In high school I started playing a collectable card game or CCG called Magic: the Gathering. This game would soon come to dominate my young social circle. My friends and I would scrap together what little money we had as adolescents to play this game. Our cards become our treasures – we’d only get rid of them, for well, more cards. Magic cards are interesting, they exist as both the rules of play like the Boardwalk card in the family’s copy of Monopoly and as a game piece like a rook or bishop from chess. Yet, they also exist akin to marbles or baseball cards – they’re randomly distributed, and the object has perceived value for its own sake. Each magic card has unique fantasy art in addition to the game information.
As I read Justin Hogson’s book Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic. I couldn’t help but think back on CCGs that I had played so much. Hogson calls attention to the new aesthetic preferences of a pastry toaster and how it understands its place in the world. A concept that might sound strange to anyone that hasn’t read anything about new aesthetics or new materialism. Hogson anticipates his audience’s confusion.
He writes, “this kind of speculating stems from the primary view that all objects exist equally and that there is always withdraw present in the ways in which individuals engage, understand, and think with any object; an object is never fully present to humans particularly not in how it (the object) might understand that presence … Meaning the pastry toaster is always more than just a pastry toaster but never less than the gathering of human relations with it” (62).
The rules of Magic have changed since the game was created in 1993. These rule changes often create conflicts with the text printed on cards. To address this issue all Magic cards, have what’s called oracle text. Which is the updated language and game templating of the card. The oracle text often functionally changes how cards work. People either must memorize the new oracle text or consult the online databases, an action that moves past the card itself. Nothing has happened to the card, but the human relation to it has fundamentally changed how humans view it. Often cards get reprinted now featuring the new oracle text. Thus, two cards might have the same name, but feature completely different text and art.
Since Magic’s creation new CCGs such as Hearthstone have come out. Hearthstone is a video game – and accordingly cards can do things that are impossible to create in the real world. They can make new things appear, they can divide themselves into parts, and other strange design choices are possible only in a video game. Oracle text doesn’t exist in Hearthstone. Because the game is digital, designers can simply change the text that appears on the card. Some cards have seen many changes over the years. Which one is the real card? All of them and none of them. That meaning is never fully present to the human players of the game!
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