Before we get started, it will help to set the stage a bit. And so it begins like this:
What came to be the Magical Game, or more appropriately the Magical Game Operating System, had its beginnings over 12 years ago. From then until the present, there has been a persistent, albeit initially clumsy drive to bring into the world what was conceived of as a magical game — one that would teach the player magic, and that would be sophisticated enough to swallow up everything else in a person’s life, if desired, into a dynamic organizational system.
The goal was essentially this: to create a game, such that the playing of this game would bring you success, even in the absence of any other actions of note. It was GTD’s “one inbox” idea turned into an analog board game, complete with narrative of wizards and witches and pirates and grimoires — a game that allowed me to craft a life of adventure, leaving a surprising number of achievements in my wake as I “adventured” through the world of my experience, augmenting reality with a frame of game play, and watching the world step forth and play the role accordingly.
So this blog is about taking a game and haunting it with magic, and topics will range from using little game mechanics to make your magic fun, all the way to the Mazes and Monsters level insanity that is my full-immersion experience with the game, solidly in play since 2012, when it could be said to have graduated from a “complicated interface of calendars, checklists and gamification processes with a narrative skin stretched over it” to anything resembling an actual game. Early versions were ugly and cumbersome, but persistence actually rewarded this amateur game designer and chaos magician with a system that, at least to me, has a surprising level of elegance.
So, anyway, yeah, the Game has a past. But it also has a future, which is where you come in. I titled this post “To Begin Again … From The Beginning” — a purposeful reference to the linked video clip from Waking Life — and also because that is where we find ourselves. It is my intention to build the Game piece by piece in sequence so that others can construct their own, like a Jedi constructing a light saber. You don’t have to take the full Jumanji plunge into this if you don’t want to, but feel free to use the tech I share along the way.
So, the Game has a future, and you have a part, and I’ll talk more about that in the days and weeks ahead.
“Given the right circumstances, a new world (is) just as likely as an old one.”
This is the path of worldmaking. This is game magic — Ludomancy, if you will.
And yet, before we can proceed, I need to lay out the philosophical roots from which this stuff emerges.
The next few posts will deal with that. They’ll likely be philosophy-heavy, but I’ll aim to keep it straightforward and digestible so we can get into the fun stuff … The Great Game Experiment.
Let the Games begin.