to the subjugation of her will, and in fact function as an extended game of solitaire Russian roulette for him, in that she finally does submit to her instinct to kill him (Spoiler! I warned you). Nevertheless, he had seemingly dedicated himself to a meaningful task, and although his tactics were extremely questionable, it is difficult to see what else he could have done to bring any reasonable degree of challenge into his existence. But why should we call this a game?

Hurka on the Value of Difficulty

Canadian philosopher Thomas Hurka writes that:

…it’s in fact characteristic of good games to be not only more difficult than they could be but also in absolute terms reasonably difficult. They can’t be so difficult that no one can succeed at them; then there’d be no point playing. But they also can’t lack all challenge: they must strike a balance between too much and too little difficulty.Thomas Hurka, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii, in Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia 3rd ed., 2014 (Toronto: Broadview Press).

That may be one of the main reasons that more people enjoy Magic: The Gathering as their game of choice over either Rock-Paper-Scissors (at the too-little-difficulty end of the spectrum), or Decision Games’ monster game War in the Pacific 2nd edition (designed by Kevin Kiff, 2006), with its nearly 9000 unit counters, 7 grand strategic, and numerous smaller tactical maps (at the too-much-difficulty end).I plan to return to the subject of ‘Monster Games’ in the future. For more on War in the Pacific specifically: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22843/war-pacific-second-edition
Components: 7 full size (22 x 34″) strategic maps in full color, new tactical maps with nearly 338 individual islands for new ground units to fight over, 32 die-cut counter sheets, nearly 9,000 counters showing all types of units from the Pacific Theater, rule books, chart books and assorted displays and player aid charts. This game weighs about 8lbs and comes in a sturdy 11x17x3 inch box.

U of T philosopher and music-lover Thomas Hurka
U of T philosopher and music-lover Thomas Hurka

It also explains why Kilgrave is obsessed with Jessica. Manipulating the rest of the people in the world is too easy for him, and the task of generating meaning in complete isolation is too difficult (arguably impossible for social animals like us). While the odds of his attempt at seduction succeeding are extremely improbable, it proves to be an autotelic activity (an activity pursued for its own end; remember, he can get anything he actually needs for free at any time) that is neither conceptually impossible to execute, nor too easy to be of interest. Seducing Jessica is a good game for Kilgrave, perhaps the only game in town. We can tell it’s a game because he needn’t have played it. He could have simply left the city, or have had her killed several times over through the use of his various agents. He knew where she lived, dammit! The fact that he was enjoying playing a game with himself is the only logical explanation for his choice of less-than-optimally-efficient means for achieving his end. In this way, and perhaps only in this way, Kilgrave resembles Wile E. Coyote, another villainous character fixated with attaining an improbable outcome while employing inefficient means.

Stay on target!
Stay on target!

Wile E. Coyote wants to eat the Roadrunner, surely, but after a few episodes of Looney Tunes you begin to realize that there’s more than that to it. What Wile is really chasing is the achievement of catching the fastest prey possible; he’s chasing his dream, and if he actually caught the Roadrunner he couldn’t play this game anymore, and his life would be lesser for it. Without difficulty, there can be no sense of achievement, and without a sense of achievement, life feels hollow. Perhaps Family Guy demonstrated this phenomenon best in the following clip:

Achievement unlocked! But it’s a Pyrrhic victory if you identify with your goal so completely that reaching it leaves you with nothing left to do afterwards; and thus it’s not clear that even if Kilgrave had achieved his goal of Jessica’s seduction, that he wouldn’t have just killed himself later on for lack of anything else meaningful to do. There would, after all, be no other subjects left who are capable of resisting him. The ‘game’ of seduction therefore turns out to be more like a puzzle, in that once it is solved there is nothing left to be gained from re-solving it. In order to keep life meaningful, he would need to stave off actually seducing her, just like the Coyote would need a catch-and-release program in place to keep the meaning-producing activity of Roadrunner-chasing possible. Anything easier to catch would not satisfy Coyote, as it would not constitute a true achievement for him after the epic struggle provided by the Roadrunner. Hurka offers us a way out of this vicious cycle by refocusing us on gaming:

If we ask what explains these differences—between achievements and non-achievements, and between greater and lesser achievements—the answer is surely in large part their difficulty: how complex or physically challenging they are, or how much skill and ingenuity they require. So if doing difficult things is as such good, playing good games will in that respect be intrinsically valuable. The rules of these games create challenges, and overcoming challenges is good.Hurka, pp. xvii-xviii.

What makes non-puzzle game-playing different (dare I say better?) than Roadrunner-eating (not eating in general) or Jessica-seducing (not seduction in general) is that we can play them again and again, and get the same satisfaction, or sense of achievement, out of them each time. Their rules permit the iteration of difficult activities which generate meaningful experiences. This is precisely why Bernard Suits insisted that good games would be needed to sustain a utopia: they are perpetual meaning generators, and meaning is the one scarce good in a materially superabundant world. That meaning is threatened, however, by simplifying what we all recognize as a good game.

Rosewater on the Value of Simplicity

In Mark Rosewater’s “New World Order” article of 2011, he expressed concerns about the cumulative complexity of Magic and how new players had an increasingly difficult job in learning or catching up with the game.Rosewater’s full article:
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/172
The survival and growth of any game (or culture) relies on its ability to recruit new players (members), so it follows that the game should be made as appealing to them as possible. His response to comprehension complexity (cards that are inherently confusing or do things you wouldn’t think they do on first read) and board complexity (cards that potentially affect too many other cards on the battlefield), was to dramatically simplify cards that appear at common rarity, with the thought that this would appeal more to beginners, who see the game via fewer packs than enfranchised players. Strategic complexity (how the cards are played differently by players with different skill levels), was not a target for reduction by R&D, though it seems impossible not to reduce this kind of complexity when scaling back the other two.

Yorke10d

The issue with attempting to reduce the appearance of complexity in a game like Magic is that it is inherently complex. There is a 200-page long set of comprehensive rules for the game. Selling it on the basis of its simplicity is disingenuous. Besides, it’s evident that the people who like Magic like complicated games. To enjoy playing, and to gain skill in it, you must embrace that complexity, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

When I started playing the game in 1996, part of the appeal was that there were cards I just didn’t understand. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the hell Ice Cauldron did, or was supposed to do. Which was fine; it wasn’t exactly tearing up the tournament (or even casual) scene. I could still play the game without using it, and it served to heighten the mystery of the game that these cards existed (and there seemed to be more of them back then) whose utility was not immediately appreciable.

There are legal wills with less text
There are legal wills with less text

Now, I’m clearly an enfranchised player, so perhaps my opinion on this matter isn’t relevant, but I still remember what it was like to learn the game, and to relearn it once the stack was formally introduced, and again when damage on the stack was removed, and most recently when scrying 1 off a mulligan became a rule. Somehow I managed to more or less keep up with all of these changes and even get a little better at playing. If you want to attract players like me – who play and stay — complexity is a selling point, not a bugbear.

Perhaps Magic has thrived of late because of R&D’s ‘New World Order’; but it’s equally likely that it’s thrived in spite of it, or regardless of it. It’s also debatable whether Portal (watered-down Magic expansions for beginners) was truly instrumental in gaining a much wider audience for the game. After all, if difficulty is valuable, then by reducing it we also reduce the accomplishment involved in playing and winning the game. We can’t feel as good about ourselves when we win at Rock-Paper-Scissors as we can when we win at Clue, and that goes for both beginners and experts at those games.

Therefore, the real failure of the Portal sets is that they were implicitly insulting; they might as well have printed “You’re not smart enough to play real Magic” on the boosters. It’s like buying a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer for your 16-year-old nephew on his birthday. He’ll say thanks, but deep down you’ll know what he’s really thinking. Wizards of the Coast just has to trust that there’s enough of a player base out there to enjoy ‘the real thing’, and not some diluted version of the same, to keep them in business.

Conclusion

Magic is a complex game, and this is a good thing. Despite its daunting comprehensive ruleset, Magic does not fall into the category of a hyper-complex ‘monster game’ because by knowing a few basic principles (casting costs, the phases of a turn, the stack) and reading the rules text off the cards that are played, most players are able to immediately understand what’s happening without having to reference those rules. I think it thus qualifies as a Hurkean good game, with a golden mean of difficulty, and would not advocate further Rosewatering (dumbing down).

Jessica Jones showed Hollywood that their audience was ready for a superhero story that traffics in adult themes and philosophical topics, not just sexless demigods pounding each other’s faces in. Bleeping out the curse words wouldn’t enhance peoples’ appreciation of the drama; nor would the addition of a laugh track make the comedic bits funnier for them. Unlike its character Kilgrave, the show doesn’t need to tell people what to do. Jessica Jones can be what it is and still entertain. We’d all be better off if Magic had the same level of self-confidence as a product.

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