Chasing the dragon
January 18th 2011 23:23
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
-- The Eagles, “Hotel California”
Trading card games generally have few nicknames beyond awkward abbreviations (MTG, YGO, WoW). Magic, though, is sometimes referred to as “cardboard crack.” This is partly because of the ongoing upkeep cost to get new cards, but partly because some people seem to believe that it is actually, literally addictive, that some players who dislike recent sets and recent game design have tried to stop and were unable to.
But this “addiction” is not like that experienced by many drug users, nor like the mental anguish experienced by a few viewers of Avatar. In these cases, the person is driven by the desire to extend a positive feeling or by an attraction to beauty, respectively. Someone who describes themselves as “addicted” to Magic is usually one who hates or resents the good decks in Standard or some other competitive format but keeps playing it, often intensively, and has never even tried to imagine what the Fields of Summer smell like.
The fact that no-one has complained of being addicted to Commander, and there has been no actual analysis of whether anyone treats opening boosters as a form of gambling, is very telling. Magic addiction as commonly understood is in fact no such thing – it is more closely related to the Spike mentality of aggression, domination, and arrogance than to any actual clinical condition. Any attempt to deal with potential psychological problems around Magic is doomed to fail until it stops being a veiled attempt to address Spike’s interests ahead of everyone else’s.
-- The Eagles, “Hotel California”
Trading card games generally have few nicknames beyond awkward abbreviations (MTG, YGO, WoW). Magic, though, is sometimes referred to as “cardboard crack.” This is partly because of the ongoing upkeep cost to get new cards, but partly because some people seem to believe that it is actually, literally addictive, that some players who dislike recent sets and recent game design have tried to stop and were unable to.
But this “addiction” is not like that experienced by many drug users, nor like the mental anguish experienced by a few viewers of Avatar. In these cases, the person is driven by the desire to extend a positive feeling or by an attraction to beauty, respectively. Someone who describes themselves as “addicted” to Magic is usually one who hates or resents the good decks in Standard or some other competitive format but keeps playing it, often intensively, and has never even tried to imagine what the Fields of Summer smell like.
The fact that no-one has complained of being addicted to Commander, and there has been no actual analysis of whether anyone treats opening boosters as a form of gambling, is very telling. Magic addiction as commonly understood is in fact no such thing – it is more closely related to the Spike mentality of aggression, domination, and arrogance than to any actual clinical condition. Any attempt to deal with potential psychological problems around Magic is doomed to fail until it stops being a veiled attempt to address Spike’s interests ahead of everyone else’s.
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