Five years ago I started making Magic the Gathering cards. It all started as a sort of agreement between a friend of mine that wanted to delve into game design and me being bored as hell and wanting to do stuff, whatever stuff. We both had a background playing magic together as kids so the choice seemed quite obvious. The project kinda went nowhere, but tinkering with the cards made me realize there was more to it that what it seemed; in the format of the cards and mechanics I found a language, not only to make a game, but to be used to communicate ideas. I finished it on my own, scraping the internet for images and completing the world I created to sort of fill the gaps of gameplay with lore. I guess that's the usual procedure, or at least the one one expects.
Fast forward to a six months ago.
I had finished writing my book, which in a sense is also a language (narrative language) to also communicate ideas and conflicts. But a book is very different, at least how I wrote it. If you want to communicate or explain something, you just do. You hit a white page and go to town, in whatever extension or form you want. Yes, you still create characters and maybe give them the expository charge, but its still a very limitation-free format. But of course, that has it's drawbacks. I remembered the quote from Mark Rosewater (I think that's the name) from a speech he gave about creating Magic cards. "Limitations breed creativity." That quote was very surprising to me, a kid that refused to learn, analyse or compose metric poetry in high-school on the basis of "conscientious objection". In my mind, art and creativity should be, by principle, as free from constraints and rules as possible. And that's still not far-fetched to me, but it comes with nuance. Now, I wanted to do the opposite. Instead of riding free on a line of text without barriers or frontiers, I wanted to squeeze meaning into little boxes, and embrace the constraints of a language as my tools to communicate it.
That's great and all, but what is "Magic" language? It's just a game you play and the lore comes in second place, we certainty didn't pay attention to it when we were kids and were trying to just min-max the game to beat each other. We didn't read Magic lore, read the flavor text or even pay much attention to the images.
Well, first of all that's a lie. There was a time, indeed where all that meant jack shit to us. But the sole reason we became mystified with the game was because the images looked pretty. Not only pretty, evocative. I remember reading over and over and watching over and over my own cards, when we didn't event knew you could play with those. There was a perceived hidden deepness in them, an evocative force. A magic card was a fascinating object on itself. And second of all, even when we forgot about all that and just wanted to play, the narrative force of the cards is not located only in their "designated" flavorful parts. Flavor in magic is ingrained on the mechanics, cost, colors, rarity, function, everything in the card. It's a unitary entity, in which you can't separate one from the other and whose function is not only to "beautify" the card but to make holistic sense, to explain an entity, in which in the best of cases their game mechanics are self-explanatory and so obviously linked to it's identity they don't require to read entire books about past events to not only "figure out" or "understand" but to "feel".
Yes, I wanted to used magic cards as a narrative device. Which is not very far from creating cards just because and then enriching them with a backstory and lore in it's result if both are done very well, but requires a totally different approach and mentality. It's very easy for me (and I assume for anybody) to create magics cards whose sole purpose is to convince you that the card you created is, indeed, a Magic card. It's also relatively easy to make them good, pretty, or interesting; like the members of communities of magic cards creators often do, as the cards created this way serve only themselves. I could create hundreds of Spiders and Ogres and brave warriors if I wanted to, pack them together and go "yep, that's a magic card edition that could perfectly be a magic card edition". But as you can expect, that's not my jam. Amidst the storm of AI generative tools I was trapped in early winter, I almost jokingly started to prompt ChatGPT with ideas for a set, and it came up with kernel ideas for cards. Then, I opened Midjourney and told it to make some art that crossed my mind. I am ashamed to admit than I needed a couple of weeks to think the obvious "hey, I could use this to actually create original magic art".
So, I had the means. And the time. I just needed a reason. Something I wanted to communicate or explore it's complexity with. I though about making cards about the world of Berserk, but that seemed like another case of just doing it because I can. Then, binging videos on youtube I found that channel named Rysthic Studies, an incredible channel that focused on art and flavor and not much gameplay. I devoured it in a week, and finally came to the video about a new plane (planes are like worlds, or universes in Magic) I didn't knew about. Well, I didn't knew about most of them, because I've been out of the Magic world for almost a decade now. What was different about it was that it was based on American mythology. Not about native american mythology in form of spirits and the usual stuff. Modern, urban mythology. Modern societies and cultures have myths and legends, not necessarily meaning lies, but foundational ideas so entangled with it's media and cultural output one doesn't usually reefers to it as mythology. But it's there. The plane was based on a fictional city, with lots of stuff related to social issues like class, social mobility, legacy. The American Dream could be felt though a veil of fiction. It basically deconstructed a modern culture into it's bare bones and reinterpred it using a canvas of fantasy. That was my shit. I love classic fantasy. Conquests, kingdoms and beasts. But I don't have any motivation to create it. The conflicts that emanate and are fictionalized from what I name "pastoral societies" are done and ever-done. I wanted to translate to a world of fiction conflicts coming from the modern age, not related necessarily to technology, but born from the core of urban society.
So I typed in google "urban myths". That didn't help. I wasn't behind what I though were gimmicks, but after endemic conflicts that could be "mythologized". Then it struck me. My favorite work of modern fiction. I could adapt that (more than adapt, use the core conflict within it, at least at first). That would be perfect to create a light-hearten card game for children to play around.
Ah yes, perfect.
So now, the easy part. How do I create a world in which to communicate the oppressive nature of power and the risks of idealism turning totalitarianism? The conflict resultant from it was obvious, an uprising threatening to appear. But what could be the scenario? Do I really have the force to introduce so many ideas and nuanced stuff while at the same time creating a new world for it? No, but my memory was there to rescue me. There was already an urban world in Magic. Used for alien invasions and superpowered beings. What a waste. I could just use that, create the minimum necessary to link it's past history to the state I wanted for it (that was quite fact) and use it's own characters, rules and mechanics.
Ravnica is a world that mirrors a multicultural European mega-city. While in the world of Magic for example minotaurs are beasts that spell wildlife and evil, here are part of a society, maintaining part of their identity but also transformed into a part of urban life. To create a minotaur in Ravnica you can either take the original and imagine how would it fare off in the modern city or you can do it in reverse, imagine a modern city and guess what would be the representations of different organizations, people or civil functions in fantasy. And maybe some of them can be a minotaur.
In order to understand what I mean when I reefer when I talk about the "language" of Magic or that world, I have to explain a couple of things. We come with preloaded expectations about the world when we come into a game. Some of them are from general culture, like the fact that maybe a minotaur should be wild and aggressive. Some of those come from the medium we are currently using. In magic, you would expect the minotaur to be red, and probably to be a creature with around two to three power and two to three resistance. These things mean nothing to the non player, but the game itself create expectations and a language you have to commit with in order to tell what you need to tell. Magic is full of micro expectations, and to navigate them is more art than science, but the main one, the one that's genius is the color wheel.
I could talk for hours about it, but here is what you need to know. There are five colors in magic, each card is from a combination of them and you can only play it if you pay mana of that color. The colors are not only a differentiating function, but each has an identity on itself. A cosmology of ideas is related with. In Ravnica, the city, there are ten guilds that control the city. Each one is of two colors (all the different possible combinations of two colors if we have five). The identity of each guild in this fictional world is not independent from the colors it belongs to, but a reinterpretation of that precise combinations and attributes of those colors in the setting. Colors are also related between them, some having identity relations to each other, common or antagonistic, and all that needs to be represented somehow in the cards, guilds, mechanics themselves. It's a giant, colossal, work of abstraction. Luckly, I have half the work done already, that world is already created. Each of those guilds have a position in the city, an identity, relations, protagonists, etc. What I need to do now is develop a function for each one in this totalitarian world that makes sense thematically, along with inner conflicts regarding the potential uprising and represent the whole spectrum of political and ideological opinions and factions that could exist in a real world in a language of soldiers, dragons and cards that say things like "destroy a land". All without creating a good and bad side, respecting the color wheel and making a functional game. Kill me.
One thing I have to point out is that, all these things are not stated anywhere. Are kind of assumed, or inadvertently learned, almost though osmosis, while playing the game. In order to create magic cards, you have to reverse engineer them. There's not a guide. That imagine is not official in any way shaper or form and has no actual direct implications in gameplay. But it has to contain it. Somehow.
The prime candidates to be the conduits of such totalitarian state were the Azorious. Blue and white, being white probably the color more like to "goodness" in the Magic universe. It would had been maybe obvious to create an evil totalitarian state of color black and have heroes of the good colors righteously fight against it. But we don't do easy here. The whole point was to don't do this kind of thing. It was far, far more interesting have that state be the result of an ideology or dream from the good guys turn inherently oppressive when applied to the real world that having a run-of-the-mill evil empire that needed purging. From that point, it was easier to fill the gaps and imagine what the consequences of that rule would be, and reactions and alliances from each of the other guilds, based on imagination, common sense but, mainly from their relative position in the color wheel (his roundness be praised). I decided that such state would be mainly them and four other guilds, with two other in open uprising and three undecided ones. That resulted to be a good balance. I created a timeline of events, a draft of the current state, motivations and representatives of each of the guilds. I created some mechanics, re-utilized old ones, and spend like a month making prototypes of the three hundred cards I needed to make. I just needed to create the images and I would be done, and maybe remake some of the cards so they would be more interesting. Maybe add some more deepness and detail in order to give it more nuance and I would be successful in mythologizing modern rebellion in the form of little pieces of cardboard. The concept and card creation took me about a month total, I give myself another one to finish this and I will move on to make something with my life.
Oh boy was I wrong. Oh boy was I not done.
It's infuriating how I get baited by myself into "little projects" again and again, when I know for certain they always become impossible monsters.
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