this is not kill reviews: return to ravnica

pt i: no fun

Ever done something you were supposed to enjoy?

The thing you’re doing is exactly the same as it has been every other time: the ritual of doing it, all the things in the process that you definitely remember enjoying before. But now, stripped of all the enjoyment, it’s nothing but that process. You recognize the thing as being the same, and wonder: will this feeling pass? Will I come back to it with the same joy I had before? Or have I just changed as a person, away from this thing?

At its worst, this feeling can spread from the specific to the general: the feeling that nothing on earth is enjoyable, and the knowledge that there’s absolutely nothing that can change that other than time.

For those of you who have never experienced this, here’s what I’d compare it to: watch a film you like. Then immediately watch it again. And again. Then the next day, do the same thing. (No doing anything on your computer or phone at the same time, that’s cheating.) Unless you’re a child, this probably sounds absolutely maddening. What’s the matter? It’s something you enjoy, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t you want to watch it again?

Personally, the solution I’ve found is going back to bed and sleeping off the feeling for the next three or four days.

pt ii: the prologue to ravnica

There was a time when Magic possessed so much restless energy, so much creativity bursting out of the people behind the product, that just doing a previous block’s theme again was out of the question. The only way to do a sequel… would be to do the theme in a completely different way. That way, the revisit of an earlier theme would be so completely independent of the original that it would stand boldly on its own.

The original Ravnica was introduced as being another multicolor block, specifically citing Invasion. But instead of blindly aping what came in the original:

“The next step seemed obvious. Take the things that defined Invasion and flip them on their head.”

Where Invasion emphasized playing as many colors as possible, Ravnica’s multicolor was narrower: play two colors, and here’s a specific definition of what playing those colors is going to be like. As I detailed in the review of that block, it is a creative achievement unrivaled in Magic’s history.

pt iii: snes roms

Between the ages of 12 and 14, I spent a lot of time playing emulated SNES games on my computer. I had grown up with an actual, physical SNES, but I had neither the hundreds of dollars to obtain real copies of these ~collectables~, nor the patience necessary to deal with The Worst Save Systems Ever Devised.

This piracy at young ages influenced me a great deal, probably more than it should have. Just like anyone else can justify their interest by constructing a series of life lessons from it, so I can do with this phase of SNES gaming.

I had spent a lot of time with PSX and PS2 games. But despite the technical sophistication of these systems over the SNES, I found myself marveling at the beauty of the sprites in old Final Fantasy games. FF7, by comparison, was mostly hideously ugly compared to its predecessors with backdrops halfway between watercolor and pointillism.

But beyond the games themselves, there was a real value in the grey-area-legality of their distribution. I could freely try as many games as I wanted for as long as I wanted, with the only limitation being my capacity to find them. The best-selling games ever competed on equal footing with rare, obscure, or even never-officially-translated-into-English titles (Front Mission was a favorite of mine, a full five years before its commercial American release).

Some of the ROM distribution sites, clearly handmade by people with a tenuous grasp of HTML from a how-to book from 1998, were wonderful in their amateurish passion. Writers would gush in exclamation-laden prose about games that never got past a few thousand copies distributed. Some of these games genuinely were lost classics; others mystified me in how people could think of them as anything more than another SMB knockoff.

In many ways, my artistic ideology has never grown past that of the kid wanting to play around with everything, opposed to anything and anyone who would stand between me and some 1993 game a dozen other people were still playing.

One enduring memory of these ROM sites were their overblown cautions, warning, disclaimers, and faux-legal protections against prosecutions. Some of them seemed to genuinely believe that, if they put a line of text saying “IF YOU ARE LAW ENFORCEMENT YOU HAVE TO CLOSE THIS WINDOW NOW,” they were completely in the clear.

pt iv: a legal protection against magic developers

What’s even better is that such a line of text actually can work for me. Rosewater has mentioned how, for legal reasons, he is prohibited from reading any fanmade cards or sets (outside of very narrow Wizards-created programs such as Great Designer Search where the creators blah blah blah legal stuff). He’s even said that he reads all his emails; however, if it’s heading toward that forbidden territory, he closes the email immediately.

I think you see where this is going.

pt v: an extremely serious submission that wizards should totally put in the next set (a magic card designed by me, jesse mason, @killgoldfish, killgoldfish.com)

Eric - 

Creature - Insect

Flying

0/1

pt vi: follow-up discussion to the above brilliant original design (by me, jesse mason, etc etc etc)

Kick back. Relax. Smile in realization that there cannot possibly be any Wizards R&D people reading at this point. If they are, they are blatantly going Against Company Policy and will receive a serious head-shaking-frown from The Legal Dudes And/Or Associated People.

*airhorns* *gunshot sound effect* *Public Enemy vocal sample*

pt vii: me and mark rosewater

I don’t think there’s any piece of writing I’ve attempted and abandoned more than a thorough discussion of Mark Rosewater. My Google Docs account and various hard drives are littered with attempts at discussing the man, his writing, his design, his influence. They vary from glowing assessments of his important writing to impassioned defenses of his value, down to cautious and-on-the-other-hand toothless, positionless caveat-making and one document which, swear to God, opens with an extended metaphor comparing him to Adolph Hitler, yes that one.

I have spent an almost immeasurable amount of time over the past 13 years reading his writing, pondering his ideas, considering his grand proclamations first in their original context, then in the context of Magic’s development since then. I have made glowing recommendations of his writing to non-Magic playing folks, and loudly scoffed at Magic players endorsing his views. I am fascinated and disgusted by his ideas on Magic, design, creativity, commerce, and the overlap of all of these.

Some of this is because his writing, in some ways, inspires mine. I wrote “why i want to fuck mark rosewater” as a response to an interview he did with Ted Knutson, where he called for holistic design analysis of Magic sets, similar to how film reviews work. This is, obviously, an idea and call to action that I agree with (though when he, in answer to a question about my reviews, said that they are inspired directly by that interview, I was immediately taken aback, because I had forgotten about that by the time I was writing the first installments of this series).

It is impossible to write about Magic design without referencing the man. It just cannot be done. He’s more than Magic’s head designer: he is Magic’s prime design historian, design critic, design analyst, design advocate, public relations agent, and salesman. So it’s now, after so many reviews where I grudgingly must reference something from Rosewater’s writing or theories, that I face him head-on.

So let’s talk about Rosewater’s writing. The most important facet of his writing, the defining aspect of it, is its presentation and context: he is writing for the official Magic: the Gathering web site as Magic’s official design representative to talk about the official vision of Magic: the Gathering.

DailyMTG can never be neutral to Magic. It exists with the purpose of promoting Magic, to get new players to play Magic, in order that they spend money on it; to get lapsed players back into the game; and to get currently-invested Magic players to stay that way and spend more money on the product than they currently do. Rosewater is the most popular, longest-running, and most important voice on this site.

When going back to read old pieces of his, it’s important to remember what he is: he is a marketing agent. His writing are not simply essays on design, they are officially promoted by the company to advertise the game. His writing, including all those often-referenced essays, is ad copy.

Advertisements are a tricky thing to analyze. As long as they fall under the category of advertisement, their motive is unquestionable: they exist to sell the product. When I read a Rosewater piece, I mentally insert the word “PAID ADVERTISEMENT” above it, like that fat chunk of a magazine paid for by Prilosec which all reasonable people skip past.

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.

I cannot claim to say exactly what of Rosewater’s writing has been honest, and which is dishonest. But I know that when he writes about the newest Magic set, it’s not because he has a burning desire to enlighten his readers… or even if he does, it is not the end goal of his writing, but merely a stepping stone toward his actual goal of selling Magic.

Rosewater has promoted every Magic set on DailyMTG since Torment. He has told us how the first Ravnica, Future Sight, and Innistrad are wonderful and worth our money. He has similarly written about design and design philosophy in ways that praise Scourge, Saviors of Kamigawa, and Avacyn Restored. I don’t know whether he thought to himself, as he wrote about Avacyn Restored, that the set is actually a pile of shit. But I do know that, if at any point he had reservations about the quality of the design or the set in general, he was contractually obligated to not tell readers about this. It’s not the demonstrable presence of dishonesty that bothers me; it is the impossibility of complete honesty. And a writer who, by the nature of their paycheck, cannot be completely honest with readers is a bad writer.

It is in this way that Rosewater has most directly inspired this series. Magic design theory has had a negativity-shaped hole in it. When things are good and positive and moving in the right direction, Rosewater tells people half a dozen times about each thing through DailyMTG writing, tumblr posts, Drive to Work, his new video series where he talks about Magic design as he sleeps, etc etc etc. I’m excited to write negatively about Magic design because there hasn’t been anyone to do so intelligently.

The most interesting Rosewater pieces are those where he argues against himself. That is, he calls out a particular aspect of earlier Magic design as being bad, which he had previously written about as having knocked it out of the park. It’s in these moments of introversion and self-revision that I find the most honesty in his work. However, I always question which Rosewater was the right one. What if the earlier one, overjoyed in telling his audience how great Planar Chaos was, had been right all along?

Rosewater’s writing most directly upsets me in areas about the overlap between creativity in commerce, and I don’t think his current occupation allows him to dive into it like I want him to. He identifies as Izzet: the mad scientist, frantically creative, always making making making without boundaries. But his writing often exposes a more cynically commercial bent than this image of himself that he creates.

Think back on his writing about creativity, where he compared things to screenplays, where he talks about Roseanne.[1] He emphasizes the need of the screenplay to stay true to a strict structure. He speaks in glowing terms of the familiarity of the American sitcom; how people follow routines, how things must stay the same if anything about it is going to change. He says that Magic strives to make blockbusters, not “art house” sets.

[1] At this point, there have been more references to “Roseanne is a Rosewater cliché” than actual Rosewater references to Roseanne.

Rosewater’s writing has become the design equivalent of the American sitcom. We read it when it goes up at the appointed time, we chuckle insider-like at the references to the same things it always references, making the same points it made five or ten years ago. If you miss one or two or ten, that’s not a big deal, because other than the season finale, everything always stays the same forever. He’ll use the same examples to make the same points next year, too.

If my scorn hasn’t become so obvious at this point that it’s become corporeal and coagulated onto your screen, I do not like the traditional American sitcom. They are never different from one another. Their plots are paper-thin veneers to allow the characters to insult one another and then find good in each other at the end of the episode.

Have you watched any Roseanne? Thank the internet age, because it’s all on youtube. Here’s one that Mark Rosewater got a writing credit on.

The biggest problem I have with this is that it isn’t funny. Like, not even a little bit funny.  One could very easily go through it and diagram exactly how it’s a Good Sitcom Episode because of how the characters interact, how the plot provides poignant and humorous moments intermixed. The jokes follow tried-and-true joke formulas. But it’s not funny.

The season of this episode, Roseanne was the second-most watched show in America. More than 18 million households watched the average episode.

But who the fuck still cares about Roseanne?

Mass-appealing shlock like Roseanne might get people who watch it on a regular basis, because it’s their time to watch TV and that’s what’s on. But it’s not made to be memorable. It is disposable art.

The advantage that the “art house” work has is that, if it’s good, people remember it. People talk about it the next day, the next week, the next year. Ten years later, it’s influencing a whole new genre created in its wake. Thirty years later, people who weren’t even alive when it was around the first time are still talking about it.

After spending a lot of time thinking about him, part of that thought process transformed into a “you’re not so different from me” sort of villain speech directed at him. We both read comics, and reference stuff like Watchmen all the time. We self-identify as creative types, and care deeply about the creative process. We think a lot about comedy. And, in our most obvious and closest parallel, we both write about Magic design. If I’m not (distantly) second behind him in the list of the most-read authors about the history of Magic design, I’d be surprised.

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.

The big contradiction in Rosewater’s writing about design is that he wants people to look at the game’s design from a holistic perspective. Then, if the holistic analysis of it comes back as “this is banal,” he just shoots back with “who cares, it sold packs.” He only wants a holistic analysis that tells him it’s wonderful.

pt viii: again

If you’re a musician or know musicians, there’s a very good chance that you could create an album that’s better than the first, self-titled Ramones album. Record those same songs, but with a little bit better, more modern, production quality. The musicianship was pretty bad on that 1976 record, so with good musicians, you could tighten it up. Maybe record slightly more emphatic, more melodic vocals. Add just a touch of autotune.

Would your album be better? Almost unquestionably, it would improve on the original.

But would it be a “good album?” Of course not. You didn’t do anything unique. The initial statement that the Ramones made with that album is the important thing, as are all the myriad influences that it had on cultures worldwide. There’s not a punk or indie rock band anywhere that isn’t influenced by that album (even if it came passed down through other bands in between them and the Ramones).

There is value in doing things first. When it comes to art, being original isn’t just an important thing. It is the most important thing, to set yourself aside from what everyone else is doing. Without originality, art is nothing.

pt ix: magic design is art

Magic design is art.