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Yorke on Games #15 – Mark Rosewater for President

In its relatively brief history, this column has been openly critical of Mark Rosewater. I’ve accused him of knowingly stacking recent Magic expansions with too many linear and parasitic mechanics (#5); of leading the charge to dumb-down the game to its overall detriment (even coining the term ‘Rosewatering’ to describe this process: #10); and of possibly ‘borrowing’ one of my jokes (#11). For all of that, I nevertheless acknowledge that he is due as much praise as he does censure, and for reasons that are not typically highlighted. Thus, today’s article is a sincere celebration of all that is great and good about the man, and also Wizards of the Coast, the company that he plays spokesperson for.

How did I turn this corner? Well, some thoughts had been bubbling in the back of my mind on this subject for some time now. But it was when I read the Mothership’s “No Two See the Same Maro” articleNo Two See the Same Maro earlier this week that the clear and inescapable conclusion came to me:

Mark Rosewater should be the next President of the United States of America!

Why, you ask? Well, as I hope to explain today, Mark Rosewater’s standard practices embody a good number of liberal democratic values in a way that those of real (career) politicians by and large do not. I’ll go further, and explain how the current internal structuring of WotC can be seen as an idealized representation of how a well-functioning representational democratic government should work.

Behold the True Face of Democracy!
Behold the True Face of Democracy!

1: Rosewater Is Transparent

Imagine a world where your mechanic lets you watch them work on your car. Where your doctor lets you film them doing surgery on you in the operating room. Where a game designer lets you in on all of the background decisions that went into creating your favorite game.

We do actually live in that last world, and it’s mostly due to Mark Rosewater’s tireless efforts in writing Making Magic on a weekly basis. I can’t think, offhand, of any other game company that lets its customers behind the curtain as often or as deeply as WotC does with Magic, via Rosewater’s various media outlets. And the enthusiasm that he brings to that task is as infectious as it is admirable.

Now, as an amateur game designer, I would read Making Magic for its educational content even if I wasn’t particularly invested in Magic as a game. However, as someone who actually cares about Magic, I feel especially lucky to have the behind-the-scenes scoop on each set as it comes out, and be privy to the key decisions that shape the game and the individual cards that it is made of, as well as the (usually intelligible and defensible) rationales behind them. My life is richer, overall, for having read the majority of these articles, and I feel closer to the game as a result.

If we lived in a world where politicians followed the same protocol for defending their stances on each new law they passed or voted down, if they felt impelled or obliged to explain the minutiae of their decision-making processes to their constituents, you can bet that people would find politics a lot more interesting and engaging than they currently do. They could feel partial ownership of the laws that govern them, as if they were in a virtual partnership with their democratic representatives: especially if they could have their voice heard in real time, and thus influence political decisions as they were being formulated. Which brings us to Rosewater’s next democratic virtue…

2: Rosewater Is Accountable

If you believe his stats (and why wouldn’t you, really?) Mark Rosewater reads almost all of the hundreds of thousands of emails, Tweets, posts, and articles aimed towards him. And in spite of his demanding duties as head of R&D, he personally responds to tens of thousands of these, as well as doing a comic, regular online polls, a blog, and his flagship column. He claims that all of these efforts add up to over a million words annually that he writes about the game. Oh yeah, he also does two podcasts a week. Feel like an underachiever yet? Our elected leaders should.

Politicians should be employing a multitude of social media applications, like Rosewater does, to take the pulse of public opinion via daily polls, to crowdsource potential solutions to complex political problems that need immediate attention, and to respond to issues of concern to their constituents in a dynamic and timely fashion.I’m talking about the practices of representatives once elected, not the kind of desperate outreach to voters that takes place during the fraught process of political campaigning. And of course I’m aware that some small percentile of elected politicians may indeed use these communication technologies to effectively build and improve rapport with their constituents. If you feel I’ve made some particularly egregious omissions in this regard, feel free to bring examples of these to my attention in the comments section. It may seem crazy that we need to refer our politicians to the practices of a game company employee as an inspirational model, but if contemporary democracy is to exist in practice as well as theory, this is exactly what needs to happen.

You want this? Just ask Rosewater.
You want this? Just ask Rosewater.

3: Rosewater Has Legitimacy

Mark Rosewater has the corporate equivalent of political legitimacy because he represents the public will of his clientele. How do I know this? It’s because if you (and some verbal friends) want a unicorn lord published in an upcoming set, you just need to repeat your request often enough and loudly enough to Rosewater, and you can be sure one will (eventually) get published. We’ve seen this happen time and time again in the recent history of the game to know this is true: if players want something badly enough, R&D will try their level best to fill holes in their design files with the desired card(s). Players win, and Rosewater wins, when he gives us what we want.

Ideally, the acts of politicians and the desires of citizens should be equally harmoniously aligned as those of Magic players and WotC. Of course, there are real-world economic and political constraints in place which work against this happening much of the time, but that does not detract from its theoretical desirability. Elected leaders could, once more, learn much from Rosewater about building and maintaining the legitimacy of their governance.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free
Huddled masses yearning to breathe free

4: Wizards of the Coast Enables and Supports Grassroots Community Engagement

Every week, there are hundreds of thousands of DCI-sanctioned Magic tournaments that are held worldwide, enabling millions of players to directly and officially engage themselves with their hobby. The logistics and record-keeping efforts required to maintain this level of participation are immense, but very few balk at their duties, and most people have fun doing what they do. These tournaments are one of many barometers of the health of the game, and on this metric at least, Magic is thriving.

It would be almost unthinkable to imagine an equivalent number of citizens being politically mobilized for the same duration of time on a weekly basis. What would happen if, say, even 1% of the citizenry of a democracy put in eight hours a week (the time it takes to play a medium-sized tournament, or a double draft) toward discussing political issues at local meetings, engaging in protest marches, or writing letters to their elected reps? The political culture of the nation would radically change overnight, for the better.Unless the government unwisely declared a state of emergency in response. If we were as educated and passionately engaged about the political decisions which shape our lives as we are about the contents of upcoming Magic sets, positive change would be a foregone conclusion. What stops this from happening is that none of our politicians are as open as Rosewater is, and none of our democratic institutions offers us tools for engagement that are as accessible, effective, and attractive as those offered by Wizards.

Yorke15d

5: Wizards of the Coast Has the Internal Structure of a Tripartite Government

One of the hallmarks of modern democracy is the separation of powers between the three different branches of the government to prevent abuses of power from occurring, or tyranny from developing. There are a series of checks and balances in place between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches which serve to curb corruption and allow for a plurality of opinions to be heard and expressed in the seat of power, rather than tending towards a system wherein one person acts as the lawmaker, law enforcer, and ultimate court of appeal. The structure is in place to thwart fascism and cronyism, in other words.

With the recent rise in prevalence of Creative as an influential and independent department within Wizards, we now have this tripartite structure mirrored in WotC itself. Research and Design, Development, and Creative each interact with the other departments toward a common end (a good game; the corporate analogy of ‘good governance’), but in effect also restrict each other’s powers: and if there’s a single most important lesson that Rosewater wants us to take home, it’s that (wait for it) “restrictions breed creativity”. There is much to be said for this system, wherein Development refines what R&D produces, which is in turn inspired by what Creative suggests, which is in turn partially constrained by what they know Development will be willing and able to execute on at the end of the process. This stops Magic from being the product of one ambitious and charismatic leader (a position of power that some view Rosewater as having long occupied), and rather the result of a large group of people with mutually enriching inputs.

Some Potential Objections to my Nomination

I’ve argued the case for nominating Mark Rosewater as a presidential candidate on the democratic character of his personal virtues, as well as the organizational strengths of his ‘party’, the WotC. There are, however, some potential issues that opponents of this nomination might want to see addressed before they can be persuaded of the merits of my view. I’ll list a few of these potential objections below:

• “Charismatic Authority”: Rosewater is exploiting social media to build up a cult of personality, presumably to magnify his influence within WotC and beyond.
• “Frontier Justice”: WotC occasionally issues arbitrary and unjustified punishments to agents they perceive as acting counter to their interests (as seen in their response to ‘Crackgate’Man Goes To “Magic: The Gathering” Tournament, Poses Next To Butt Cracks and the ‘Judgegate’Several SE Judges suspended by WotC illegal card leak debacle over the holidays).
• “Let Them Eat Cake”: WotC, with Rosewater as their spokesperson, regularly issues game-changing or expectation-defeating announcements in a paternalistic fashion, without first consulting the Magic community.

I’ll address each of these hypothetical charges that either Rosewater or WotC conduct themselves in an anti-democratic fashion in turn. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I know more about Mark the person than I need to, or even care to, via his expositions on social media. After all, most people, like myself, would presumably rather just read about the exploits and insights of Rosewater the game designer instead. But he often links his personal content to his professional content in a way that is mutually illuminating and beneficial. And not all of the content is flattering: he’s as likely to write about how tough it was for him to be on the dating scene as he is to indulge in a story about when he faced numerous internal obstacles to the adoption of his ideas and mechanics, only to be vindicated when the set released and these proved to be successful. So the content is not all unqualified self-promotion.

Being exposed to a fair amount of social media, Rosewater has seen a lot of people prophesy the death of Magic, and even blame him for its perceived downfall. He has also seen the game go from strength to strength under his direction, and continuously grow in scale and influence, despite the doomsayers. So it seems unfair to accuse him of attempting to set up a cult of personality, and more accurate to say that he’s setting the record straight the best he can against the competing voices out there, and giving his audience a privileged view of the inner workings of WotC (and R&D in particular) on the way. If the narrative occasionally comes off as narcissistic, that’s a forgivable tic, and the price of entry for reading content you can’t get anywhere else. No leader is without faults, and occasionally showing people this is part of what make them relatable.

As for WotC, the perception might be that as an organization they are too cavalier about the way they treat their well-meaning subjects. The group of judges who were suspended for just being part of a social network where a few leaked cards were posted, for example, or that doe-eyed fellow who got suspended for taking a few playful pics of ‘plumber’s butt’ at a big tournament. Didn’t WotC come down too hard on them?

In these two cases, and others I have read about previously, WotC has always offered a measured public rationale for their responses after the fact. In ‘Crackgate’ the stated issue was preventing what could be understood as bullying behavior from taking place at WotC events. Indeed, if it were women’s breast cleavage (or women’s ass cleavage, let’s face it) in the background of Sidney Blair’s photos rather than men’s ass cleavage, it would have been considered a straightforward case of sexual harassment. There’s no logical reason to tolerate Blair’s behavior towards one sex when the identical behavior towards the other would be illegal in most contexts. In ‘Judgegate’ the stated issue was protecting WotC’s intellectual property from illegal distribution. If the implicated parties weren’t high-level DCI-sanctioned judges, essential to running large events in their corner of the country, it’s fair to speculate that this case wouldn’t have gotten the same level of sympathetic treatment from the public, or the same level of leniency from the company. Despite the serious nature of the leak, WotC actually came very close to admitting they’d jumped the gun and gone too far in Judgegate, revoking the suspensions and calling it a “learning opportunity”Learning Opportunities for them. The communication ended with a vow to be more transparent in future cases wherein suspensions are issued. That hardly sounds like the jackboot of a disconnected dictatorship to me, and more like a corporate entity dedicated to the ideal of democratic accountability, while (rightly) wanting to keep the behavior of its players and staff within legal parameters.

Finally, as with any institution that serves a number of clients too large to reasonably communicate with at all times and regarding all matters, WotC needs to retain its power to make executive decisions in order to get things done: sometimes regardless of, and even contrary to, public opinion. After all, democracy is a system, but a system is only as good as its power to get things done efficiently and well. Players can’t reasonably expect referenda to be issued to them for every issue that comes up.

Just like the president of a country might need to make a tough call on behalf of their nation without discussing the matter with their citizens prior to making that decision, so too does WotC need to shake things up occasionally for the good of the game (with card bannings, for instance, or changing the block structure). And sometimes, gathering comprehensive player feedback is not necessary when the need for change is obvious, and the fix is within their power to immediately implement. Recriminations may follow such a course of action, especially when the public is steeped in democratic culture and values. However, people need reminding that in a representative democracy, you choose people to make decisions for you; you don’t choose the contents of their individual decisions in each instance. And so it is with all the major changes to the game initiated by WotC that made people say they’d quit and sell their collections… in retrospect, many found that the changes were inoffensive or even beneficial, and so played on.

An undesirable alternative
An undesirable alternative

Then Play On

I hope you’ve enjoyed this extended analogy between the practices of WotC and good democratic governance, and can now see why I think Mark Rosewater might just be the next great hope for sorting out the numerous problems of our great neighbor to the South. His efforts dwarf and embarrass those of many career politicians currently holding office. With his creative, communicative, and organizational skill sets, it seems clear that he’d make a terrific president. At the very least, he couldn’t do any worse than Donald Trump would… Right?

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