I’ve never really cared for his work, and this has got to be one of the worst pieces he’s written. He’s taking extreme postmodern ideology, and than just crudely forced the magic player base to confirm to it. If he had stuck with some of the more basic points (pay to win game design is bad), that were true, he would have been fine. However, he goes off the deep end in a need to prententiously entwine two things he dislikes: magic and capitalism. I suppose if you’re naive enough to think that capitalism created inequality, you hated economic inequality in magic, and really wanted to write a forced hate scred about economic models under the guise of game commentary, writing a weird piece like this would make sense.
i wasn't gonna reply but fuck it, you're parroting jordan peterson and i can't stand for this
you imply that you've been following postmodern and neo-marxist stuff for a decade but I think you're tilting at windmills, dude. Obviously I respect you and your intellect and I would hope that you'll give this post a fair shake etc etc as I am trying 2 do with yours.
I really really don't want to do a point-by-point rebuttal (does anyone outside of formal debate like these?) to your section-based breakdown but it's hard not to respond to some of the stuff you're saying so I will try to focus on the areas where I disagree with you most strongly. I'm not a marxian economist but I majored in economics in university and I'm more sympathetic to marxian critiques than I am to New Keynesianism. I'm also a socialist IRL. I think that you're pretty knowledgeable about econ so I won't speak down to you. this is a lot of preamble on what I intend to be a short post but I really want to demonstrate that I'm engaging with you in good faith!
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I have a couple substantive points against your argument.
1) I think that your reference frame is so different from mine, vis a vis 'extreme postmodern ideology'. To me 'extreme postmodern ideology' is, uh, the worst parts of what gets called "choice feminism", or sometimes "selfie feminism" - the idea that simply because one chooses an action it isn't harmful or part of a greater context. You see choice feminism come up in stuff like the abortion debates, but also (odiously) in the dispatches of the ultra-rich and complicit (
Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP, Lena Dunham's "Lenny Letter"), where it's used to argue that our individual choices come from within ourselves and not from
societal brainwashing. I don't think a basic analysis of Magic's problems
vis a vis financial barriers to entry is extreme, and I'm kind of intrigued that you do.
2) Much like those choice feminists, you elide the social contexts and pressures that drive our actions, even the ones we believe we make of our own free wills. The guy who spends $5K foiling out his EDH deck IS a horrifying thought, and he's doing it because he knows people with foiled or partially foiled EDH decks. Obviously all personal discretionary spending is on a sliding scale of immorality, and it's not exactly the worst capitalism has to offer, but conspicuous consumption
should make anti-capitalists uncomfortable. And yet Jesse raises an interesting point: these people performing conspicuous consumption on this facet of their life really don't seem to do it elsewhere - where are the gratuitous-kanji streetwear outfits, the nice cars,
the attention to personal grooming?
3) The global mechanisms of capital
are the Great Satan. They centralize the planet's wealth in the hands of the already wealthy and are wantonly cruel to the poor.
4) There *is* a way to keep Magic but not keep the financial barriers to entry, and every time someone proxies up a cube at Kinko's they're doing anticapitalist praxis within the sphere of collectible card games. It's probably too late for Magic to think about becoming a living card game, but those are also a more anti-capital version of the genre pioneered by Magic nearly 25 years ago. You say that "[t]he ideological solution would be to just destory magic itself, or change it so fundimentally as to have effectively made the game that everyone loves unrecognizable", but that's simply not true. If we gave up on this notion that only Magic cards printed by Wizards of the Coast are 'real' game pieces, Magic would become cheaper, democratized, and have more fun tournaments, all in one fell swoop. It's a remarkably simple solution that would be almost universally accepted by players if it weren't for capitalist brainwashing. Drafting a Cube, too, dispels some of the uglier meta-game problems that the secondary market creates.
5) You say "And of course, wizards is reduced to the caricature of the monopoly millionare, taking rent money from [...] EDH players that just want to bling out their decks. It says something about the strength of his argumet, when he has to resort to distortions and strawmanning to get it across." And yet, how is this a distortion? Wizards
literally does extract rents from EDH players, and the rest of us besides. This is no strawman. Those EDH players are, by and large, not multi-millionaires. They budget for their purchases out of their discretionary funds. THIS ITSELF is the exploitation, the collection of players' money beyond operating costs. The players can choose to foil out their EDH decks if they like, out of their own
volition, but that desire has been informed, sculpted, and inculcated by Wizards' marketing. As Jesse points out, the actions of secondary-market devotees are analogous to those of stock traders. This is capitalist indoctrination of a way to navigate the barriers to entry imposed by capitalism. My example in point 4 is an anticapitalist way to navigate the barriers to entry imposed by capitalism. That players overwhelmingly believe this stock traderism is smart or prudent, but do not overwhelmingly believe that third-party cards are a viable answer for casual play, is commodity fetishism, pure and simple.
6) You'd be hard-pressed to find an anticapitalist who wants to remove fun from a post-revolutionary world. Joy, artistic expression, and fun may be greater personal motivators in an anticapitalist system than they are at present, when the working class are freed from the exploitation of their excess labour which takes undue time away from their lives. The revolution isn't coming any time soon but I just wanted to note that personal discretionary spending of one's time and income is not anathema to an anticapitalist world. Magic would still exist, and maybe people who aren't white men in the West would play it.
Your friend,
saf
PS: where do you live that universities have any Marxists on staff at all, let alone more than a handful of leftist profs? Sounds nice.
One I have always respected for his custom card skills.
