Abstract
Game scholars have critiqued ludic magic systems for their rational, quantifiable, and wonderless nature. Yet, despite the magic system's prevalence in modern games, the field of game studies lacks a formal theoretical framework to analyze how these systems—and the framing fictions they inhabit—go about articulating a sense of enchantment to players. To address this gap, this article proposes a novel method for close-reading ludic magic systems based on Antoine Faivre's “definition of enchantment” from the field of Western esotericism. The article describes examples of Faivre's four esoteric qualities—correspondences, living nature, imagination and mediations, and experience of transmutation—as they appear across twelve different games. These examples illustrate how the logics of premodern enchantment, which underlie ludic representations of magic, can evoke awe and wonder in the player by providing alternative ways to knowing and being in fantasy gameworlds.
Introduction
Though fantasy games abound with arcane spells, powerful wizards, and otherworldly weapons, game scholars have critiqued ludic magic systems for their strict rationality and formulaic design. Put another way: they’re unenchanting. In Game Magic: A Designer's Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice, Jeff Howard states, “The magic systems in many video games are repetitive, dull, lacking in variety, and superficial” (2014, p. 8). For William Bainbridge, the magically-coded crafting systems of EverQuest II are “structurally identical with each other,” showing how “supernatural images in gameworlds merely cloak rigid technical realities with an aesthetic symbolism” (Bainbridge, 2013, p. 176). Kevin Schut meanwhile observes that in games, “Magic or the gods or spirits, all those mysterious forces, have been reduced to a fancy type of gun or an extra-strong bandage” (Schut, 2014, p. 262). Steven Poole (2000, p. 40) and Nicolas Meylan (2017, pp. 143–144) too have shared similar sentiments about the quantifiable and wonderless character of ludic magic. Notably, scholars and journalists alike have leveled these critiques specifically at magic systems as they appear in digital and tabletop games. However, in this article, I argue that this discontent arises from a larger set of cultural and intellectual tensions embedded within Western culture—tensions that ludic magic systems, in their own ways, actually attempt to resolve. The problem isn’t systems: it’s disenchantment.
Sociologist Max Weber popularized the phrase “the disenchantment of the world” (die Entzauberung der Welt) in a lecture in 1917, though he himself actually borrowed it from the German poet Friedrich Schiller. Later, the Frankfurt School critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer took up the term in their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment as part of their acclaimed critique of Enlightenment means-end rationality. The disenchantment of the world proposes that a declining belief in religion and magic, coupled with the rise of scientific rationality at the turn of the twentieth century, lay at the very heart of Western modernity, its crisis of meaning, and its mounting self-alienation. The protracted process of explicit—per the literal translation—“de-magification” placed Westerners in an intrinsically distanced position from the natural world due to their perceived mastery over it, made possible through the intellectual domination of empirical science on the one hand and the material conquest over nature via technology on the other. For Weber, this loss of social intimacy and religiosity, when taken to its most dire conclusion, would inevitably lead to the decay of all meaning. In such a future, enchantment—which, by contrast, is a way of being and apprehending the world that allows for the possibility of wonder, awe, and mystery—would disappear altogether. The narrative of disenchantment and its persistence receive thorough scholarly attention in the domains of philosophy, cultural history, and the history of ideas (Bennett, 2001; Josephson-Storm, 2017; Partridge, 2004; Saler, 2012). However, the lesser-known discipline of Western esotericism presents a unique and valuable perspective on the matter of modern (dis)enchantment that game scholars can deploy in the analysis and critique of ludic magic systems.
Western esotericism is an academic discipline that emerged in the mid-to-late twentieth century out of a growing body of interdisciplinary research in the fields of religion, the history of ideas, and the history of science and technology. The French scholar Antoine Faivre (1934–2021) made major strides in establishing Western esotericism as a legitimate domain of scholarly inquiry by “setting high professional standards while putting central issues of method and theory firmly on the agenda” (History of Hermetic Philosophy [HHP], 2021). His own work bounded and defined the field through the study of historical prototypes from which he identified a set of common properties. Faivre deemed these properties as criteria, which could be used to qualify a spiritual or intellectual current as an esoteric ‘form of thought’ (forme de pensée). These shared criteria (explored further below) exist between a range of Western traditions, beliefs, and practices, which include (among others) magic, divination, Hermeticism, alchemy, Theosophy, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and occultism.
In this article, I argue that applying the language of Faivre’s criteriology of the esoteric form of thought to fantasy games provides game scholars with a novel method of close-reading ludic magic systems. Put another way, Faivre’s criteriology, when applied to the narrative and systems design of ludic magic, reveals the logics of the premodern enchanted worldview that fantasy games utilize to instill a sense of awe and wonder in the player: affects that Weber believed would disappear from the world with the rise of science but which scholars have since argued remain available to us—as they always have—as a heightened form of attention (Bennett, 2001; McCarthy & Wright, 2018). An enchanted worldview in the Weberian-Faivrean sense, where everything holds and exudes mystery (as described below), may very well predispose the individual player to judge their experiences with in-game phenomena, like a magic system, as possessing a particular kind of distinctiveness, uniqueness, and charm (McCarthy & Wright, 2018).
I first develop this argument by explaining each of Faivre’s four essential qualities: the concepts of (a) correspondences, (b) living nature, (c) imagination and mediations, and (d) experience of transmutation. For each, I then provide examples of how the essential quality appears in magic systems drawn from a diverse cross-section of 12 titles, purposively selected to illustrate the concepts at work and together representing a broad history of analog and digital fantasy games over a period of 50 years. These illustrations suggest that the Faivrean model provides games scholars not only a novel vocabulary with which we can articulate the mechanisms of enchantment in ludic magic systems but also an understanding of underlying causes of disenchantment for which fantasy games are frequently aesthetically critiqued.
Theoretical Framework
There are several components to the theoretical scaffolding of this study. First, the way this article uses Faivre’s criteriology differs somewhat from his own approach because, as Wouter J. Hanegraaff observes, Faivre’s criteria “read like a definition of ‘enchantment,’ set against the ‘disenchanted’ worldviews associated with post-cartesian, post-newtonian and positivist science” [sic] (Hanegraaff, 2012, p. 254; 2013, p. 5). If one of the major (albeit tacit) goals of fantasy as a genre is to enchant—to orient players towards feelings of awe, wonder, and mystery—then Faivre’s criteriology provides a detailed framework for identifying and scrutinizing the precise mechanisms by which ludic magic systems facilitate that enchantment. As a definition of (rather characteristically) premodern enchantment, Faivre's criteria can describe how enchantment works in fantasy games in particular. This is because Western fantasy fictions—ludic and otherwise—borrow heavily from and iterate on collective imaginaries of medieval and early modern Europe. The layout of major cities in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 1994) and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) resemble those of medieval castle towns. The slashed, quilted, and pearl-embroidered clothes depicted in CD Projekt Red's series The Witcher (CD Projekt Red, 2007) harken back to the specific European fashions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The efficacy of magic and the existence of otherworldly spirits in game series like Dragon Age (BioWare, 2009) and Diablo (Blizzard Entertainment, 1997) reflect the perceived realities of those who lived in Europe for the majority of the past two millennia. Indeed, there exists a growing body of literature specifically dedicated to the neo-/pseudo-medievalisms of the Western fantasy genre (Fitzpatrick, 2019; Fugelso & Robinson, 2008).
In terms of narrative design, Faivre’s criteria outline the fundamental assumptions of the enchanted worldview of premodern Europe, from which fantasy often derives its core temporal-cultural aesthetic. From there, Faivre’s criteria inform our understanding of systems design by highlighting the rationalities that undergird the enchanted worldview, which designers then reify through in-game mechanics. Despite Faivre’s foundational status within the discipline of Western esotericism, subsequent scholars have leveled valid critiques regarding his religionist approach (Strube, 2021), Eurocentricity (Saif, 2021; Villalba, 2021), and exclusion of New Age spirituality from his framework (Crockford, 2021). Hanegraaff himself also validly critiques Faivre’s overemphasis on early modernity (c. 1300–1600 CE) as a perceived golden age of esoteric thought, stating that for Faivre, “Ancient and medieval sources are acknowledged as a necessary background, rather than as manifestations of esotericism in their own right” (Hanegraaff, 2013, p. 6). On the surface, this might suggest that we cannot apply Faivre’s criteriology to the neo-/pseudo-medievalisms of fantasy games and their magic systems. Not so. Fantasy games are especially anachronistic in their handling of medieval magic, frequently relying on visual and conceptual representations of learned magic from later centuries rather than those of the actual European Middle Ages (Sebag, 2024).
Another element to consider is how this study’s understanding of the ludic magic system intersects with other non-esoteric domains. While magic systems are prevalent in modern fantasy games, they remain largely understudied, with Jeff Howard’s Game Magic (2014) being the only book-length scholarly treatment of the subject. Much of the contemporary discourse surrounding magic systems comes from fantasy fiction, with figures like author Brandon Sanderson having done much to popularize the idea that the rules and limitations of a given magic system exist along a spectrum ranging from “hard” (firm and explicit) on one end to “soft” (flexible and nebulous) on the other. For a digital game, the strict, machine-driven proceduralism of its magic system invariably lies on the hard end of the spectrum—non-diegetically, at least—even if scripted events within the game’s narrative can suggest more freedom and fluidity in the magic of the gameworld’s fiction. In analog roleplaying games, a game master can exert a certain degree of interpretive fiat over the magic system to further soften it, but even then, the underlying rules-as-written may be just as rigid and standardized as the rest of the game (Mizer, 2015). While most fantasy games are significantly indebted to Dungeons & Dragons, which heavily drew inspiration from the fantasy pages of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, and Jack Vance (Peterson, 2014), the demands of games as rules-based systems have significantly shaded the (re)presentation of magic within the medium’s form.
Lastly, this is an explicitly conceptual article, meaning that its primary scholarly contribution is to “bridge existing theories in interesting ways, link work across disciplines, provide multi-level insights, and broaden the scope of our thinking” (Gilson & Goldberg, 2015, p. 128). Framed by these conceptual ambitions (and the aforementioned theoretical contexts of this work), what follows is a series of twelve analyses that each illustrate how one of Faivre’s four mechanisms of enchantment manifests—or fails to materialize—through either or both the narrative and systems design of a ludic magic system.
Faivre’s Criteriology in Games
The 12 examples below illustrate the application of Faivre’s theory for close-reading a game’s design. Included are award-winning titles from AAA studios, independent games, interactive fiction, genre-defining collectible card games and tabletop roleplaying games, persistent online worlds, and games that blend elements of horror and fantasy. Before we can begin the analysis, however, it is fundamental to understand Favire's four essential components and their core ontological and epistemological assumptions. Each of the following subsections introduces a Faivrean criterion and then shows how it appears within—or remains absent from—various ludic magic systems. The four essential components are: (a) correspondences, (b) living nature, (c) imagination and mediations, and (d) experience of transmutation. The games are presented below in Table 1.
The games analyzed in this paper.
Titles marked with an asterisk are analog games.
Correspondences
“Correspondences” refers to the idea that real and symbolic associations “exist among all parts of the universe, both seen and unseen” (Faivre, 1994, p. 10). Faivre holds, “These correspondences, considered more or less veiled at first sight, are, therefore, intended to be read and deciphered… Everything is a sign; everything conceals and exudes mystery; every object hides a secret” (1994, p. 10). In correspondences, a vast network of relationships connects all the moving parts of the macrocosm (higher universal order) and those of the microcosm (terrestrial phenomena and affairs). In the enchanted worldview, the notion of correspondences takes these meaningfully symbolic relationships—between the signifier and the signified, between a lock of hair and the person it once belonged to—and imbues them with material significance. In this view, using symbols and performing symbolic acts can produce change in the real world. To Hanegraaff, Faivre’s (largely premodern) conceptualization of correspondences is “clearly meant as an alternative to linear or instrumental causality” (2013, p. 5).
Dungeons & Dragons
In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast & TSR, 1974), spellcasters frequently require physical objects—“material components”—to cast their spells, often with clear symbolic associations between the component and the spell’s intended effect. These associations have been a feature of the magic system since some of the earliest editions of the game. Many of the material components first introduced in the 1978 Player's Handbook for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (TSR) have persisted into the most recent 2016 fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast). In both editions, the spell flesh to stone (called statue in the 1979 edition) calls for a combination of lime, water, and earth or sand; the core components used in making concrete are the very same that the spell requires to magically petrify a living creature. The spell detect thoughts (once called ESP) requires a single copper piece, which magically actualizes the English idiom “a penny for your thoughts” in a very literal sense. Whether using the scrying spell or a crystal ball to conduct magical telesurveillance, the intimacy of the caster’s personal connection to the subject determines how challenging it is for the target to resist being observed. Resistance becomes even more difficult if the caster is in possession of a garment, body part, or lock of hair belonging to the target. In Dungeons & Dragons, material objects are often necessary to make magic, but spellcasters use these objects in symbolic, analogic ways that speak to the object’s representational properties over its literal chemical composition or physical instrumentality. While this may be inconsistent with the linear causality of a physics engine operating on a Newtonian conception of the universe, such manipulations (and outcomes) are highly congruent with the premodern enchanted worldview that sees symbolic relationships as having their own special lines of causality.
Wildermyth
In the “character-driven, procedurally-generated tactical RPG” of Wildermyth (Worldwalker Games, 2021), players can take on the role of Mystics, spellcasters who can magically attach themselves to inanimate objects and terrain features of the gameworld. By “interfusing” with a rock, tree, or coil of rope—graphically represented by a flowing chain of glowing purple leaves linking the environmental object to the Mystic—the player can use that object to attack enemies, bolster allies, and trigger passive abilities. Because Mystics can magically manipulate only the objects present on the battlefield, the spells available to them vary from encounter to encounter. For instance, only by interfusing with a plant can the Mystic cast the wild grasp spell. Spells cast through an interfused object always originate from the object itself, making the selection of an object and its position on the battlefield significantly determine the Mystic’s range of possible effects. Mystics also gain increased vision via the object with which they have interfused, allowing them to gain a line of sight in a radius around the object and to target otherwise concealed enemies. However, if a Mystic moves too far from an interfused object, the link is broken at the start of the next turn. Casting spells from an interfused object also directly damages the object itself, meaning that Mystic can only cast the discus’ spell from an interfused rock so many times before it’s destroyed and the spell is no longer available (at least from that rock). Interfusion procedurally and thematically places the Mystic into a larger network of correspondences for which the player acts as a relay center in an esoteric Internet of Things. In Wildermyth, this mechanism demonstrates how correspondences can emerge even in the limited and highly ludic context of a tactical turn- and grid-based RPG.
“Savoir-Faire”
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons and Wildermyth, Emily Short's interactive fiction “Savoir-Faire” (2002) takes the idea of correspondences in a rather different direction. The player assumes the role of Pierre, an eighteenth-century Parisian exploring his childhood home, only to find his adoptive family’s estate abandoned. The player learns in a memory that Pierre is proficient in a magical art of the French nobility called “lavori d’Aracne,” a translation from the macaronic Italian-French “the works of Arachne,” likely in reference to the skilled weaver-turned-spider of Greek mythology. In the special instructions for the interactive fiction, Short describes how this magic works, writing: In addition, your character can LINK objects of similar properties. (e.g.,: LINK SNUFFBOX TO SMALL YELLOW BOX.) Once this link has been created, things done to one object will automatically affect the other as well… subject to certain rules (Short, 2002).
Living Nature
In Faivre’s view, we may understand magic—especially the Renaissance magic that has inspired so much fantastical learned magic—as “simultaneously the knowledge of the networks of sympathies or antipathies that link the things of Nature and the concrete operation of these bodies of knowledge” (1994, p. 11). As the locus of these networks (of correspondences), Nature with a capital ‘N’ occupies what Faivre calls an “essential place” in the esoteric worldview. In the Faivrean model, Nature is “seen, known, and experienced as essentially alive in all its parts, often inhabited and traversed by a light or a hidden fire circulating through it” (1994, p. 11). Hanegraaff frames Faivre’s idea of living nature as standing against post-Enlightenment disenchanted worldviews that conceive of the world as a “dead mechanism or clockwork” (2013, p. 5). The aforementioned hidden light or fire, particularly in the context of games, most frequently manifests as the primary resource used to fuel spells and sustain the enchantments of magical items: mana. Though mana as a term originated in Oceania, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological treatments of the idea have conceptually muddied it (Golub & Peterson, 2016; Meylan, 2017). Before Greg Costikyan’s (1978) game Swords & Sorcery, which was the first game to use the term “mana,” “magic points” had been the unit of measurement for magical energy. Terminologically, mana has since rapidly overtaken magic points in most Western games, which adopted not only the language but further developed novel thematic and mechanical interpretations (and extensions) of the concept.
Magic: The Gathering
In the framing fiction of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast, 1993), mana flows through the planes of the game’s multiverse along leylines, which are channels of magical energy that stretch across the world(s). The language and visual imagery of Magic’s cards often describe and depict mana as having fluid-like properties; it circulates, ebbs, rushes, and wells within creatures, objects, and places the same way that water might. Indeed, for much of the game’s history, players would terminologically add mana to their personal mana “pools” before using it. Five different basic types of land each correspond to the five colors of magic in Magic: The Gathering—Plains (white), Island (blue), Swamp (black), Mountain (red), and Forest (green). Each color corresponds to a high-level (implicitly diegetic) philosophy that is then distilled into a general purview of (explicitly diegetic) magical effects that align with and advance that color's philosophical agenda. Except for land cards themselves and a small handful of zero-mana cards (less than 2% of all nonland cards, as of writing), everything in Magic: The Gathering—creatures, artifacts, and spells—requires mana. Though the color of spells is a crucial component of the game, particularly with regards to deckbuilding, many spells do not require that the mana used to cast them be of a single type, further reinforcing the in-game fiction that mana, as a more general conception of vital energy, exists in everything. In the Faivrean enchanted worldview, color in Magic: The Gathering facilitates its own network of “sympathies and antipathies,” while mana itself, regardless of its color, is the “inner fire” that pervades all Nature.
The Elder Scrolls
In the history of our own world, from antiquity through early modernity, magicians and astrologers have theorized that the heavenly bodies emit rays of different qualities. They believed these rays traveled through space to materially affect daily life on Earth according to the placement and temperament of the stars or planets that produced those rays—not unlike the different kinds of mana produced by different types of land in Magic: The Gathering. A sizable portion of the learned magic that proliferated in the Hellenistic and Arabic worlds, and in early modern Europe, was predicated on calculating the time of emission of these “stellar rays” and capturing them in amulets and talismans (Klaassen, 2013, pp. 23–25). In the premodern enchanted worldview, both fixed and moving stars have represented a significant source of magic. In a paradigmatically similar move, in Tamriel, the fictional world of The Elder Scrolls, one in-world author writes, “The stars are our links to the plane of Aetherius, the source of all magical power, and therefore, light from the stars is the most potent and exalted of all magical powers” (Bethesda Game Studios, 1994). This passage comes from an in-game text, the book Magic from the Sky by the gameworld character Irlav Jarol, which the player can read a short excerpt from. The “book” appears three times across the series, in Oblivion (2006), Skyrim (2011), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014–). Since 2006, stars in The Elder Scrolls have been the canonical source of magic and its mana analog, “magicka.” But here, Faivre’s model reveals a discrepancy between game lore (its narrative design) and its mechanics (its systems design). In The Elder Scrolls, astrology is largely a visual and literary gloss applied to the gameworld’s magic: Tamriel’s schools of magic aren’t organized around the stars, nor are there many star-themed spells, and players aren’t required to track the movements of the heavens in the night sky as part of their engagement with the game’s magic system. In this sense, while the stars provide a thematic skin for The Elder Scrolls’ magic, players aren’t invited—nor have particular any need—to pay special attention to them. There is, however, at least one moment in the two of the games where this theme is mechanically enforced. Player characters in Morrowind and Oblivion are auspiciously born under one of thirteen different constellations, the player’s choice of which becomes their character’s birth sign and bears some impact on the experience of the game that follows. For example, character's born under the sign of The Mage are, perhaps unsurprisingly, naturally gifted at magic. While this does invoke the gameworld’s astrologically-affective cosmology in a non-trivial moment during character creation, the stars of The Elder Scrolls otherwise remain in the skybox.
World of Warcraft
In most fantasy games, mana serves as an exhaustion mechanic. It’s a metabolic energy unique to spellcasters that regulates the frequency with which they can cast their spells, with each spell consuming an amount of mana in proportion to its magnitude (as defined by the designer’s overall sense of game balance). In practice, players must themselves balance their immediate magical needs with the amount of mana available to them, the number of resources they have that restore mana, and the rate at which their mana naturally regenerates. This is true in Magic: The Gathering, where lands refresh (or “untap”) at the beginning of a player’s turn to make themselves available again, and in The Elder Scrolls series, where rest replenishes the player-character's magicka. While there is little mechanical novelty in how the MMORPG World of Warcraft approaches mana, the narrative design of the game takes the general-purpose magical resource and integrates it more fully into the lore of the world of Azeroth and creates new opportunities for mana's in-game manifestations in the gameworld. There are mana berries, mana gems, and mana oils, along with creatures that feed on mana and elemental beings composed of mana. The game’s designers have described the gameworld’s volatile energy, arcane magic, as a phase-state of mana, akin to a compressed steam version of mana's default, water-like state (Kosak, 2014). One of the player race options, the blood elves, are addicted to mana, and one of the starting abilities blood elves have, arcane torrent, allows them to effectively “drink” in an ongoing spell effect, nullifying the benefits while simultaneously replenishing the blood elf’s own resource: mana if they are a spellcaster, or the mana-analog stamina if they are a non-spellcaster. Mana’s ubiquity in the gameworld, still present in the players’ characters but also extending well beyond them, reaffirms mana's existence as more than simply a spell-regulation mechanic. In World of Warcraft, mana reminds players that Azeroth abounds—both literally and figuratively—with magic.
Imagination and Mediations
Faivre proposes that imagination and mediations are “linked and complementary,” suggesting that “a form of imagination [is] inclined to reveal and use mediations of all kinds, such as rituals, symbolic images, mandalas, [and] intermediary spirits” (1994, p. 12). “It is imagination,” Faivre continues, “that allows the use of these intermediaries, symbols, and images to develop a gnosis [i.e., mystical knowledge], to penetrate the hieroglyphs of Nature, to put the theory of correspondences into active practice and to uncover, to see, and to know the mediating entities between Nature and the divine world” (1994, p. 12). Direct engagement with—and the manipulation of—the mediating entities that are believed to produce material change has historically been the very aim of magic. To Hanegraaff, Faivre’s twin criteria of imagination and mediations stand “opposed to a cosmos reducible to only matter in motion” (2013, p. 5). And because the imagination unlocks access to all levels of intermediary reality between matter and spirit, the imagination becomes “an organ of knowledge and not just a fabricator of illusions, as held by Enlightenment rationalism” (2013, p. 5). Players encounter numerous mediations in the fantastic game worlds they enter, and sometimes the kind of mediation they apprehend may be unclear; an onscreen demon may be both an intermediary spirit and a symbol for something else. The player’s imaginative engagement with such irrational mediations—and a design philosophy aimed at guiding the player’s imagination in understanding of these mediations—represents perhaps the greatest underutilized source of enchantment available to fantasy games.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
In the independent cozy game Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator (tinyBuild, 2022), players take on the role of an alchemist who must brew potions for their everyday customers while privately deepening their knowledge of alchemy in pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone. The cottagecore game’s “hyper satisfying physical interactions with ingredients and equipment” (Worldwalker Games, 2021) enables the player’s delicate handling of the potion-brewing process to feel every bit as painstaking as we might imagine that of a medieval alchemist to be. In addition, an intellectual understanding of the ingredients themselves, and the larger cosmology that they gesture towards, is perhaps its most enchanting component. The otherworldly herbs, fungi, and minerals that the player uses to brew potions each correspond to one of eight different elements, and those elements also correspond to a cardinal direction on the Alchemy Map, the core minigame of Potion Craft. The Alchemy Map visualizes the intricacies of the potion-brewing process, throughout which the player must grind ingredients, heat the cauldron, and dilute the mixture in various amounts and at varying intervals to safely guide a potion bottle icon to the desired location on the map (and thus produce the corresponding effect).
Pale air-aligned potion ingredients take the bottle icon in a northerly direction, while orange fire-aligned ingredients take the potion west. Blend fire and air ingredients together, and the player can concoct a potion of lightning, as we may analogically conceive of lightning notionally as a type of fire from the sky. At the start of the game, the majority of the Alchemy Map is covered by fog of war, so players must embrace the experimental, proto-scientific empiricism that STS scholars have observed in medieval and early modern alchemists (Newman, 2006). Only by experimenting with different ingredients can the player fully explore the Alchemy Map, sometimes producing potions whose sole purpose is to find the limits of what is possible but serve no instrumental, sellable use. As players expose more of the Alchemy Map and develop their understanding of its cardinal-elemental arrangement, so too do they grow their understanding of the game's underlying enchanted worldview.
In Potion Craft, the ingredients act as the mediations Faivre describes: each reveals a part of the larger, hidden network of correspondences that link flora, fungi, and minerals to different elemental affinities, which themselves are linked to even higher abstract concepts. Because rage is a fiery concept (characterized by flushing, heat, and innervation), a potion of rage requires fiery ingredients; meanwhile, airy ingredients are necessary for potions of air-related concepts like swiftness and invisibility. The wise alchemist is the one who, over the course of play, begins to perceive—and via their Faivrean imagination begins to anticipate—these conceptual threads that tie ingredients to cardinal elements and elements up to larger ideas. This expansion of the player’s magical awareness within the game, made possible primarily through their comprehension of the game’s systems, is fundamental to the game’s capacity to enchant. As players develop their understanding of the effects of grinding ingredients, diluting their potions, and mixing together the precise combination of wildly different components, so too do they grow their understanding of the gameworld’s underlying logic: that ritual actions performed upon material ingredients can produce magical effects if one can properly anticipate the variety of possible interactions. For Faivre, this is “the eye of fire [that] pierces the bark of appearances to call forth significations” (1994, p. 13). Blending the language of Western esotericism and games studies, we may more explicitly refer to this expanding magical awareness within the fiction of the gameworld as articulated through the logic of its systems in what I term “ludic gnosis.”
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Not all instances of imagination and mediations, however, are as cozy as those found in Potion Craft. In the 2002 Silicon Knights psychological horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, the player takes on the role of four different characters across three continents and two millennia, as they unravel a Lovecraftian mystery and find themselves at the heart of an ancient conflict between primordial entities. While the game fruitfully distorts the player’s sense of what is real and is not through manipulation of the typically sacrosanct elements of the user interface as part of its once-patented sanity system, the magic system of Eternal Darkness demonstrates a similarly strong capacity for enchantment. As in Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (LookingGlass Technologies, 1993) and Arx Fatalis (Arkane Studios, 2002) (released the same year as Eternal Darkness), players cast spells by combining magical runes to produce unique effects. Combining the runes “Bankorok” (Protect) and “Santak” (Self) logically produces a personal shield spell. But then Eternal Darkness takes it one step further.
Casting a spell first requires the invocation of one of the Elder Gods’ runes, which determines the alignment of the spell, making it especially effective against the servants of the chosen Elder God’s rival or causing the spell to operate within the god’s sphere of influence. The healing spell invoked using the name of the Elder God Chattur’gha, for instance, recovers health, but that same spell invoked with the name of Xel’lotath recovers sanity instead. From this, players can somewhat naturally deduce that Chattur’gha’s domain is that of the body while Xel’lotath’s is the psyche. Here, the runes are a mediating force not between the player and a notional, abstract concept of magic diffused throughout the gameworld but between the player and the primordial, quasi-divine beings at the center of the narrative’s conflict. In Eternal Darkness, the imagination constitutes an organ of knowledge; the players predict logical interactions between runes, experiment with those interactions, and witness their effects in the realm of Nature in the same proto-scientific mode as Faivre’s early modern occult thinkers. In Eternal Darkness, the imagination, as it collides with the operations of the game’s magic system, reveals the organization of the cosmos and the relationships between the primordial beings that govern it.
Invisible Sun
In Monte Cook’s (2018) tabletop roleplaying game Invisible Sun, players take on the role of wizards called vislae who have recently left our mundane world and returned to an alternate—allegedly truer—reality called the Actuality. Not unlike Eternal Darkness, Invisible Sun embraces the weird and bizarre in its approach to imagination and mediations. Designer Monte Cook takes profound influence from Surrealism, Doctor Strange, and the Roaring Twenties, and his Invisible Sun narrows the gap between diegetic character action and non-diegetic player performance through each of its unique magic systems. These each operate differently and demand different imaginative lenses through which the player can approach solving the problems that the Game Master sets before them. The four main magical orders of the Actuality epitomize this best.
Players whose characters belong to the Order of the Vance—a reference to D&D’s magic system and its literary touchstone, author Jack Vance—must physically arrange spell cards on a game board that represents the internal storage space of their memory. The cards vary in size, corresponding to the magnitude and complexity of the spells effects, and just as in Dungeons & Dragons, the need to anticipate which unique spells will be useful becomes central to the player’s experience as a spellcaster. Meanwhile, another order, the Makers, may produce items with unexpected side effects and must also risk dangerous mishaps as they push their luck in the almost-alchemical pursuit of crafting the perfect magic item. The Weaver vislae must imaginatively combine together different threads of abstract concepts like “Alleyways” and “Thunder” to produce their magic, while Goetic vislae must summon and then—as a player—verbally negotiate with powerful spirits, angels, and demons who act on their behalf. In Invisible Sun, the gameworld is filled with various mediations: magical formulae for Vances, alchemical ingredients for Makers, quasi-divine symbols for Weavers, and intermediary spirits for Goetics. How each player chooses to engage with their character’s respective set of mediations presents ample opportunities for Faivre’s imagination to operate as an “organ of knowledge” as Hanegraaff describes it.
Experience of Transmutation
Lastly, the “experience of transmutation” refers to how humanity or nature may be changed into a higher spiritual state or even attain a divine condition. For Faivre, “It should also be understood as ‘metamorphosis,’” which conceptually links the interior world to the exterior: active imagination as an intellectual activity, and inner experience leading to knowledge (i.e., “gnosis”) (1994, p. 13). Hanegraaff here does not explicitly position Faivre’s notion of transmutation against disenchantment as he does with the other three criteria, but that may be because the core notion of transmutation (as rooted in belief in the divine) runs counter to material positivist scientific rationality altogether. As the godfather of general systems theory Ludwig Von Bertalanffy once lamented, “In the world view called mechanistic, which was born of classical physics of the nineteenth century, the aimless play of the atoms, governed by the inexorable laws of causality, produced all phenomena in the world, inanimate, living, and mental. No room was left for any directiveness, order, or telos” (Von Bertalanffy, 1968, p. 45). There cannot exist a divine hierarchy within which the magician may ascend if no order exists whatsoever.
But this isn’t the case in fantasy games. Since Dungeons & Dragons first appeared in 1974, character advancement systems have existed, and for wizards and clerics, “leveling up” often signifies the accumulation of supernatural favor or wisdom. But absent a narrative design that substantiates such logic beyond what the game's procedural rhetoric—its use of rules and processes to convey persuasive concepts and messages (Bogost, 2007)—may afford, this kind of ascension is only numbers-deep. The transmutation of a human being into something more divine, or merely something numerically superior, itself doesn’t produce enchantment: rather, it is the confirmation of a cosmology that affords such apotheosis that stands opposed to disenchanted rationality. The following examples point to such constructed cosmologies.
Diablo III
In each installment of Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo series (1996–), the ongoing war between angels and demons inevitably embroils the game’s player-character protagonist. As each game unfolds, the player learns of the larger cosmology of the gameworld and the divine order—and, at times, disorder—that governs it. While one could argue that character advancement in such games is itself a form of Faivrean transmutation, the third installment embraced this criterion most fully. In Diablo III (2012), the player takes on the role of an adventurer who discovers that they are a Nephalem: one of humanity’s ancient forebears, birthed from the union of angel and demon, yet more powerful than either of heritages alone. This revelation unfolds over the course of the game, as the character advances through the plot and grows more powerful through the usual accumulation of experience points, ever-superior equipment, and new supernatural abilities.
While the Gothic medieval gloss of the game’s visual design reinforces its quasi-Gnostic Christian mythology, the idea of the Nephalem—though Biblical in name—may be conceptually linked to the early modern conceptualization of humanity found in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Renaissance manifesto, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico, himself an esoteric thinker who believed magic could help individuals ascend to the status of angels, believed that humans were creatures “neither of heaven nor of earth” (Della Mirandola, 1996 [1486], p. 7). And unlike God’s other creatures, humanity had the power to make its own choices, to determine its own fate. Similarly, in the framing fiction of the Diablo universe, humanity’s capacity to choose between good and evil sets mortalkind apart from angels and demons, each of which are predestined to embody good and evil, respectively. In Diablo III, Faivre’s transmutation appears as reclamation of humanity’s inherent divinity, reflected in the history of esoteric thought via Pico’s manifesto and in the lore of the game as an articulation of the player’s empowered status to make choices for themselves—even if this isn’t reflected in the narrative design of the game's railroad plot (as is typical of the Diablo franchise and the action RPG genre the series helped popularize).
Divinity: Original Sin II
Similar to Diablo III, the player’s journey to divine apotheosis is one of the central themes of Larian Studios’ 2017 computer roleplaying game Divinity: Original Sin II. The player character begins play as a Sourcerer, an individual with the innate ability to channel Source magic, itself a type of divine, soul-powered magic that is mechanically and thematically distinct from the typical magic available in the game’s setting. The player shortly thereafter discovers that their character is not only a Sourcerer but also a Godwoken: a person marked by the gods to ascend to divinity themselves. Over the course of the game, the Godwoken undertakes a mythic quest to pursue—or ultimately rebuke—this ascension, and though there is some mechanical expression of this theme, much of this experience of transmutation, as Faivre would put it, is tied to the narrative itself. At key moments in the game’s storyline, through ritual communion with the divine, the player unlocks Source skills that become increasingly biblical in both theme and proportion. The Godwoken can call on spells with such evocative names as door to eternity, blood storm, and—unsurprisingly—apotheosis (though this is a more transitory glimpse of godhood than the full experience). Prior to the game’s final conflicts, the Godwoken’s companions even pray to the Godwoken player character, which allows the player to use their Godwoken character’s Source skills freely. The enchanted narrative of Divinity: Original Sin II renders the boundaries between the mundane and the divine porous. Humanity has the capacity to ascend to godhood, and the game procedurally reflects as much both in its distinct Source-based magic system and the biblically-themed spells this system contains.
Mage: The Ascension
However, not all games rely on biblical or divine imagery to embrace Faivre’s notion of the experience of transmutation. In the White Wolf tabletop roleplaying game Mage: The Ascension (White Wolf Game Studio, 1993–2004), players take on the role of the eponymous mages—postmodern willworkers surviving the bleak “World of Darkness” where Mage’s famous sibling RPGs Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse is also set. In the in-your-face postmodernity of Mage: The Ascension, subjectivity fuels and defines the mage’s spellcraft. Mages can group up with other like-minded spellcasters, but the paradigms that define their magical abilities can also be entirely idiosyncratic. Yet mages are bound at least by something of a common goal. The game is richly inspired by historical and living magical traditions (including many Faivre would identify as belonging to Western esotericism), and fittingly, as its subtitle suggests, the pursuit of “Ascension” is a central theme of the game. The nature of Ascension is left deliberately vague, but the rulebooks imply that it represents the highest form of self-actualization and superhuman wisdom (Bowen, 2004, p. 216). It is also so precious that mages “suffer, kill, and die for it” (2004, p. 219) as the game’s factions wage a so-called Ascension War to determine how—and if—all humanity may Ascend together. Reality, as understood and literally shaped by the collective imagination of all human beings, is both the battlefield and the prize at the center of this conflict. Some of the primary antagonists attempt to stymie or exact authoritarian control over global Ascension, while others pervert this shared ambition entirely by corrupting others to join them in pursuing descension instead.
Intriguingly, the Faivrean notion of transmutation in Mage isn’t a tangible progression within the game, but an abstract ideal that the players (as mages) pursue, should they accept it as the game’s core premise. The deliberate omission of Ascension from the otherwise comprehensive and richly-designed game system communicates the postmodern slant of Mage’s core philosophy; the nature of reality, like Ascension, is subjective. Systems exist only to describe that which is universally agreed upon. Among these universal systems is the magic system, which, however variously different approaches to spellcasting may be described in the fiction of the game, uses a standardized set of formulas and in-game statistics to resolve these effects. Ascension, by contrast, is an experience so divine that it can be reduced to neither textual description in the game’s rules nor mathematization in its systems.
Discussion
To return to the scholarly indictments of the ludic magic system with which this article began, it is worth noting that if Faivre’s criteria can help us to detect enchantment at work in a game, then the absence of these criteria may similarly diagnose why a game fails to enchant some players. Yes, it is entirely possible for a player to appreciate the novelty or sophistication of a game’s magic system without feeling any sense of charm, surprise, and delight, but if the gameworld is bereft of its own enchantment at the outset, it’s unlikely that the player will have any greater inclination to experience that missing enchantment themselves. To wit, if a game reinscribes a mechanistic worldview where magic functions via the same linear causality of classical physics, its quotidian nature makes no demands of the player to attend to the gameworld in ways that go beyond “habitual sense-making” (McCarthy & Wright, 2018, p. 366). While this can’t be the sole metric of a ludic magic system’s worthiness, the presence or absence of Faivre’s criteria in a game’s worldbuilding and design can provide a useful starting point for understanding why scholars have critiqued magic in games as feeling too technical and bereft of wonder. There are also implications beyond this, however.
Understanding ludic magic through the lens of enchantment—afforded specifically in this instance through the language of Faivre's criteriology, partly via Hanegraaff—allows us to bring game studies into a wider dialogue with scholars of enchantment and human-computer interaction (see McCarthy et al., 2006; McCarthy & Wright, 2018). The narrow “Western esoteric” definition of enchantment that we have used also serves as an entry point for us to put the object of the ludic magic system into the larger scholarly context of how Weber, Horkeimer, and Adorno have framed the cultural malady of disenchantment. The means-end rationality of the Enlightenment that so diminished our access to the premodern enchanted worldview also gave rise to widespread alienation, bureaucratization, and the pursuit of absolute domination over nature (Weber, 2004; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972). Magic systems provide players with personal and efficient means to bring the gameworld to heel, even as these systems surprise the player and ignite their imagination. When interpreted through the lens of (dis)enchantment, the ludic magic system—as an object torn between the arcane and mysterious on the one hand and full, calculable discernibility on the other—embodies some of the most central tensions that characterize modernity.
Conclusion
This article represents hopefully the first of many, as research slowly builds on the topic of magic in fantasy games. It’s incumbent upon us as game scholars to acknowledge the ubiquity of magic as a recurring theme in the landscape of modern games and to be adequately equipped to critically engage with its manifestations. By attending to the ludic magic system as a meaningful object of study, this article paves the way for future research and will ideally provide scholars with one possible analytic framework to interrogate both narrative and procedural representations of magic. Specifically, this method reveals the logics of the enchanted worldview that designers employ to infuse their gameworlds with enchantment, hoping perhaps to also enchant their players. Understanding how it is that ludic magic systems are able to re-enchant—how they can revive premodern modes of being in and apprehending the world with wonder in spite of the magic system’s full calculability—opens the door to conceiving other possibilities for re-enchantment.
Using Faivre’s framework as an analytic strategy in the realm of game studies represents maybe only a first foray. We might also go a step further and take a page from Western esotericism by developing our own criteria for ludic magic that enchants. Unlike Faivre and Hanegraaff, however, we needn’t strictly define what a ludic magic system is nor must we constrain our criteriology to the domain of the Western neomedieval fantastic. From here we might begin to wonder what a truly enchanting magic system would look like in a video game. Would its in-game fiction rely on a Faivrean model of premodern enchantment as so many games already have, where each component of the world holds and exudes mystery? Or should it focus on the equally ambitious yet less straightforward task of arresting the player’s attention in ways that feel rare amid the otherwise routine rhythms of play? Perhaps most importantly for this work, we might ask: does the former beget the latter?
We might also reflect on other unexpected genres where an enchanted worldview might arise. We may consider, for instance, science-fiction games like Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) and the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007), where players can access technologically-derived superpowers through ludic subsystems that structurally resemble—and that players readily identify as—magic systems, even as they eschew the thematic conceits of fantasy. Since the enchanted logics that subtend Faivre’s criteria can still persist in such worlds, the possibility exists for players to adopt an anachronistically premodern enchanted worldview and to enjoy the wonder that accompanies it. While the Faivrean model attends to the aesthetic, cultural, and temporal dimensions of (rather specifically) Western fantasy, fruitful research opportunities for enchantment in games outside of this limited, historical, and Eurocentric context represent a salient area of much-needed research. Ultimately, the challenge before us is not only to understand magic systems in context of the Western neomedieval fantastic imaginary—though it’s as good a place to start as any—but to question if magic in games (still?) retains any capacity to enchant and, if so, how.
Footnotes
Statements and Declarations
This article is based on an abstract originally presented at the 2023 Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) International Conference.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
