Introduction

Magic systems are great. However, there's a big disconnect between the magic systems of fiction, and the magic systems we can implement in games. There's a dream of implementing magic systems in a computer as some "alternate physics" that have underlying, consistent rules with interesting emergent dynamics and gameplay.

This blog is going to be documenting my progress in understanding this gap: what makes designing formal, implementable magic systems hard, what are some reasonable methodologies you can follow, and what I've managed to do so far.

I use writing to work out my thoughts, so expect these posts to sometimes be rambley. I'll try to prefix a post as (distillation) if it's a summarization of helpful insights, and prefix a post as (scratch pad) if it's me working through the ideas. Except some repetition as I continue to rework things.

My research methodology is going to be a combination of the following:

- Reading literature directions that seem relevant, working through the ideas, and trying to distill them into concrete takeaways

- Pushing on directions that I feel are promising and underexplored

- Prototyping systems: in game design, thinking only gets you so far, and it's important to verify that things are actually fun

- Trying to formulate various mathematical theories (complexity theory, chaos theory, information theory, category theory, artificial chemistry, differential equations, programming language design, etc.) in terms of what insights they provide to designing magic systems

Pessimistically: I'd like to understand why magic systems are so lacking in games. What are the fundamental roadblocks, when would we know once those roadblocks are overcome, and what research can be done to tackle those roadblocks.

Optimistically: I'd like to come up with plenty of heuristics one can use to "narrow the search space". I'd like to eventually make a guide that distills the important insights to help others design their own magic systems for their own projects. As part of this, I'd like to make a few games that demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques. I'm aware that there are many other things that make some mechanic fun that aren't related to the underlying mechanic, so if I'm able to find a few nice systems I'd like to spend quite a bit of time polishing the gameplay experience.

Sometimes my posts might seem a little sidetracked from this underlying goal. If I just wanted to design some fun magic systems for games, the correct way to do that would be prototype and study other games. Eventually I could build an intuition for what kinds of things work and what don't, and that intuition can help me design good systems.

I do expect to spend a fair amount of time doing that. However, as Hamming said "Education is what, when, and why to do things, training is how to do it. Most courses are training. There are very technical people who applied their methods and technology to the wrong problem and it had to be undone. There are other people with all kinds of theories that couldn't do anything. Neither is useful. You need both theory to guide you, and skill and technique to do well." Much of my thinking will be about developing my own sense of the theory that I can use to guide my prototyping. Building magic systems in games is not a unique ambition to me, so I only expect to be able to make significant progress if I can build off enough of the shoulders of others, while also putting in a lot of effort doing hundreds of prototypes. So I'll also be doing quite a bit of literature review, first principles thinking, and thinking by analogy.

For most things, I think that frameworks, abstraction, formalizing constraints, and possibly some machine learning have the ability to turn something hard to create (need intuition built up over many years of hard work) into something that's easy to create (plug some numbers into some formulas). I want to do that with magic systems.

Ultimately, I also don't just want to build a magic system. I want to understand what it takes to make a magic system and virtual magic world that lead to interesting game design mechanics that feel satisfying to play.