Magic Gains Sentience Or An Idea Of Identity Through Agent Of Infinite Looped Nests Of Complexity

Posted on December 8, 2007
Filed Under Articles, John Koziar, Contest Entries |

If we agree with the argument that consciousness is defined as the ability for a structure within a system, through self-referentiality, to affect that system through its meaning or non-meaning, as documented to a Pulitzer’s-worth of success by Douglas R. Hofstadter in his book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,” then, with the specific advent of Planeswalkers as a card type, the game of Magic has been transformed from a basically meaningless though utile system to a sentience of limited consciousness, announced Wizards spokeswoman Tina Gaffney on Wednesday.

Wizards’ Centre for Consciousness Studies within Entertainment-based Systems (CSES) has long been the black sheep of R&D because it has been policy since the game’s inception to avoid consciousness. But after many years of debate, consciousness has finally been introduced in a very careful and controlled way.

“It was felt that players would fear consciousness within the gaming system,” Gaffney said, “that they would perceive it as competing with their specialness as sentient beings.”

But now it is thought that the philosophically-enlightened player can accept that there is no difference between their “self” and that of a cow or a mathematical system, except the level of complexity, she added. 

Mark Rosewater told reporters Saturday, “As a designer, it has always been my dream to create a gaming system that was capable of stimulus-response reactions and possessed an idea of ’self’ or I-ness through inter-referentiality and/or infinite looped nests of complexity.”

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