For our second Obsession session, follow Sam’s twisting logic as he unites three escalating ideas – staves, wands, varinhas. Sam’s obsessions unearths a Freudian figuration in our sense of magic. All of these wooden lines and alchemical calculations belie a desire to simplify chaos. Is magic really such a straight affair?  – ga

I. SIGHTING STAVES

Were one to trace the etymological line of the English word “ley,” a centuries-old term for pastures, open fields, etc., a spike in meaning would occur around the 1920s, when a Brit by the name of Alfred Watkins conjoined it with “line” in order to hypothesize networks of walking paths and trade routes in prehistoric Britain--networks invisible to the contemporary eye but for the many nodes of archeological significance through which they might be reconnected, re-traversed, and re-mapped. A century later, the result of Watkins’ walking tour, The Old Straight Track (1925), is most analogous to something like The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), or The White Goddess (1948): an esoteric work whose poetic tone & latent mysticism have obfuscated the more rigorous, analytical methodologies present within the text itself. Their commonality is the attitude of the generalist: Watkins, a would-be cartographer, traces neat lines between the cairns and mounds he visits, but he’s ultimately torn between the competing interests of folklore and oral history, of archeology and botany, of etymology--the geography of language posing a particularly meandering topography, averse to his systematizing--and it is this role, that of the non-specialist, that most lends his thinking a kind of magic. More relevant than any particular spiritual or pseudoscientific musing is his willingness, at all times, to exist in uncertainties and doubts, to contort his path (and life) around misreadings, meditations, stories, his own fixation on natural places and a deep suspicion that there must surely be a greater unseen system of logic undergirding all of them. His method, as such, becomes centered around the reconstruction and embodiment of an ancient professional class of land surveyors which, he believed, used “sighting staves” to map out the leys. These “ley-men” had existed alongside or else evolved out of druids, seers, and astronomer-priests; bards, magicians, hermits, and pilgrims. Wizards, the lot of them, each wielding their implement “of work and of authority” in the form of walking sticks, rods, scepters, staves, wands, all pointing the way, in their own way. 

II. WANDS

When it comes to magic, our most fundamental visual language is the elemental and the projectile: fast-moving bolts of electricity, fire, poison. Components which exist, in other words, until they are combined. The first trick of Finnish computer game Noita (2020) is to situate this idea about what a “spell” looks like within a complex, physics-based simulation of chemical reactions. As jolts of electricity are more powerful when in contact with bodies of water, so too is fire with alcohol, but likewise for other in-game solids, liquids, & gases, whether they actually exist or not – flummuxium, fungal vomit, & velvet slime also have their place within the calculus. Magic, here, is conditional. Every particle onscreen—grains of dirt, motes of pollen, a thimble of gunpowder—must be accounted for as a potential catalyst, for your own projectile spells but also some terrible chain reaction of unrelated accidents, your avatar’s actions being only one factor in a larger system of emergent gameplay, since enemies off-screen have access to the same gasoline, the same ignitions. The environment is procedurally generated, but pointedly volatile to its own composition, presenting the player with a mess of materials which might be navigated by empirical manipulation, by experimentation with and slow mastery over the game’s elemental arcana. 

The second trick of Noita being that its arc consists not of playing as a wizard but as a character who slowly becomes one--not a game about casting magic, but making it, out of acid, and pheromones, and light. Player discourse rightfully orbits this exceedingly intricate “wandcrafting” mechanic, by which a handful of individual spells must each be slotted into wands with randomized affixes--cast delay, capacity, projectile spread--to create unique cocktails of effects used for combat, navigation, and, often, suicide. The combinatorics are dizzying; amateurs could spend hours learning the situational nuances latent to deploying “magic missile” or “blood mist” without killing themselves, representing just two of over four hundred possible components here. Expert discourse, meanwhile, is so impenetrable by comparison--endgame progression revolves around iteratively breaking advanced mechanics in order to birth a new sun, with players offering quips like “requirement spells enable you to spell wrap within the same cast block”--it begins to feel like there’s actual forbidden knowledge within these systems, a pulsating wizard’s tome just out of reach. And as you gain more of that knowledge, descending the layers of the game’s world, Noita becomes more abstract, its frenetic magic merely visual trappings for the actual connections being made in your mind, what its world is made of, how it works. Ley lines being carved within the simulation.

III. VARINHAS

Such interactive magic need not be limited to complexity, however. The minimalist complement to Noita’s maximalism is surely Cinco Paus (2017), a perfect game of imperfect information in which comparable experimentation with simul-cast spell effects is instead turn-based and limited at all times to a five-by-five grid. A “pocket roguelike,” some have called it. I came to it by way of Canadian developer Raigan Burns, who named it his own favorite game two years after co-creating mine; curious, given Cinco Paus was, by my comparison, an unassuming iOS title made by a bearded New Zealander named Michael Brough who had more recently taken to filming spontaneous monologues in the woods. At the time of development, Brough was taking Portuguese classes; his decision to limit the game to that language is one that many players find inaccessible, despite his intentions being to evoke the textural quality of hieroglyphs while still allowing the half-certainty granted by cognates and context. Such is the ethos of Cinco Paus--the tension latent to performing actions with limited knowledge--a game in which the five random effects of the five varinhas (wands) in your possession can only be discovered upon using them correctly. One which arcs around corners and passes through walls will only reveal those effects upon reaching a corner or a wall; the delight of the exercise is in navigating the labyrinth with such profound uncertainty. “When you’re making art out of wood,” Brough tells us, “you really need to be in tune with the underlying structure to make something that’s harmonious. Because you have something that’s already beautiful, and you’re trying to develop that beauty without damaging it.” His career has been defined by applying this thinking to programming. I’m reminded of Watkins, ruminating on how “early man was not quite a fool, and there are some indications that if, for example, a long sighted ley crossed several loops of a winding river, he did not make several crossings where one was enough.”