Cracking a Smile at Nerd Cults: An Insider's Mainstream Response to the Magic Media

Cracking a Smile at Nerd Cult-ure: A Magic Player’s Mainstream Response to the Magic Media

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Everyone involved with Magic: the Gathering could learn more about themselves by reading oversimplified and underinformed mainstream articles than by living in a myopic and censorious echo chamber

BY CHRIS MORRIS-LENT

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The world experienced Crackstyle as very funny, and so did a lot of Magic players. it became even funnier when the Magic poohbahs insisted it wasn’t, and it became still funnier when those nerd kings cynically used hurt feelings as an excuse for moral outrage. Those people have caused, and will cause, more hurt feelings than they’ve prevented. But they won’t admit it to themselves, and, until they do, Magic culture will never change.

1.

In the world of sword and sorcery, wizards and planeswalkers, convention centers and corporate offices — the wide world of Magic: the Gathering, I mean, the shit has hit the fan. Everyone is shitting themselves, and even the rest of the world was arsed, however brief-ly, to give a shit. Butt if you’re a cardboard crack addict, don’t crack up, crack a pack, or crack a smile, or you’ll crack the “victims’” sanity, and fall prey to the community crackdown yourself …

… If you’re here, you probably know that sixteen men at a “prestigious” Magic tournament (“Grand Prix Richmond”) were caught with their pants down the other day, and you know that the Magic community has reacted, well, ass over teakettle, threatening to bust a cap in his ass, open up a can of whoopass, or (for the half-assers) haul ass to judgment.

You might even know that the nameless perp has been punished severely – with an 18-month ban from playing organized Magic cards; he must be shitting himself! – but you wouldn’t know the details from reading the press release from Wizards of the Coast (the company that makes, markets, and monopolizes Magic, even more thoroughly than Disney). The punishment attempts to redress the “15 minutes of other people caring” @Dr8Sides has brought down upon Magic, as the reaction has been less sympathetic than 2011’s “Finkelgate.” 

Like Finkelgate, Crackstyle has made inroads into the world of “muggles” that an article on “Modern-constructed Splinter Twin splashing Black for Thoughtseize” never could, and this has caused Magic players to call the “scandal” not “Crackstyle” but “Crackgate.” Historians will note the scandalous part of Watergate wasn’t the break-ins and bugging, it was the cover-up (appropriate for a case of naked flesh). And, as in Watergate, the corruption in Crackgate goes all the way to the top. The name Crackgate suggests this is all a giant PR pain in the butt, and Wizards is shitting its drawers, as it needs to cover its ass, even if the players don’t!

Let’s go back to Wizards’ press release. On its face, it seems reasonable. It seems more reasonable when you compare it to the dumb articles from TIME, SI, and Kotaku, to name a few mainstream-media sources who deigned to comment on a “children’s card game.” Who would be against “camaraderie,” “excitement,” and “a positive and safe environment,” and, more to the point, who would be for “disrespectful, harassing, or bullying behavior,” as well as “hurtful acts”? 

I see the same language circulating in the Magic community, which the Wizards communiqué describes as “vibrant.” This is only somewhat true. I have played Magic for the last few years (taking a decade-long break between the end of childhood and the death of online poker); I wrote regularly for one of the biggest secondary-market sites and a couple of times for another, but it wasn’t until I stopped writing that I started making friends within the game. (Magic writing exists on secondary-market sites for the same reason it exists on wizards.com – advertising. I had an editor at tcgplayer.com straight-up tell me that “the point is to sell cards,” i.e. not to document Magic culture, entertain readers with mordant tales of high misdeeds outside Magic, or, least of all, criticize anyone who was anything, never mind if those help sell more cards.)

I live in Seattle, the birthplace of Magic and the location of Wizards’ corporate HQ. The community here is vibrant, or has pockets of vibrancy. There are pockets of vibrancy all over the world. But you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you read what Magic’s online commentariat had to say about Crackstyle. 

Most everyone, at least those of us who bothered to write about Crackstyle online, scrambled to identify with the “victims” in a way that typifies the Internet’s response to issues like, say, Trayvon’s murder. “Oh look, a black-and-white issue of social injustice; time to write something so I can show people how informed and virtuous I am. Nobody could possibly disagree!” These brave souls stand for controversial things like “racial harmony” and “a positive and safe environment” and rail against “shooting people for stupid reasons” and other “hurtful acts.” Never mind that such writing by definition betrays a fatal lack of perspective and individuality; when they so ballsily put some “anal-ysis” on the Internet, they didn’t do so just to be anal-yzed themselves!

The sense of scale, in the case of Crackstyle, is even more warped. Now the ratio of Time Put Into Discussing Crackstyle to Time Put Into Making Crackstyle approaches that of “the last episode of Breaking Bad” or (god help us) “Nipplegate.” And many of these words have come from community “pillars,” who have presented a more-or-less united front in condemning the mean bearded dude with the fantastic poker face and keen sense of irony.

Writing the minority opinion were Matt Sperling, a sardonic lawyer when he’s not playing Magic, and Brian Braun-Duin, who works in Magic but is still right about most everything Magic-related. Writing the majority opinion was … everyone else. A measured “funny, but inappropriate” came from “Magic judge” Riki Hayashi on Twitter; the hall-of-famer Luis Scott-Vargas, like most “pros,” voiced unambiguous disapproval, on the same medium. But nobody shat a bigger brick than the (usually) bright and charismatic golden boy, Brian M. Kibler himself …

2.

… One of the many funny things about Crackstyle is that I started writing this piece with the intent of having it published within Magic, or, more specifically, on a Magic website, where everyone would know who Brian Kibler was. (Most Magic players are casual; only a few percent have ever shown up to a sanctioned tournament — the strategy websites cater to a niche within a niche. I’d bet no more than 1 in 20 of Wizards’ customers know who Brian Kibler is.) Now that it’s out here, though, nobody knows who Brian Kibler is, and I needed a friend, who plays even more Magic than me, to remind me of that.

Who is Brian Kibler? In a lot of ways, he’s a genius. Magic is one hell of a hard game, combining elements of chess and poker, and Brian Kibler is one hell of a Magic player, and more. He plays and markets and makes other games. He writes lucidly about Magic and “streams” himself playing Magic Online at a clip that would stale my content and turn my brain into mush within a week. He’s also one of the guys who’s been able to parlay his early involvement in the game into more conventional returns. He has a cute dog, an attractive girlfriend, a degree from Emory, a profitable game-design endeavor or two, enough money to travel on a whim, youth, good looks, and health – all the conventional markers of success. From a distance, he is about as far as it gets from the stereotype of a Magic nerd, binging on Doritos in the dungeon or basement.

It will thus come as a surprise that Kibler devoted a lengthy blog post to a livid censure of Crackstyle; if anyone would be in on the joke, it would be him. It surprised me, too, until I considered the following. While condemnations of Crackstyle were very popular within Magic (as measured by retweets or Facebook likes), dissenting views were not. The extreme lack of community dissent shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows nerd celebrity culture (or has attended a Star Trek convention); these guys, after all, have fan-bases they have to appeal to, and those fan-bases are full of guys looking for the opposite of a confrontation. Nerds crave a social hierarchy, someone to look up to, and, by marketing Magic “celebrities” to market its $4 pieces of cardboard, Wizards has given them one. Kibler, as one of these “celebrities,” understands, explicitly or not, that if you pretend to like the average nerd, you can treat him however you want — a fact that Wizards has been milking for all it’s worth, to the exclusion of other markets. Since this business model is “good enough,” it hasn’t changed for two decades now. I’d hesitate to call that dynamic “vibrant.”

If the fans are nobodies, it follows that much of the pissiness and prissiness over Crackstyle is of the “fans don’t boo nobodies” variety. While this is part of the problem, what it misses is that a public Magic figure cannot, in practice, boo anybody in Magic — least of all a public figure — and expect to remain a public figure himself. Magic culture has some elements of individualist freedom, some elements of corporate line-toeing — often, you get the worst of both worlds (“libertarians”). In a game where “pros” cannot make a living from prizes alone, but have to supplement that paltry income with writing, popularity is the coin of the realm — if you’re struggling to afford Doritos, you don’t shit where you eat! So the only thing to do is to get mad. Luis Scott-Vargas is mad; Kibler is mad; it’s time to get mad! Community figures, like it or not, provide moral guidance (and judging by the way they cultivate large retinues of sad sycophants, they do like it) — and telling admirers not to crack a smile for Crackstyle is a bum steer indeed. To the world of Magic, this is economic necessity; to the outside world, it’s (bare with me here) a “race to the bottom.”

Thus the sewers overflow with filth, and everyone’s mind is in the gutter; nothing brings together a cult, even a big and extremely lucrative cult like Magic, like a nice episode of paranoid, self-righteous anger. “Gee, I wonder why nobody wants to play with us.”

This (very good) insider history describes a libertine culture during Wizards’ infancy: initially, nudity wasn’t censured; it was required! But the corporate backlash lasts to this day. At the very least, you’d think we’d be a little more used to it, what with the advent of The Nerd Supermodel, who is, I must say, quite the piece of ass. I wonder if the devaluation of @Dr8Sides is the inverse of the idealization of women common to eighteenth-century novelists, teenagers, and geekdom alike. Never meet your heroes. Never grow up; never surrender.

3.

But I digress! Let us not be distracted from the very important business of discussing the ramifications of some guy taking pictures of buttcracks at a Magic tournament and putting them on the Internet. I read Kibler’s post and saw it had effected a bum rush of brown-nosing, so I butted in and was soon butting heads with the ass-kissers. I’d intended to just shoot the shit, but soon was taking a shit all over their arguments, which caused some to lose their shit. Kibler replied; I replied to his reply; the thread is now dead, presumably deleted. This is nerddom’s representative response to disagreement.

Again, I know my perspective — that Crackstyle has been hilarious and enjoyable — is a fairly popular one within Magic (and nearly universal outside of Magic — shit, maybe the world’s onto something!); however, few within the game have yet to come out and say it. Here is what I wrote that got the axe:

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Hi Brian -- I’m a fan of yours. I wouldn’t mind seeing the guy banned. I also have been following how that fellow made the men in the trenches the butt of all wisecracks with great amusement. I strongly disagree with your butt-hurt reaction (if I may crack a joke or two). 

Seriously, though, here are some thoughts on the matter.

I found the pictures funny. My friends who play Magic overwhelmingly found the pictures funny. My friends who don’t play Magic funny unanimously found the pictures funny. None of us would take the pictures, much less upload them, and I can see how they weren’t funny to other people, but, eh, I still enjoyed them. I could make a utilitarian argument about how a good sense of humor has turned this all into a net positive in spite of hurt feelings, but it’s more useful to point this out: the difference between finding it “bullying” or “a joke” is, (for the most part) as you’ve written, “self-esteem.” And, if people with low self-esteem get hurt by this, they can get hurt by anything. I might as well find it funny, and I might as well find your telling me it isn’t funny to also be funny: for me, the community reaction has been even more enjoyable than the initial photos. And, really, it’s unlikely either of our reactions will have much of an effect on the self-esteem of the community; the whole thing, like Finkel vs. the Gizmodo Harpy, will pass into the realm of “amusing anecdote” in a week or two, but in the meantime it’s all great fun, a much more interesting topic of conversation than “what do we do with the UWR flex slots for the Open on Sunday,” and it makes me wish my friends and I talked about the cultural aspects of Magic far more often.

As for the reactions of “Magic celebrities,” your post is fairly representative. Your language, like the language of those who agree with you, is obviously driven by anger. This kind of anger admits of no alternative; in your view, everyone else ought to be angry, too, and if I’m not angry I’m complicit in the cruelty. But this is predicated on a number of assumptions, the first of which is that the “victims” think of themselves as “victims”; what if they don’t? What if a number of them (and I bet this is the case) were laughing at themselves, too? What if many of them just didn’t care? You presume to speak for them all, and you presume they have an unhealthy mindset towards this all; saying “It’s intended as shaming!” as if your so-called “empathy” legitimizes that perspective to the point that other healthier responses is so hypocritical and blind to the responsibility you have for your feelings on the matter. It’s also silly, as it’s (pretty clearly to me) first and foremost a joke. This isn’t a general and objective judgment on you -- this sort of tunnel vision happens to everyone, especially online -- but I do think the white-knight instinct is both a cause and symptom of low self-esteem. To stretch comparisons across time, too, “getting mad on the Internet” and “self-righteous posturing” are two awful aspects of the Magic community this post exemplifies. 

The link between them, which you spent the first few paragraphs describing, is corporate culture. Corporate culture saturates Magic at every level, and it will determine the inevitable fate of The Guy in the Pictures. Let me say that I don’t think this fate is unjust. I can see publicizing the “gotta ban this dude” perspective if you’re Wizards, and maybe even believing it a little, needing to make money and appeal to a big demographic and all. But not everyone has to agree. Not everyone here has to feel negatively about the entire affair. 

As for the overall image of the game, I don’t much care, but if you do, realize this is a symptom more than a cause of being marginalized or whatever. To the extent it is a cause, it is the 20th-most important thing to get mad about. Get mad about it not being worth it for “pros” to go to GPs. Get mad about Modo [Magic Online, a Web-based version of the game] being a script kiddie’s adolescent piddle. Get mad about cigarette butts at cardboard crack. Get mad about the cruel lie that being a Magic pro is a feasible thing. Changing these things will change Magic culture a lot more in the eyes of Magic players and the rest of the world. The rest of the world’s reactions to The Butt of all Wisecracks are kinda philistine, too, but they do provide even more much-needed perspective on this trivial issue. Consider what a non-issue this would be in the world of poker, for example … 

… A dozen paragraphs into your rant, I get to the phrase “don’t be a dick.” I see “don’t be a dick” trumpeted in Magic all the time, as if it’s some sort of categorical imperative. Well, it isn’t. There’s more going on here. You wouldn’t have written so much if there wasn’t. Some of this writing touches on the corporate nature of Magic; Wizards often has to “be a dick” to protect its interests, and players do too. I am not saying this should be used as an excuse to be a dick, but more an explanation that everyone is a dick sometimes, and the worst dicks are the ones who pretend (or actually believe) they never are, viz. Hasbro. (How do the employees feel about it? Let’s let them tell us themselves: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wizards-of-the-Coast-Reviews-E4718.htm). Anyway, “don’t be a dick” is, at best, one guideline in a sea of guidelines, and, at worst, a vague pseudo-religious platitude that gets used, subconsciously or not, to excuse yourself for being a dick. The rest of your post has little substance beyond its anger; it cycles through precedents of varying similarity, then gets to the real issue at hand, your autobiography which makes you the Emperor of All Once and Future Fat People; for you, it really does “boil down to don’t be a dick.”

The Magic world thus divides into “self-loathing players who are dicks” and “self-loathing players who aren’t dicks.” The implication is that anyone who disagrees with you is aligning themselves with objective dickishness. That implication is ludicrous; being offended may very well cause you to stop thinking, but that doesn’t give you any special rights or anything. In that same sentence, you attempt to annex “empathy” too, but the rest of the piece does not earn this self-attribution; here, like the typical man with a grievance, have little empathy to give; taking seriously the idea that a bunch of people saw this as “a crusade against exposed butts” shows that, as nobody on that end of things cares as much as you, and it’s a straw man in any case. Not only do you have no regard for divergent perspectives here, you also just don’t get them. 

I also don’t think you understand your own reaction, and what and how other people who disagree think and feel about it. For the upshot is that sentiments like “I sure as hell don’t want you at any tournament that I’m playing in, and Wizards shouldn’t either” expose a far stinkier intolerance, indeed ugliness, than 16 or even 4,300 cases of plumber’s butt. 

The sweetest thing about Magic is how anyone, at any level, can make a sweet play; the very concept and economic model of a TCG [Trading Card Game] hinges on subjectivity, and Magic is one of the few games where you’re more defined by your sweet plays than you are by your mistakes. I just wish this were true in the community. I for one would much rather hang out with the kind of people who find this kind of thing funny than those who don’t. Previous versions of CML have gotten mad, even offended, by events like having their buttcrack exposed and photographed, and though I value the emotions of those previous versions, I don’t do so to the exclusion of every other consideration, especially the realization that this attitude is childish and hilarious. Does this mean I want to ban you? Of course not.

Cheers, CML

4.

If it takes guts to come out to a Magic tournament (and bigger guts still to snugly fit a pair of XXL jeans), just imagine what courage it takes to argue on the Internet. After I tweeted at him, Kibler replied with a post of moderate length which held that “Frankly it wouldn’t matter if [any of the ‘victims’ were angry or not],” and which drew a comparison to the Tyler Clementi tragedy.

The link between that and Crackstyle is so fatuous that it has to be the (stillborn) brainchild of a zero or a hero, not anyone in between. It would have been a great joke about how arguing on the Internet makes nerds into morons, and too many Magic players don’t know what’s going on outside the game, except (I am almost certain) Kibler meant it. Surely he’s shitting me … except he’s not! This actually makes it even funnier; just because he isn’t in on the joke (yet) doesn’t mean I have to take it seriously, right? I guess the comparison makes sense if being relentlessly bullied by an inescapably cruel and bigoted roommate and his mean-spirited cabal is the same as having a photo of an exposed backside taken once on the Internet. I wouldn’t trivialize the Clementi case that way, though, at least not without being a little facetious — but doing so is not only widespread among the Magic media; it is the default position.

Again, I don’t have the full text of my “exchange” with Kibler (and I hesitate to call it an exchange, as that would imply he’d both read and cared about what I wrote). My only comments that remain on “Cracks in the Community” are ones I tacked on to the outpouring of positive feedback. Ironically, in order to have my views represented, I couldn’t’ve talked directly to Kibler. Instead, I had to “boo the nobodies” with whom Kibler here had aligned himself.

It seems clear now that the big kinship between Magic “celebrities” and “nobodies” is their crippling sensitivity towards criticism — sensitive only towards themselves, of course. Think of how someone with absolute power or absolutely no power acts; there’s little difference. The presence of one even implies the other. Anyway, issues like Crackstyle tend to bring this out because disagreeing and maybe even being wrong about cards is one thing, but being wrong about people? A guy who makes and plays games for a living, wrong about people? Inconceivable! Well, then there must be something wrong with the game. But there can’t be! Then there must be something wrong with Kibler. But there can’t be! Uhhhhh … can we get a judge to rule on this?

The comments section didn’t get nearly this far. It was a big circle jerk, a human centipede. Both leader and followers were talking out of their asses, and burying their heads in one another’s fumes.

Yet it is the curse of the famous figure that mere mortals must take their every word somewhat seriously. I wrote back something sincere:

Haha, of course it matters if they [the “victims”] are angry or not. You wrote a thousand words on how angry these things would have made previous Kiblers. Getting mad on behalf of someone who’s not mad would be silly; possible anger is a requirement of your whole argument. The “what if they chose not to go to an event” question, as I wrote above, isn’t too important for me, but I do acknowledge it is important enough for Wizards that they should ban the dude.

Moving on to some straw men, if someone were to take his own life from this, then it would be terrible, sure, but it would be for a bunch of other reasons, too. “What if the guy who took the pictures took his life for getting an 18-month DCI [Magic’s “governing body”] ban?” “What if PTQ Grinder X took his life because he’d done nothing else for the last ten years and realized the PT didn’t make actual ‘pros’?” are similar questions in this vein. The Ravi farfetched comparison bespeaks the lack of perspective I was talking about; it wasn’t funny at all. But the guy isn’t Ravi, people giggling over the pics aren’t Ravi’s friends, and the pictured buttcrack guys aren’t Tyler Clementi. I could ask a dumb question about “what if someone made harmless joke Y and person Z got offended based on flimsy pretext A,” and it’d be about as far from this situation as was the Rutgers tragedy, but eh. This is way closer to “Star Wars kid,” which has brought humanity much joy.

What it really boils down to (per TCGs) is that these are matters of taste and subjectivity; what I’m trying to get you to admit is that a) you ought to approach it this way, and b) you ought to realize most of us who disagree with you are making a nuanced, subtle, complicated judgment based on enough variables to make a token-clogged board-state look simple. As to whether the pictures are in bad taste or good taste, we can disagree about that :)

Last thing: this is a good read http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

5.

(Before going on, click the Plausibly Deniable link. It’s much better than this article.)

Done reading it? Doesn’t everything make much more sense now? Oh, to be described in totality by a decade-old Internet blurb. It’s funny that a card game with strong similarities to poker can bring about such predictability, such a lack of irony, such an inability to “read” or deal with complexity and ambiguity.

I am now going to submit “don’t be a dick” to some poker-style exegesis, i.e., “He’s sure betting a lot, but what does it really mean?” A bit of Googling reveals “don’t be a dick” is called “Wheaton’s law.” Wheaton’s law unanimously passed both the nerd House and the nerd Senate at PAX in 2007. One could make any number of jokes about basing your life around a Gary Stu in a utopian future, not to mention “Wesley Dream-Crushers.” I’ll just point out that “Don’t be a dick” is everywhere in every nerd culture – and its being the motto of Northwest Magic, the most old-school (and most defunct) of all the Seattle Magic groups, is no coincidence.

This innocuous-looking little phrase is the crux of Kibler’s argument. It is also the crux of my argument against his argument. Debaters (rightly) slur this kind of one-liner as “not even wrong.” One implication is that it’s about as courageous as coming out in favor of “racial harmony” or against “bullying.” Another implication is that “don’t be a dick,” like “that’s offensive,” is often a justification of being a dick to someone that’s being a dick, while not even acknowledging it. Something like “don’t be a dick” isn’t the start of a conversation, but the end of a monologue. The very sight of that phrase makes me go flaccid, and do remember that Magic is played with two or more players! “Don’t be a dick” defines people by what they don’t do, and implies that “if you come to a Magic tournament, you’ve ass-ented to agree to everything that goes on there” — two of the surprising and numerous affinities between corporate and nerd culture (seamlessly integrated by Wizards). “Don’t be a dick” is declaring its speaker is making no judgment, especially one of the complexity, “How funny does something have to be to justify hurting some feelings?” when he in fact makes that judgment all the time, and should. It is a pretense towards kindness that stops well short of the real thing. It is an excuse to do anything, so long as you don’t think of yourself as a dick. It is, worst of all, an excuse to stop thinking.

If the whole issue really does boil down to “don’t be a dick,” then that’s what “don’t be a dick” really means; the subtext is far richer than the text. I think Kibler et al. are guilty of all the above charges on this issue. To this Magic player and writer, the witch hunt has been more shameful than the initial act. The cure has been worse than the disease.

I do have to wonder if I’m not guilty of that same issue, just a “level” above — after all, this petty little drama replays online, in a thousand places, all of them oblivious to one another, and ranging from men’s rights forums to New York Times comments sections, on a daily basis. More broadly, geeky rumpuses erupt in convention centers and chatrooms all the time. The Internet’s vice and virtue is that it distances ourselves from the consequences of our actions, and thus lends itself to bringing out latent conflicts. These conflicts tend to spiral further out of control as they become more “meta” — Internet users tend to see their own position as unassailable, which is most of the problem right there.

That being said, let’s step back and take a crack at these questions: Are pictures of people’s huge asses in the breeze not funny? Is calling people who find them so “assholes” not Internet “bullying,” or at least “shaming” too? Kibler, remember, is perpetually energetic and cheerful, except when the MOCS crashes. Kibler the Magic celebrity is the kind of person who would never bully or shame, which means precisely that he can bully and shame and get away with it.

When the community ignores this, it suspends both judgment and players, and it also creates conditions that are bad for business. When it allows itself to indulge in ostracism, Magic becomes more xenophobic and repellent to outsiders, including prospective Magic players, than it knows. (Amusingly, this is contrary to Wizards’ marketing strategy, which aggressively pursues new customers and treats its current ones with barely-concealed contempt and a shit-eating grin …)

… Many of the commentators have focused on “how bad” the images made Magic look (though the position that exposed cracks make it look bad is equally stupid). Alright, then. Image is everything. But then the “cracks” aren’t “in the community”; the cracks are in the community’s façade. Patching up the facade is easy; just ban the guy (it’s a cover-up … tough shit!) and go on to the next tournament. In Mel Brooks’ words, “Keep firing assholes!”

All this is fine with me, or would be, if it weren’t an excuse for doing nothing.

6.

Insofar as this article has a thesis, it is this: The community response to Crackstyle, far from being full of “empathy” and “sympathy” and “maturity” and “adulthood,” has been very short on those virtues, and this has dire consequences for anyone who plays Magic. I think nerd culture too often uses words like “empathy” without knowing what they mean, “adulthood” in particular. In most senses of the word, Kibler is an adult; he’s self-sufficient, independent, smart and successful. His involvement in the Magic community is a major net positive for both.

But adults should also be able admit they’re fallible and sometimes think fallaciously; adults have a sense of irony and self-awareness. Well, where is Wizards’ fallibility? This tempest in a teapot shows that Magic is indeed a children’s card game, not in the sense that its in-game design is for children (it isn’t), but in the sense that its culture is designed for children. The people who play it (or have played it) to the exclusion of most everything else often turn themselves into children.

7.

Nowhere is this easier to see than in Seattle. When I go draft at “Friday Night Magic,” or hit up an “SCG Open tournament” with a prize purse of $10,000, over half the people I meet have started playing within the last few years, or have ‘gotten back into the game’ within that same timeframe. The new blood has been incredibly good for the game, not least of all because more new blood means more new blood – and this is true even if the game’s explosive growth has recently slowed. 

Most of my Magic friends fit into this broad category. They are among the best players in the area. At a 320-man tournament the other day, they took the entire top 4 places, which is about as hard to do (and uncontrollably improbable) as it would be in poker. This is a stupendous achievement, and that I’ve been able to build a smaller community around them and myself seems no less stupendous, because I like my Magic friends, a lot. They are some of the smartest and funniest and singular eclectic people I’ve met. They take photographs and run sales teams and go to college and work as a strip club DJ and program (but mostly program). I grew up in Seattle, spending a decade in a nerdy gifted program before shipping off to a prestigious university anyone who plays Magic couldn’t care less about, and Magic made 2013 my most socially satisfying year since 2005, when I was crowned Homecoming King in high school. The game of Magic itself is very good, second to only poker in my reckoning, but when it isn’t going well, it’s these people who make it worth it, worth the early mornings, the humorless power nerds and insulting prizes. (Gee, I wonder why I’m happier trying to please them than overworked Wizards drones or secondary-market editors.)

The goal of everyone at Wizards should be to get more and more of us to join the game all the time, because, as I tell anyone who will listen, most everyone likes Magic. Frat boys and club hos and bros and CEOs like Magic — they just don’t know it yet. What they do know is Magic players, and they don’t like them. But I bet they’d like me and they’d like the homies, and they’d like Brian Kibler on a good day.

My friends’ tournament achievement becomes singularly satisfying when I think of the people they replaced at the top of the table – a different generation of Magic guys that the bros and CEOs would not like. They are the “grognards,” if you will, in the senses of “old soldiers,” “anal dudes,” “obsessive painters of metal models,” and “party loyalists.” There are enough guys in Seattle who played during the commercially dark days of “Saviors of Kamigawa” and “Eventide” to form a coherent clique or two. They are likely a big reason 2000 through 2008 were the commercially dark days for Magic. Their defining personality trait is that all of their friends are from playing Magic. They therefore defend it with the zeal of a fanatic, someone who has nothing else; they (think?) they owe everything to Magic. If I didn’t play Magic, I might have a full-time job or read more books or be a better musician. If the old-school grognards didn’t play Magic, then they’d have had no social lives, “jacked off and played CounterStrike.”

From that simple observation, the rest of their character traits fall neatly (even inevitably) into place. Almost without exception, the grognards either work for Wizards, or barely play the game any more. The ones that do play are all strong players. They are suspicious of the “new wave,” perhaps feeling threatened by the game’s newfound popularity, for with popularity comes “popular kids.” They are anal-retentive when considering themselves, and anal-expulsive when considering outsiders. They like open-face Chinese poker. They usually like real poker, but are oblivious to how bad they are at it. They write incessantly on one another’s Facebook walls, sharing incredibly boring bad-beat stories only they find funny. They “like” each other’s Facebook posts with greater frequency than diffident teen girls. They have, at most, a primitive and underdeveloped sense of irony, which makes it hard to have a conversation with them, much less tell a joke – they see the world as it exists outside the card table in the blackest blacks and whitest whites. They hate losing more than they love winning, and they hate criticism much more than they love approval. They think they and their friends are the only smart and kind people in the universe. When they do grace a tournament with their gravitas, it will be a big tournament, and they will have dressed their bloated egos in undersized clothes. A temper might explode out of a fleshy exterior; a belly might slip out beneath a mistreated button-down; a buttcrack might break through bursting jeans. But what makes these full and comic figures funniest of all is that they are incapable of laughing at themselves. They say absurd things like “I don’t care if Wizards isn't forthright with us, they just make the best product and that’s all I care about.” They are sometimes unattractive, usually bright, often unpleasant and always weird. Not all of them are great of gut or gauche of dress; they come in different shapes and sizes. They do all take Magic way too seriously.

All of these qualities (as well as the absence of any other ones) make the grognards eminently well-qualified to work for Wizards — there’s got to be someone for whom the un-ass-ailable standing, the sense of being someone, the innervation of authority and power, make working at Wizards worth it. But with authority and power comes the possibility of hurting people — it turns out that, in corporate life, “don’t be a dick” goes from categorical imperative to “the stupidest rule ever.” Separately, these guys can be thoughtful, even nice. Together, they are the bad Magic stereotype incarnate. What I’m trying to get at is that the people who shat themselves over Crackstyle were almost all this “type.” They share stories about how they were fat and unhappy growing up. They try desperately to prove they’ve moved beyond this. They say things like “fuck [@Dr8Sides] and his apologists.” They are, collectively, Wizards of the Coast. 

The grognards are, Magic, but without them Magic could be ten times as big. But if Magic were ten times as big, maybe the grognards wouldn’t be in charge of it anymore. So it’s time for them to get upset over Crackstyle! (When Kibler aligns his past selves with this “victims,” I have to wonder the extent to which he too is “still those people” — maybe he too “owes everything to Magic,” or thinks he does.)

Among the new wave of players, there is a pervasive feeling that Wizards does all the small things to grow the game, but none of the big ones. The thrust of this argument is that Wizards refuses to spend some money to make more money (though I’m guessing much of this is the fault of its parent company, Hasbro). This means it pays its employees so poorly that you almost have to be a kind of cultist to work there. The cultists won’t spend more money, so they end up hiring more people like themselves … who fear infiltration of non-cultists into the game. It seems clear that, as the newer players have overwhelmingly enjoyed Crackstyle – we are @Dr8Sides’ apologists; we are your customers – the Magic boom has happened in spite of Wizards, and in spite of the community figures who spoke out against Crackstyle.

This is depressing, since Magic is, after all, a game about people. The more interesting people there are, the better the game is. Wouldn’t you rather have a big community of people who found Crackstyle funny, rather than a small community that found it offensive? Well, that’s what you have, except for the people that run the show.

All the self-exculpation, the rush to judgment, the conditions that made it impossible to write an anal-ysis of the situation that was well-considered, timely, and broadly disseminated, are what’s really "uncool" — for if the grognards weren’t so obsessed with avoiding the judgment of the world, and rooting out heresies from apostates like @Dr8Sides, Magic would be so much bigger and so much cooler. 

That paranoia also ass-ures something like Crackstyle will happen again. The reaction will be identical. Wizards will wring its hands, dispatch a self-righteous press release, outsource most of the outrage to Kibler and friends, and so on. For them, it’ll be more bad news, and more confirmation that the world is full of wankers. For me, it’ll be great news, and more confirmation that the old-school part of the Magic community, while by no means homogeneously terrible, is mostly full of wankers.

8.

It takes all kinds, though, and I have as little interest in persecuting these people as I do in, uh, kissing their buttcracks. I don’t want all of Wizards to be cut out and repopulated with well-adjusted, “normal” people; then Magic wouldn’t be Magic, either. Nor do I mean to position myself as an objective arbiter in re Crackstyle. I rather want to contest the idea that anyone is, or that claiming offense or hurt feelings entitles anyone to any special rights in and of itself, since those are what have gotten us to this point.  I want to challenge the Kibler and Wizards versions of reality, and I want my own tested too, because Crackstyle exposes us all – as crackpots! But with its characteristic mob-mentality agnosia, the Magic community refuses to acknowledge its crackpot-tery, much less the complications it brings up.

It might be true that Magic is also a “children’s card game” in the sense that it turns you into whoever you were as a child. It’s definitely true that success in Magic is no cure at all for low self-esteem, and that low self-esteem (I’d stop a bit short of “self-loathing”) has a peculiar logic of its own, unshakeable from without. 

This kind of enraged solipsism-as-selflessness, ubiquitous on the Internet, is easy enough to parody: “Today, we are all fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out”; or “You say we’re a bunch of fat dudes with our asscracks hanging out? You’re damn right we are!” — this is the typical cant of the cult, corporation, or congressman. I could point out that the tone of Kibler’s post is about as far as you can get from self-deprecation and self-awareness, then ask you if complex empathy can exist in the absence of those traits. I could ask pointedly if we would rather have a community of people who get mad about buttcracks than those who laugh at them, I could draw parallels between the community’s waxing rage and a bickering couple, and I could get ironically butt-hurt about the attacks on dissenters, as my friends are a lot nicer than I am. I could note that the Magic community exalts a guy who fucking had another guy killed so he could beat a drug charge, but hey, he’s our friend and develops positive content for us so you know why not let bygones be bygones I’m sure the guy just accidentally OD’ed, right?

A number of community figures of far greater prestige than me privately voiced their support for this article, and hoped it would get published, just “not under their names” — nobody in Magic would take the risk of publishing it. That’s why I’ve had to shop it around to a wider audience; that’s why you’re reading this here.

9.

I don’t intend for this to be a (completely) personal attack on Brian Kibler, either: if I haven’t made it clear enough already, I don’t consider him to be a horse’s ass. I just think all the people sniffing his farts have convinced him his shit doesn’t stink. I do, however, want to take literally his invitation to subject him to “public attention and scrutiny.” (Though, if he really was holding himself to a higher standard, and he really did think it was “fine” to read “horrible things about himself on the Internet,” why would he delete even my initial post? Why would he chafe at the indifference of the universe?) … 

…  This may be a mistake, though, as the post could just be corporate moralistic grandstanding from a private source; a cynical notion, yes, but think how idiotic it would be to literally interpret anything on the “Mothership,” to take Wizards’ public face at face value. In times of crisis, the best defense is getting offended — it’s Wizards’ asses that are, so to speak, flapping in the breeze! 

When Kibler writes “be the change you want to see in the world,” he must be aware, on some suppressed level, that his article is doing quite the opposite. His reaction was so full of name-calling and negativity and anger and shit and calls for ostracism — everything short of table-flipping, really — that a closer double of this behavior is the guy who took the pictures. Let me state my position very firmly here. Kibler’s blog post is a study in “bullying” and “shaming,” with none of the redeeming qualities of humor.

When someone as attractive and magnetic and successful in and out of Magic as Kibler writes that kind of thing to the community’s undivided plaudits, is it any wonder mainstream culture stays away?

10.

I, for one, refuse to stoop to the level of calling Kibler a “bully” and a “shamer” in all regards, in all situations, all the time. But nobody is always right all the time, and Kibler’s role in Crackstyle couldn’t be clearer to me. Not only has Crackstyle “made” the lion’s share of the Magic media into everything it hates (at least until the furor subsides), but the Magic media can also never admit this to itself. That, I think, is the primary cause of the outcry — and fuck anyone who notices it. Just like how Magic “celebrities” and “nobodies” are both so sensitive as to be beyond criticism, having accountability only within Magic and having no accountability within Magic are basically the same thing.

It is useless to write that it is also the result of that outcry, and equally useless to write that Wizards costs themselves far more money that way than a renegade butthead with a camera ever could. The stereotype of Magic players as slovenly fat nerds may not be true, but the stereotype of people who depend on Magic as humorless cultists is. By not even considering the possibility of laughing at himself, Kibler confirms most of the allegations in that stupid TIME article as true.

So where do we, as Magic players, go from here? Nowhere, if the past is any indication. If Magic is to grow beyond a cult into a culture, it must take account of its own flaws, its own biases and imperfections. It must learn to listen to criticism from within and outside the game, and even develop self-critical faculties of its own. It must learn to laugh at itself, and endure, even enjoy, laughter from the outside world. Otherwise, why would the outside world ever change its perception? I’d have trouble faulting outside readers of “Cracks in the Community” concluding that the Magic community richly deserves much of its bum rap.

Today, Magic faces great pressure from the outside world; with spectators for its most popular (and abysmally presented) live-streams being orders of magnitude below League of Legends, with the rise of eSports, and with Hearthstone seeking to carve out a niche of its own from the TCG market, Magic can no longer afford to ignore the outside world. In order to survive, grow, and flourish, it must adopt the kind of self-awareness the Magic celebrities embody as players, but, at the slightest hint of provocation, far too seldom fail to live up to as people. Magic has to get its ass into gear. The alternative is the kind of conflict aversion that causes one community figure to lament not that Magic Online is a piece of shit, but that Kibler called it a piece of shit. Even Magic players can agree that’s ass-backwards.

Shit happens.

It’s a bummer that this kind of auto-da-fé is part of what sometimes lies just beneath most Magic “pros’” squeaky-clean public images. For if Kibler’s post stands for “empathy,” anything can. And if it stands for  “inclusivity,” who will we be including, and how many of them will there be?

Good thing the outside world hasn’t noticed most of this, or doesn’t care. 

Thanks for reading!

CML

@BasicForest on Twitter

Postscript: This weekend, at the tournament the homies clean-swept, as our team was kicking as much ass as General Butt Naked, I returned from the bar shit-faced and chanced upon the opportunity to take a picture of a friend’s asscrack. I circulating it among our mutual friends, with shit-eating grin, until I was caught and couldn’t bullshit my way out of it. The good humor with which this incident was met, by “victim” and “predators,” has helped me better appreciate the Crackstyle photos. I now find them even funnier than before. I feel a little sorry for Kibler, who claims to be unbothered by a hypothetical photo of him “scratching his ass or picking his nose,” but who is, in this matter, unable to deal with any disagreement or criticism of a more thoughtful variety. It is clear to me the entire Magic media cannot take any criticism, hiding behind notions of “professionalism” and labeling all opposition as “trolls,” because it is overwhelmingly composed of insecure people. It’s a shame that Kibler’s private insecurities made it difficult for him to find Crackstyle funny; it’s a worse shame that his public position, especially when backed up by a legion of tossers and ass-kissers, makes it more difficult. But it doesn’t make it impossible.