Spoiling the Future Metagame: The Promotional Logic and Reception of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering

McFarland has recently published an edited collection Beyond the Deck: Critical Essays on Magic: The Gathering and Its Influence, featuring my chapter about card previews as promotional materials and the related metagame discussions. The book, which comes out just in time for MTG’s 30th anniversary, was edited by Shelly Jones and includes contributions by a group of international scholars, covering issues ranging from mechanics and design to economies and competitions to player communities and themes beyond the game itself.

In my chapter Spoiling the Future Metagame: The Promotional Logic and Reception of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering, I analyze the promotional function of card previews for the 2020 Q2 set Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. The findings suggest that the promotional logic is closely connected to the game’s business model and that cards that are likely to have higher prices on secondary markets due to artificial scarcity such as rares and mythic rares are given more attention during the preview period. On the other hand, most of the so-called common cards were revealed at the tail end of the promotional campaign in one big batch. The publisher and content creators all benefit from hyping up the upcoming cards. This increases the interest in strategy content as well as drives pre-order prices before the cards could have been properly tested in play. The chapter also explores metagaming discussions by players, which are sparked by the card previews and allow fans to theorycraft and hypothesize about new decks and strategies before the metagame settles again.

Mediatization of Tabletop Role-Playing: The Intertwined Cases of Critical Role and D&D Beyond

The journal Convergence has just published my article Mediatization of Tabletop Role-Playing: The Intertwined Cases of Critical Role and D&D Beyond. The article explores the impact of Critical Role (a weekly show on Twitch where voice actors, including Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, or Matthew Mercer, play Dungeons & Dragons) and digital tools like D&D Beyond on the tabletop role-playing hobby and industry. 

 

I argue that Critical Role promotes in-person play with high-end physical accessories despite being a mediated form of tabletop role-playing. Overall, the process of mediatization of analog games, including D&D and Magic: The Gathering (see the article Mediatization of a Card game: Magic: The Gathering, Esports, and Streaming), seems to follow the logic of addition by maintaining analog modes of consumption alongside new digital and virtual ways of playing (and watching). This multitude of playstyles is marked by extensive commodification, ranging from physical accessories (miniatures, dice) to digital subscriptions and virtual goods. These findings are based on a quantitative analysis of Critical Role‘s episode sponsorships and a qualitative analysis of embodied player practices, including the use of physical accessories as well as D&D Beyond‘s digital character sheets (starting in 2018) by the cast members. Aside from advertising from TTRPG-related businesses, Critical Role is regularly sponsored by video game companies, which sometimes commission entire episodes. The show and its cast thus inhabits a unique position between analog and video game industries, further showing the complexity of the process of mediatization, which is anything but straightforward.

Mediatization of a Card Game: Magic: The Gathering, Esports, and Streaming

The journal Media, Culture & Society has recently published my article Mediatization of a card game: Magic: The Gathering, esports, and streaming. This piece explores the recent shift of the genre-defining trading card game towards esports. By analyzing Twitch streams, paratextual material, and online discussions in the period from September 2018 to March 2019, leading up to the first major tournament - The Mythic Invitational - played using the new digital adaptation Magic: The Gathering Arena, I show that this top-mediatization is a contested process with its own discontinuities and opposing forces. To a certain extent, the new competitive structure organized around esports-like league consisting of 32 top ranked players from the season 2018-2019 turned many of these selected professional players into advocates of this transition, although not all of the changes were welcomed by the community. The "legacy" ways of playing - the tabletop version and older digital adaption Magic: The Gathering Online - remain supported, but Arena is central to the new stage of the game both for competitive and more casual audiences. Furthermore, the more mainstream interest in Magic: The Gathering draws attention to various long-standing issues in the player communities, such as the often uncontested notions of meritocracy and the lack of diversity.

Analog Game Studies: Volume 3

The third volume of the Analog Game Studies journal was just published by the ETC Press. The full book can be downloaded for free here in PDF. Among other articles and essays on analog games, there is also my piece about Magic: The Gathering, which focuses on a critique of the computational essentialism of platform studies. This article was previously published in the online version of the journal in 2016 (link). The third volume was edited by Emma Leigh Waldron, Aaron Trammell, and Evan Torner.

Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. It defines analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more.

Analog Game Studies: Volume I

The first volume of the Analog Game Studies journal was just published by the ETC Press. The full book can be downloaded for free here in PDF or purchased in a paperback form at Lulu. Among other articles and essays on analog games, there is also my piece on board game errata as paratexts which was previously published in the online journal in 2014. The volume was edited by Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner and Emma Leigh Waldron.

Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. It defines analog games broadly and includes work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more.

Regarding Board Game Errata on Analog Game Studies

Mansion of Madness errata insert.

Follow-up (and also a significant improvement) to my previous article (Changing the Rules, Keeping the Fiction) on game rules and errata has just been published in the fifth issue of Analog Game Studies. It describes errata as paratexts using Gerard Genette's framework and Alexander R. Galloway's notion of the interface effect. It features examples from boardgames Mansions of Madness, City of Remnants and A Few Acres of Snow. Read the full article and check the whole journal at: analoggamestudies.org.

Direct link: http://analoggamestudies.org/2014/12/regarding-board-game-errata/.