I spend a lot of time in front of screens. As a writer in pop culture, my workday inhabits digital spaces as much as physical ones, planting me in Microsoft Word and social media terrain. My vocation is hardly unique: the First World at large is now a digital enterprise in which correspondence, entertainment, and news media consumption primarily demand the screen of some device or another. Smart phones are no longer exceptional but increasingly necessary to participate. At this point, mine rules my attention like a six-year-old showing off his dinosaurs.

This digital saturation is problematic for video games, which, being recreational in theory, appear most often at the end of my day when I know I've been productive. By that point, I've been staring at electric light for so long that the prospect of another round sounds physically painful—an activity I love looks like a chore. I feel obligated to slog through it, to overcome my fatigue with the interface and carve out some enjoyment, but this is no way to consume art. The medium is too strong—too innovative with narrative—for me wander off in my twenties like the tired old man I said I wouldn't be.

Cardboard to the Rescue

As I stressed out and mourned, an indirect solution emerged somewhat organically. I found myself playing Magic: The Gathering (MTG), a high-fantasy trading card game (TCG) I hadn’t touched since grade school, and connecting with its aesthetics and mechanical structure in a nuanced, promising way. I noticed about a year into my stint that MTG was acting as a sort of video game surrogate, an alternate venue for the tropes and thought patterns that made me salute gaming (and the fantasy genre) in the first place. MTG held me by being physical, by offering an analog retreat from my digital overexposure while fully performing as a game. In this context, paper was accomplishing what 3D rendering was not.

For video games, screens serve as an entryway to digital environments. The player’s goal is departure: He passes from our world into another, from Earth into Azeroth or Skyrim, and inhabits that fictional space by virtue of an avatar. TCGs perform the opposite migration: by placing their information on cards, the games arrive in our space and come to life within it. Tangible, real-world objects transport elsewhere to here, bringing with them the history and drama of whatever they depict. Cards become action embodied in print.

To form a better sense of what physicality accomplishes, it’s worth borrowing terms from narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan, whose work lays out the conceptual frames in which tabletop gaming takes place. Storywise, each TCG references some fictional setting, which Ryan calls the Alternate Possible World (APW). Cards convey this mainly through high-budget visual art and literary, non-mechanical “flavor text.” The mechanical information – whatever skeleton on each card you require to play the game – factors into Ryan’s Game Fame, or the game itself. All of this enacts in the Actual World (Ryan 13).

The fun part happens when we play.

By engaging in Game Frame mechanics, physical aesthetic objects blur the line between the Alternate Possible and Actual Worlds. Epic mythological narratives take place on kitchen tables. Players exist in the APW right here in the Actual World by virtue of Game Frame inclusion: In MTG, for instance, players take the form of planeswalkers, who are basically transdimensional wizards throwing creatures and spells at each other for dominance. This encounter takes place both here in the Actual World and in the Alternate Possible multiverse of MTG’s lore. (The Planechase supplements make this literal by ascribing Game Frame abilities to APW locations.) Players compete both as people and as something else through the medium of fantasy pyrotechnics.

For the digitally fatigued, this analog interface sidesteps the tedium of screens while still delivering the interactivity and emergent narratives that gaming provides. Combat is sophisticated, story is rich and full of style, and no computers are required. TCG players interact with each other directly instead of through digital avatars, free to make eye contact while they attack and talk trash. No technology divides them as it seeks to bring them closer.

Video Games and Digital Fatigue

Of course, we could play board games or tabletop role-players such as Dungeons & Dragons for similar effect, but the collectable nature of TCGs renews something further that video games, particularly in the role-playing game (RPG) genre, specifically used to cultivate: a meaningful sense of possession. Illusion has always been at work there—no reasonable Legend of Zelda player, for instance, would mistake the Master Sword for a real one—but before screens planted flags in every corner of our lives, that illusion was as unimportant as it was obvious. Satisfaction with in-game possession decayed over time as a symptom of a much more general unease.

There’s a certain sense of transience to digital media at large, a quality of unreality that stems from the recombinatory nature of pixels and our understanding of how information is stored. We are aware that the objects on our screens do not exist except as images. They could be items in a painting, except that paintings freeze in place, and these flash by like specters. No physical substrate corresponds to their being that will not immediately correspond to something else. Flexible productivity both enables and degrades.

In video games, this loss of immediacy can seriously undermine the drama of accomplishments. It does less damage to shooters and other genres in which action is the central point, but for the RPG, in which the acquisition of items is important if not essential, disbelief in those items can empty the whole affair. Consider loot-based models such as Diablo and its lineage, for which the entire purpose of gameplay is the collection of increasingly powerful gear. What sense of reward am I supposed to feel when I acquire a cool new weapon, if it’s basically a ghost and I’m immediately on the path to its replacement? As soon as the upgrade arrives, I’ll pawn away the old one to some non-player mannequin in the marketplace, dissolving it into the sea of bits churning behind the interface. It won’t even sell for much, which means I’m really just removing it from my inventory so I can carry more stuff, none of which feels real. My weapon is truly gone, and it was only kind of here.

Something in Your Hand

TCGs, by virtue of being physical, restore meaning to this involvement with items. Cards are not passing apparitions, but tangible, real-world objects you can hold in your hand. Opening a booster to find a chase rare feels rewarding because you have something now, something made of a material that forms it and it alone. It will not vanish, and you need no intermediary screen to access it. The card is right there with a weight, texture, and even that fresh-pack smell that I imagine works similarly to the new-car variety. Only Hume could question its immediacy.

Given this, the TCG’s mise-en-scene endows cards with the aesthetic value of formal art objects; they are like tiny prints of paintings that happen to work as a game. A card’s physical condition affects its monetary value not because damage impedes function but because appearance matters. A foiled card, as a corollary, is worth about twice as much as its normal counterpart for the same reason gold outvalues copper: It’s shiny. Trade binders act as little galleries, and cards with alternate art command their due. In short, physicality and the aesthetic considerations it enables not only make in-game possession fun again, they elevate it to somewhere very near legitimate art collection.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of alters. Altering cards, as a practice, entails expanding, transforming, or otherwise manipulating a card’s visual content to achieve an aesthetic end. The most common technique is to continue the main art to the edge of the card with paintbrush and acrylics, obliterating the decorative frame and mechanical information (which is assumed to be understood). This explicitly creates an art object by prioritizing appearance over function. Good alters of this style are ones in which the artist’s additions blend seamlessly with what was there, unifying the card with a new and clever composition. The final products have such artistic merit that some artists have built commission-based careers within TCG communities (illustrator Eric Klug being perhaps the most prominent).

All Roads

So while video games accomplish much that TCGs do not, cardboard scratches the itch while circumventing screens. It takes us elsewhere from the same conceptual base, anchoring gaming experience in a world we need not leave. Cards command more presence than items we can't touch, while serving in comparable roles, and sophisticated visual design allows each to act as canvas. This is no call to arms for Neo-Luddite gamers, and especially no repudiation of what video games explore—this is simply a remedy for those who love to game but find that mana bar depleted by the time they make it home. TCGs run on different fuel.

Works Cited

• Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print.
• Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design As Narrative Architecture." Henry Jenkins. Massachusetts Insititute of Technology, n.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. <http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html>.
• Grouling, Jennifer. "The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Roleplaying Games." Janice Lee. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. <http://janicel.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Ch5_Jennifer-Grouling-Cover-The-Creation-of-Narrative-in-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games.pdf>.
• Kaiser, Rowan. "Diablo's Descendants." Joystiq. N.p., 27 Mar. 2012. Web. 02 Dec. 2012. <http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/27/diablos-descendants/>.