Magic

Dr. Richard Bartle, or maybe that should be Professor, gets a lot of things right.

That said, one of the things he believes is that this world is not designed. As a designer of multiple highly-successful game worlds himself, I reckon he generally knows what he's talking about, so please understand that I do not say this lightly: I believe he's wrong in this particular instance.

I strongly suggest you read that link anyway. It's very enlightening. But I'll summarise: the general argument is that our reality sucks and why didn't the designer throw out the bits that sucked?

I'll deal with the more common variants of this argument first, and get back to Dr. Bartle's later. Let me emphasise that these are not things he says. It's things I hear occasionally from other people. One, you can't blame a designer for shitty things people do to other people, that's not how free will works. Two, I agree things like weather and natural disasters suck, but those are effects of an underlying system and I suggest you go look up how this world would be like if those systems weren't in effect. I, personally, prefer this alternative.

Actually, that second part does apply to some of what the good doctor said. He even admits that Reality is superbly engineered - just doesn't extrapolate that to the rest of the systems in place, most of which produce those "sucky" side effects he talks about. The way everything works together, I don't think any human could design that, and if you started picking out the bits that sucked and marking them for removal, that'd be exactly equivalent to coding exceptions in one of the fundamental ways this world works: the law of consequences following actions. Not to mention the effects it'd have on everything else in the system.

But look - it doesn't really matter that no-one from this world would play a virtual world that was designed to be exactly like this one. No-one from the World of Warcraft actually wants to be there, either, and the only reason they are is because they don't have the capacity to make decisions (and they lack the framework to be able to commit suicide. Not that suicide would matter when a new copy is instantly spawned anyway...) The considerations are quite a lot different when you're designing a world that people live (and die) in vs. one that people go to play in. And for goodness' sake, if you're even thinking about suicide, don't do it, talk to someone first. This world has permadeath.

I'm going to appear to go off in a different direction, bear with me, you'll see where this is going if you finish reading it. 

I read a lot of fantasy books and play a lot of games. So do a lot of people. It seems that the human interest in magic (not necessarily the gathering!) is pretty powerful. Maybe we can blame Tolkien for that. But in any case - have you ever looked at your computer or smartphone recently? Really looked? That thing is doing scary feats of calculation and communication. We don't really know how they work, but we can tell them to do what we want them to do. This is starting to sound an awful lot like magic. In the way that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (thank you Clarke), and sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (thank you Sir Terry), and there really should be more books that treat magic that way.

Here's another thing. The magic in a lot of those books, the fantasy worlds in which a lot of people immerse themselves by choice? Any development of new spells or magic in general tends to be hand-waved, if it's even mentioned, and with good (usually plot-related) reason too. Magic is largely a static system: this is what we've got, it's been passed down from the ancients and we've forgotten a good bit of it, you use what you're given and no way to improve on it. And in games, it makes sense, because who's going to code a system with that much potential for breakage, and who's able to code a system with that much potential for expansion?

But we, in Reality, are developing new technology all the time. And nobody even finds this unusual. Magic, I remind you, is "the way things work" in books and games. Out here in Reality, we call that Science and we poke and prod at it, we understand it and then we use it. I don't know about you, but I like that better than the alternative with "real" magic.

Looks like we've been given magic after all. And more than that, we've been given the keys to magic. (And, if you're religious, the bugs will be ironed out in the next patch. What's not to love?)

Props to the guy who designed it all. I know I couldn't.