Are we having fun yet?
16.
As mentioned in the first part, Magic: The Gathering is undeniably more intellectually engaging and calls more of one’s total personality and intellectual and creative faculties into play than taking on a compartmentalized role on a salesfloor, loading dock, or delivery van—but in a sense it is the ludic acme of the material culture that calls such occupations into existence, and which makes a game like Magic possible to begin with.
Being a pay-to-play, pay-more-to-win game has always been Magic’s dark open secret. Even an informal playgroup of three to five people that meets up once a week to play Commander or a kitchen-table variant of Standard has to continuously purchase new products as they’re released. There can never be any such thing as a “finished” deck when the following year’s expansion sets may introduce threats that it’s unable to reckon with. To be a Magic player of any seriousness, you must continually purchase new cards. The rest of your playgroup are the Joneses, and you can either keep up with them or embarrass yourself before them.
The typical way of augmenting one’s collection is buying booster packs (the solid-life analog and precursor to the online game’s “loot box”), which contain fifteen cards of three basic rarity levels: ten commons, four uncommons, one rare.1 The cards in the rare and uncommon slots are the ones you’re most interested in assessing when opening a booster: on the whole, you can expect them to have the most in-game utility and trade value. While a few commons are indispensable staples, the majority aren’t useful for anything but giving the newbies who use them a hard lesson in the difference between good cards and lackluster cards.
Most of an inveterate Magic player’s collection consists of commons. Nobody wants to trade for them. They’re worth nickels and dimes on the secondary market. They just pile up and pile up.
Like fast fashion, Magic: The Gathering is an egregiously wasteful enterprise, printing and packaging and shipping millions of cards that will never see any actual use. Commons are the foam peanuts a player sifts through when opening up a quantum of Magic product; indeed, the formats in which commons really matter (draft games and Pauper) have the air of a child playing with the box a toy was packaged in. But it is precisely the abundance of inefficacious cards that valorizes the powerful, scarce ones. The business model and the health of the game depend on Wizards designing and mass-printing a lot of junk.
There is something else Magic has in common with fashion: identity signification. One’s choice of clothing can convey one’s status, ethos, affiliation with a formal or informal group, and so on. Of course, our consumption choices in general indicate to others something about who we are. What does the choice to subscribe to the New York Times instead of the Wall Street Journal tell one about oneself, and what does it communicate to others? What about a preference for craft beer over Budweiser or Corona? Starbucks or Dunkin? An electric sedan or a pickup truck? An iPhone or an Android? Walmart or Target? Electric bicycle or electric scooter? What about your choice of baby stroller?
This is nontrivial stuff in the real world, where people are prejudged in terms of how they present themselves by way of consumer choice. While buying and playing with Magic cards is a consumer choice in and of itself, a lower-stakes form of identity play occurs along similar lines when a player constructs and plays with a deck. From the game’s earliest years, deckbuilding has always been similar to assembling a Rube Goldberg machine. Functionality is paramount, but a player’s aesthetic sensibilities may ultimately dictate what kind of deck he or she puts together. Is it more important to try to win efficiently, or to try and win with pizazz? Are you most comfortable playing fast and aggressive, or do you take it slow and try to control of the tempo of a match? Each of Magic’s five color types has its own “philosophy,” grounded in the tactics and strategies its cards facilitate; which color or colors best fit your style? If you’re playing the Commander format—and if you’re playing in game in 2025, you probably are—what legendary creature do you select as your Commander? How should your deck synergize with them?
This is to say that a Magic deck, like any creative project, says something about the cast of thought and the personality of the player who put it together. Given the player’s own investment in their deck—the time, money, and the intellectual energy they spend putting it together, testing and tweaking it, and pitting it against other players—they too will experience their deck as an exteriorization of themselves, a piece of their identity. But where identity is concerned, there is always room for fluidity.
When I played as a teenager I was a monoblack enthusiast, and my devotion to black’s outlook and approach continued when I picked the game back up when a friend introduced me to Commander some fifteen years later. (It was still called “Elder Dragon Highlander” then.) Before I stopped playing altogether I found myself intrigued by Simic and Golari’s modi operandi, and attempted to build Tatyova and Slimefoot decks. In a way it was like deciding I didn’t want to be a goth kid anymore and got to experimenting with being a stoner or a raver instead. Monoblack strategy doesn’t translate into a blue-green build, and constructing a deck around a gimmicky card like Slimefoot, the Stowaway meant figuring out how to wring utility out of the gimmick with efficacy and panache (mostly the latter). Both entailed getting acquainted new ways of thinking, warming up to new aesthetic sensibilities—and buying a whole lot of cards after spending hours scrutinizing search results on Scryfall.2
The Magic player with a stack of several diverse decks practices code switching via the language and gestures of consumption. During a recent conversation with a younger Millennial friend in which she decried Zoomer fashion, she suggested that for Gen Z this sort of thing comes quite naturally.
17.
On the same theme: in a school requiring its students to wear uniforms, teenagers rely on sanctioned accessories (hair ties, socks, bracelets, bookbag charms, etc.) to communicate their personal quiddities to classmates. Deliberate aesthetic choices such as these convey much about a person’s values and sensibilities, and a culturally fluent observer (most likely another teenager) can discern something of how a peer would like to be seen on the basis of wearing this in their hair instead of that, or placing their phone in an X-styled case instead of a Y- or Z-style case.
The early internet was like a Catholic school in the sense that one person participating in a chatroom or a message board conversation had nothing that visually distinguished them from anyone else. Conscientious users tried to select clever, memorable names that expressed something of themselves, or made a luculent first impression upon others. When my cohort in middle and high school was using America Online, many of us self-consciously fussed over filling out the standardized fields in our user profiles, hoping to come across as clever and cool to the classmates who might be looking us up without our knowing. On the phpBB message boards that sprouted up across cyberspace during the early aughts, having a striking avatar pic and a smart signature were de rigueur.3
The developers of early MMOs understood that giving players options as to how other players would see their in-game representations added value to their products. My personal experiences in this arena are limited: the only MMOs I played for any length of time were Gunbound and Final Fantasy XI. Bling was important to both: players used in-game currency to buy apparel, change their characters’ appearance, and augment their stats. The really good outfits and accessories, always impressive-looking, communicated wearers’ skill, dedication, and veteran status to other players. I do remember, however, that in Gunbound there was an option to join games where accessories bestowed no in-game bonuses, which more or less meant you could customize your character’s appearance purely out of aesthetic interest. As I recall, these rooms were never lacking for willing participants.
At this juncture I’ll provide a link to an index of Fortnite “cosmetics” and say no more. I don’t think we need to examine too closely why this stuff is so popular, particularly in games one typically plays with and/or against strangers from across the world. One wants their in-game representation to say something about themselves to other players (and to themselves).
Some competitive online games like Overwatch and the later iterations of Street Fighter do allow players to change their character’s appearance, but only to the extent of selecting from one of some number of prefabricated “skins” and/or color schemes. Compared to Fortnite or Final Fantasy XIV, they offer pitifully few options for customization—but in the latter games, players construct a generic in-game actor from a template, while Overwatch and Street Fighter provide readymade, pre-realized, and often famous fictional entities. (When an iteration of Street Fighter introduces a totally new character, it is the result of a laborious in-house “audition” process, analogous to the procedure of selecting a candidate to be integrated into an existing Kpop group.)
If Netherrealm Studios doesn’t give players the option to put Sub Zero in a barbecue apron, yellow galoshes, and a green afro in the more recent Mortal Kombat releases, it’s not because it lacks the technical capability to implement a Fortnite-style cosmetics system. It is rather is out of respect for the brand—and the business imperative to make sure the brand remains respected. IPs like Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Ryu, Chun-Li, Tracer, D.VA, etc., are iconic in the gaming world. People who’ve never played a Fatal Fury or King of Fighters game recognize Terry Bogard. These IPs’ owners have an interest in maintaining this state of affairs, which entails exercising control over the characters’ images.
Die-hard fans implicitly respect this. For hardcore players, these figures are more than icons. They’re totems—and for that to be so, it is important that the character I recognize as Sagat, Scorpion, or Heihachi is unmistakably the same character you recognize as them.4 To don a uniform is to subordinate some portion of one’s selfhood and subjectivity to an external signifier; but a uniform can also confer power, confidence, and a grounded identity—even when that uniform is a trademarked character owned by a video game publisher.
It’s hard to explain, that peculiarly intimate identification with the image and functionality of a video game character, if a listener can’t speak of ever having “mained” anyone in a game like Super Smash Bros. or League of Legends. After crossing a certain threshold of muscle memory and twitch familiarity in games like these, you’re no longer just hitting buttons, but virtually inhabiting your on-screen homunculus during a match. On some level, the homunculus seems like another you—or at least an extension of you.
Baudrillard wrote that television makes us into holograms; our passive absorption in the radiant, discontinuous play of images and sounds “gives us the feeling, the vertigo of passing to the other side of our own body, to the side of the double, luminous clone, or dead twin that is never born in our place, and watches over us by anticipation.” Baudrillard is fun to read because, like McLuhan, he’s a provocateur whose prose crackles with poetic élan. But this remark of his, when transferred from the nonresponsive medium of television to video games, becomes a mundane statement of fact.
When I am intensely focused on playing Street Fighter III, I experience Alex as an extension of my will; his actions seem my actions. When he stands and gloats over a fallen opponent or lies in supine humiliation at the end of a match, I feel that it is me on the screen, basking in victory or agape in defeat. (I know my opponent will see it that way, too.) As my onscreen “clone,” Alex doesn’t merely “watch over me,” as Baudrillard says, but answers to and advises me. On very good days, he and I are like synchronized swimmers performing a routine on separate layers of reality.5
When I was heavily into King of Fighters during the aughts, I had K’ wallpaper on my laptop, K’ forum and AIM avatars, and a folder of K’ fan art in my Downloads. Though I never incorporated some form of “K Dash” into a username on any platform, the practice isn’t uncommon.6
Association with the video game icon follows association with its functionality—or, rather, with one’s success through that functionality. A Guilty Gear player whose online moniker (perhaps “community name” would be more appropriate?) incorporates some or all of “Sol Badguy” and who has Sol avatars on social media wouldn’t be so concerned with braiding his persona with Sol’s if he hadn’t won a lot of matches playing as that character. I don’t think that K’ wallpaper up above ended up on my desktop until I’d after racked up a fairly high number of wins in King of Fighters 2003 on XBox Live—and my team’s leader and anchor was always K’.7
It feels good to win. Even when there’s virtually nothing at stake in a contest, one feels that victory—or a string of victories—signifies something with regard to his prowess and character. He prevailed over another person or persons in fair, earnest play; fortune has smiled upon him, his natural giftedness and the cultivation of his skills are made manifest, and he takes pride in himself—and in his onscreen totem. Why would he not want to broadcast it: wear his triumphant avatar-self out in the world, bring his luminous clone with him into as many other areas of his life as he can?
18.
While video games have accrued a great deal of cultural clout over the last three decades, society at large doesn’t respect video games—or at least not the people who play them with intensity. People who invest a lot of time and energy in competitive games played online with headsets or with expensive arcade sticks are viewed with more skepticism than those who spend forty-five minutes after work playing low-energy, low-commitment stuff like Cats & Soup or Stardew Valley.
I’ve browsed threads on Fortnite subreddits with titles like “tips for adult casual players?” The advice offered is well-meaning and helpful; one gets the impression that Fortnite and its playerbase is built up such that non-hardcore players aren’t alienated by the really competitive ones. This certainly isn’t the case for fighting games, and it doesn’t seem to be for games like Counter Strike or League of Legends, either. These are “get good or fuck off” affairs, and their players like it that way. Not surprisingly, these are some of the games most often brought up in internet discussions about “toxic” communities. (One person’s agonism is another’s toxicity.)
When the ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides introduce a political or military figure who’d taken the prize in a competition at the Panhellenic Games (the most famous of which were held in Olympia), they make a point of mentioning the fact because they knew their audience deemed it important. Such displays of athletic excellence spoke to the fundamental quality of the people in question. Even today, when we learn that the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, Vladimir Lenin, and Albert Einstein were avid chess players, we may be less disposed to say “everyone has a hobby, big whoop,” than to glimpse a connection between their genius and the Game of Kings. Chess retains much of its old glamor for this very reason: the cultural environment conditions us to to associate the game and its players with mental acuity and discipline. But even though more than half the American population plays video games for at least an hour a week, most of us are still unlikely to be impressed by gamers.
This is to say that your 75 percent win rate in Guilty Gear Strive ranked matches is utterly unimportant to the office where you’re employed as a project manager, a claims adjuster, or a development coordinator—and it communicates nothing to your bosses or colleagues about your character (unless one of them cares as much about your game as you do). Your admirably high ranking on your favorite game’s leaderboards matters even less to your manager at Walmart or the Amazon warehouse. It means absolutely zilch to the owners of the rideshare app whose logo you place in your car’s rear window—and to probably 99 percent of your passengers. Just drive the car, car driver.
This doesn’t apply if you’re the kind of pro gamer who’s won enough major competitions to make a lifestyle out of playing competitive games and doing some consulting, content creator, and influencer work on the side. Gamers may not be held in much esteem—but people do respect success and fame. If a gamer was good enough at games (or at talking about games on YouTube) to quit his day job and make money and a name for himself, that changes everything: it becomes a victory that positively does redound to their character, even where people who don’t give a damn about video games are concerned.
In one of Homo Luden’s final chapters, Huizinga bemoans the professionalization of sports in the early twentieth century:
[W]ith the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost. We see this very clearly in the official distinction between amateurs and professionals (or “gentlemen and players” as used pointedly to be said). It means that the play-group marks out those for whom playing is no longer play, ranking them inferior to the true players in standing but inferior in capacity. The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness. This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex.
Today, this is only half-true. Nobody ranks an NBA player “inferior” to a young man who plays basketball out on the blacktop on late summer afternoons four or five days a week—just as nobody really believes a street musician or a karaoke singer is higher “in standing” than Chappell Roan because they’re strumming a guitar and singing for the sheer pleasure of it, not because it’s their job. The same goes for the player who’s much better than average at League of Legends, but not good enough to make the e-sports circuit, or to run a popular YouTube or Twitch channel centered on League of Legends. If the amateur has an inferiority complex, there is good reason for it.
19.
In this regard, the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime (remember how we started with that like six months ago?) presents an appealing fantasy to any player of these new forms of competitive games. In Yugi’s world, the card game “Duel Monsters” matters in a big way. Everyone plays it. Everyone knows that everyone plays it. Everyone’s interested in it. Audiences crowd into stadiums to watch tournaments. People are respected for playing it well. It’s a wonderful dream: for the niche game at which one excels to be recognized as something socially important, and for their skill at it to factor into assessments of their worth in a way favorable to them. (Why should chess players get all the respect, anyway? What’s so special about their game that they flush so much of their time and energy into?)
To the extent that the “angry & lonely male gamer” trope has a basis in reality, it may be worth asking whether the dissonance between the experience of being a regular victor and valuable teammate in, say, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and the low esteem in which they are held elsewhere accounts, at least partially, for the chips on their shoulders. From elementary school on, they’ve observed that the world bestows praise and honor upon winners, even when the competitions are somewhat trivial. There’s prestige in being the last kid standing in a school spelling bee, being the first student across the finish line when running the mile for gym class, or winning the blue ribbon in a diorama contest. So here they’ve been drawn into a domain of strenuous competition where they find they can prevail over others and prove themselves men of capability—and the significance of the latter cannot be understated when alienated, unrewarding work and learned powerlessness are the order of the day for a horrifyingly large portion of the population—but it means nothing. Women don’t respect them for it. Employers don’t respect them for it. Their parents don’t respect them for it.
Given that most competitive games are played online, it’s likely that the player on a hot streak isn’t even sitting on his couch between a pair of friends who can talk trash to him in good humor, or congratulate him for match well-played. If there is social capital in playing sports in an amateur league, there’s also social capital in playing competitive video games with friends in-person. If nothing else, every time you have someone over to play Super Smash Bros., you’re reaffirming a friendship. But in most situations, competing in games played with incorporeal strangers sitting hundreds of miles away is socially bankrupt. Online gamers play by themselves in an enthralling but flimsy simulation of togetherness, and as a result, their victories are ephemeral and effectively immaterial.
Most of the popular games we play have little to no organic connection to society—while, paradoxically, their existence is essential to it. Under the conditions of advanced capitalism, they are to leisure what Graber’s bullshit jobs are to labor.
[one more TBC]
This is a simplification, but the details (foils, mythic rares, cards from The List, etc.) would be too tedious to wade through.
Both decks remain in incomplete provisional stages. It’s for the best.
As per McLuhan: one does not experience their online profile as something separate and other from them, but as an extension of their entity. While Tyler the Creator’s famous tweet about cyberbullying is sound advice in theory, in practice it amounts to asking someone to detach their finger and walk away from it after they accidentally slam it in the car door.
With the acknowledgement that this is an inordinately heavy King of Fighters-heavy post—there is an object lesson in the King of Fighters: Maximum Impact games, which beat Street Fighter to the punch in giving an alternate outfit to each member of its roster. These were conceived by Falcoon, an SNK illustrator and character designer who made himself a persona non grata among a large section of the fanbase owing to his way over-the-top sartorial aesthetic. Many of the alternate outfits left a bad taste in people’s mouths; evidently you can only change a character’s appearance so much before it comes across to their fans as a violation of that character’s integrity—or, to the truly devoted, a kind of blasphemy.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but—this is Blue Mary’s poster art for King of Fighters XI (2005), in which she wears her standard outfit:
And this is Falcoon’s concept art for Blue Mary’s alternate costume in KOF Maximum Impact Regulation “A” (2008):
Capcom was much more cautious when it came time to design alternate costumes for the cast of Street Fighter IV—and to the best of my knowledge, no vocal contingents of the fanbase were calling out any designers by name and begging Capcom to drop them. We can also appreciate why the Street Fighter developers never put in work to offer players a range of mix & match dress-up options that could conceivably be used to make Cammy look this unrecognizable and ridiculous.
Oh god—here I am, using the present tense. One of the two barcades in town has a Street Fighter III: Third Strike cabinet. There’s not much in the way of competition there; I usually play against the computer just to scrape some of the rust off.
Unrelated tangent: it was my rotten luck that my late teens and most of my twenties coincided with the Dark Age of Fighting Games, that decade-long interval between North American arcades’ extinction spiral and decent netplay. For fighting game fans, the experience of those years was akin to standing alone on a basketball court, dribbling the ball and thinking how nice it would be to have someone to play with.
Lest I give the impression of tooting my own horn, “serious” King of Fighters players in the Western hemisphere weren’t playing laggy matches on Xbox Live circa 2005. Nor were they playing the janky King of Fighters 2003. As I understand it, most were bullying King of Fighters ‘98 and King of Fighters 2002 arcade cabinets in Latin America. (They would have kicked my ass.)
Systematically going through how games are hollowing out as means of being social, in our society. It's like enshittification, to quote another blogger. Things tend to get worse, and people tend to just deal, until they don't any more.
dang, i literally just finished reading part 3, what a timing.