Unfortunately, I lack the ability to properly communicate the experience of playing Magic as opposed to other games. I can point to a few aspects of the game, though:
1) It’s not static. Magic changes all the time because new cards are released every few months. Chess and Go have been Chess and Go for hundreds of years, and they’ve been studied to death. Relative to other classic games, Magic is a game that gives more rewards to experimentation and discovery.
2) There are random factors in Magic. This adds excitement; to paraphrase a saying about American football, on any given day, any player can win. The best player at your local tennis, Chess, or Go club will never, ever win a match against the current World Champion. In Magic, although the better player usually wins, upsets can and do happen. This can even be fun for the better player, who can still have the experience of trying to claw his or her way back from behind, even against lesser players. (On a related note, some games are harder to handicap than others; Go has an elaborate system in which weaker players are given handicap stones at the start of a match, but handicapping Chess players is more difficult. Magic handicapping is trivial; just change the decks each player is using.)
3) I find trying to think zillions of moves in a chess or chess-like game difficult and stressful. Magic doesn’t present players the task of dealing with ridiculous game trees but still manages to continuously present interesting decistions to make, thanks to random factors and hidden information in addition to a moderate amount of visible complexity. It’s more about who has better quality heuristics than brute-force look-ahead.
4) Competitive Magic has a large infrastructure and community devoted to it. You can find small tournaments all over the world, and Magic Online is almost always available. There are also larger, more prestigious tournaments, too, many of which have significant cash prizes and some of which are invitation-only, up to and including a World Championship. If you have cards and want to play Magic competitively, it’s easier to find opportunities than it is for many other games and sports.
5) It almost goes without saying, but playing Magic is fun and exciting. They don’t call it “Cardboard Crack” for nothing.
As a former casual Magic player in the early 90s, I’m going to go ahead and argue that you just aren’t familiar enough with games other than Magic that have come out either before or since. Just among customizable games MTG only ranks 14th on boardgamegeek. It’s beaten out not only by games that don’t require constant infusions of cash (notably Mage Wars at #2), but other collectible card games (Android: Netrunner at #1).
Throw in games that have fixed cards but can be played with a draft mechanism (e.g. Race for the Galaxy; Omen: A Reign of War—both games that I own and can recommend highly) and you have even more choices that won’t break your wallet.
There are over 50,000 board and card games in the boardgamegeek database. I assure you that there are plenty of them that many people find more fun than Magic, even among people who find deep abstract strategy games stressful.
Note that Magic is also far from the only modern board game to have both online play and tournament infrastructure. To take an atypical example, one of my favorite games, Dungeon Twister, (imagine the mutant hybrid child of Chess or Arimaa and Dungeons and Dragons) is both available for Playstation online, and has (or at least had) tournaments in both Europe and the United States.
TL;DR -- Your claim is informed by availability bias and insufficient sampling.
Does Netrunner have high-prestige tournaments and a World Championship? I know there are some games, such as League of Legends and Starcraft, that have ambitions of being “e-sports” with highly competitive, publicized gaming circuits. It’s that kind of thing that I’m attracted to.
This sounds like something you have to be really into and which is then super-exciting to the point that you might get hooked on it. This is certainly not the shape that I would want an additional hobby to take...
Unfortunately, I lack the ability to properly communicate the experience of playing Magic as opposed to other games.
Given that we are at Lesswrong, the main point isn’t about “communicating the experience”. Even if you would succeed in communicating “the experience”, that doesn’t help anyone with doing an utility calculation with whether he ought to pick up Magic the Gathering.
Chess and Go have been Chess and Go for hundreds of years, and they’ve been studied to death. Relative to other classic games, Magic is a game that gives more rewards to experimentation and discovery.
I have Go experience but don’t know much about Chess. I don’t think the fact that Go is old stopped my at all from experimentation with various strategies.
Magic doesn’t present players the task of dealing with ridiculous game trees but still manages to continuously present interesting decistions to make
Given that this is a forum for rationalists what’s the issue with “ridiculous game trees”? If you already play an intellectual game, why not play one that provides a strong intellectual challenge?
5) It almost goes without saying, but playing Magic is fun and exciting.
I don’t really but that magic is exiting and I have played it in the last. It doesn’t compare in level of exicting to dance fast and intimate Salsa or Bachata with an attractive woman. The emotions that come up by playing a card game are comparably weak.
I don’t want to say that it’s not okay to do things for fun but, none of the things you listed say anything at all about providing benefits in other aspects of your life.
If you are a rationalist in search for a new hobby, pick one that’s fun and that provides secondary benefits. To me it seems like you didn’t seriously thought about the issue of whether playing magic is worthwhile. You just found yourself by accident playing MtG and it draw you in.
It interesting how hobbies draw people who are otherwise rational into them. If I would say on Lesswrong that you should seek a spiritual experience because it just provides an amazing experience that I can’t even put into words, nobody would take me seriously.
On the other hand one can say that one should play Magic the Gathering for those reasons because it’s tribal behavior that’s common under nerds.
I don’t really but that magic is exiting and I have played it in the last. It doesn’t compare in level of exicting to dance fast and intimate Salsa or Bachata with an attractive woman. The emotions that come up by playing a card game are comparably weak.
The best time I’ve ever had was when I made top 8 at the New Jersey State Championships in 2001. I was on top of the world for a long time afterward. I have been dancing, but I’ve never taken any kind of lessons though. I enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t exactly what one would call a “peak experience”. The path of the would-be champion is hard, but rewarding.
If I would say on Lesswrong that you should seek a spiritual experience because it just provides an amazing experience that I can’t even put into words, nobody would take me seriously.
Well… I’ve heard various claims to that effect about meditation and other spiritual practices that basically work by putting the brain into weird states, and also about various drugs...
Most people who pick up magic as a fun thing to do are not going to be champions.
When recommending hobbies to people it matters what they’re likely to experience, not just what happened for you. I like playing music and dancing a lot, but people I recommend them to tend to enjoy them less than I do. They still enjoy them, so I still suggest them to others, but I don’t recommend them nearly as heavily as I would if I knew everyone picking them up would get the enjoyment I’ve had.
I felt really good when I won a PTQ but I also felt very good when I got my yellow cord in capoeira. Success feels great in many different fields. Not a great reason to recommend a hobby from the outside view.
Why do you think Magic: the Gathering is amazing compared to other games you could play?
Unfortunately, I lack the ability to properly communicate the experience of playing Magic as opposed to other games. I can point to a few aspects of the game, though:
1) It’s not static. Magic changes all the time because new cards are released every few months. Chess and Go have been Chess and Go for hundreds of years, and they’ve been studied to death. Relative to other classic games, Magic is a game that gives more rewards to experimentation and discovery.
2) There are random factors in Magic. This adds excitement; to paraphrase a saying about American football, on any given day, any player can win. The best player at your local tennis, Chess, or Go club will never, ever win a match against the current World Champion. In Magic, although the better player usually wins, upsets can and do happen. This can even be fun for the better player, who can still have the experience of trying to claw his or her way back from behind, even against lesser players. (On a related note, some games are harder to handicap than others; Go has an elaborate system in which weaker players are given handicap stones at the start of a match, but handicapping Chess players is more difficult. Magic handicapping is trivial; just change the decks each player is using.)
3) I find trying to think zillions of moves in a chess or chess-like game difficult and stressful. Magic doesn’t present players the task of dealing with ridiculous game trees but still manages to continuously present interesting decistions to make, thanks to random factors and hidden information in addition to a moderate amount of visible complexity. It’s more about who has better quality heuristics than brute-force look-ahead.
4) Competitive Magic has a large infrastructure and community devoted to it. You can find small tournaments all over the world, and Magic Online is almost always available. There are also larger, more prestigious tournaments, too, many of which have significant cash prizes and some of which are invitation-only, up to and including a World Championship. If you have cards and want to play Magic competitively, it’s easier to find opportunities than it is for many other games and sports.
5) It almost goes without saying, but playing Magic is fun and exciting. They don’t call it “Cardboard Crack” for nothing.
As a former casual Magic player in the early 90s, I’m going to go ahead and argue that you just aren’t familiar enough with games other than Magic that have come out either before or since. Just among customizable games MTG only ranks 14th on boardgamegeek. It’s beaten out not only by games that don’t require constant infusions of cash (notably Mage Wars at #2), but other collectible card games (Android: Netrunner at #1).
Throw in games that have fixed cards but can be played with a draft mechanism (e.g. Race for the Galaxy; Omen: A Reign of War—both games that I own and can recommend highly) and you have even more choices that won’t break your wallet.
There are over 50,000 board and card games in the boardgamegeek database. I assure you that there are plenty of them that many people find more fun than Magic, even among people who find deep abstract strategy games stressful.
Note that Magic is also far from the only modern board game to have both online play and tournament infrastructure. To take an atypical example, one of my favorite games, Dungeon Twister, (imagine the mutant hybrid child of Chess or Arimaa and Dungeons and Dragons) is both available for Playstation online, and has (or at least had) tournaments in both Europe and the United States.
TL;DR -- Your claim is informed by availability bias and insufficient sampling.
Does Netrunner have high-prestige tournaments and a World Championship? I know there are some games, such as League of Legends and Starcraft, that have ambitions of being “e-sports” with highly competitive, publicized gaming circuits. It’s that kind of thing that I’m attracted to.
I’ve not played this one. But if you look under the “More information” portlet here you can find information on tournaments and online play.
This sounds like something you have to be really into and which is then super-exciting to the point that you might get hooked on it. This is certainly not the shape that I would want an additional hobby to take...
Given that we are at Lesswrong, the main point isn’t about “communicating the experience”. Even if you would succeed in communicating “the experience”, that doesn’t help anyone with doing an utility calculation with whether he ought to pick up Magic the Gathering.
I have Go experience but don’t know much about Chess. I don’t think the fact that Go is old stopped my at all from experimentation with various strategies.
Given that this is a forum for rationalists what’s the issue with “ridiculous game trees”? If you already play an intellectual game, why not play one that provides a strong intellectual challenge?
I don’t really but that magic is exiting and I have played it in the last. It doesn’t compare in level of exicting to dance fast and intimate Salsa or Bachata with an attractive woman. The emotions that come up by playing a card game are comparably weak.
I don’t want to say that it’s not okay to do things for fun but, none of the things you listed say anything at all about providing benefits in other aspects of your life.
If you are a rationalist in search for a new hobby, pick one that’s fun and that provides secondary benefits. To me it seems like you didn’t seriously thought about the issue of whether playing magic is worthwhile. You just found yourself by accident playing MtG and it draw you in.
It interesting how hobbies draw people who are otherwise rational into them. If I would say on Lesswrong that you should seek a spiritual experience because it just provides an amazing experience that I can’t even put into words, nobody would take me seriously. On the other hand one can say that one should play Magic the Gathering for those reasons because it’s tribal behavior that’s common under nerds.
The best time I’ve ever had was when I made top 8 at the New Jersey State Championships in 2001. I was on top of the world for a long time afterward. I have been dancing, but I’ve never taken any kind of lessons though. I enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t exactly what one would call a “peak experience”. The path of the would-be champion is hard, but rewarding.
Well… I’ve heard various claims to that effect about meditation and other spiritual practices that basically work by putting the brain into weird states, and also about various drugs...
Most people who pick up magic as a fun thing to do are not going to be champions.
When recommending hobbies to people it matters what they’re likely to experience, not just what happened for you. I like playing music and dancing a lot, but people I recommend them to tend to enjoy them less than I do. They still enjoy them, so I still suggest them to others, but I don’t recommend them nearly as heavily as I would if I knew everyone picking them up would get the enjoyment I’ve had.
I felt really good when I won a PTQ but I also felt very good when I got my yellow cord in capoeira. Success feels great in many different fields. Not a great reason to recommend a hobby from the outside view.