M Files – Controlling the Balance

Playing with information

MagicDuel is a game for me as it is for you, but not in the same sense. I do play with information balance in the game, but I am not mocking or fooling you into things just to see “an interesting reaction.” If I provide wrong information to a system, the results I analyze will be also fictive, so I need to be sure that the information I place in is true enough not to ruin MagicDuel.

That’s one of the main reasons I started to be so against Ancient Lore. At the point of its creation, the lore had as purpose: the general feeling you had after hearing about it. But some of you got lost in the details, creating a separate subsystem within MagicDuel, a system that even if it’s somehow fun, interfered with my main system. The results of a subsystem present within the realm becomes, from time to time, obvious and I will not go into detail because I do not want to harm the reputation of any of you.

How do you put information into a complexly balanced world?
It’s the same thing when you ask, “What are the lines that give a painter’s masterpiece its beauty?” You can’t define them! MagicDuel is the same as a beautiful painting: it has a message, a theme, a feeling of its own, and–against popular belief–I am not controlling every bit of information of the system, not at all. It’s enough to place the right questions and create the right “bed” for the information to come and “rest” in. The system will build itself.
In MagicDuel, I measure information by a very uncommon measuring unit: human minds. The colors I use to paint the masterpiece are people, people that I manage to select by having a series of filters during their initial stages.
I could train them, it’s true, but over internet, I can’t. They must be filtered out and leave statistics and chance to be controlled by MagicDuel subtle information balance, a much slower process to get the right people into this realm.

How can a person influence the realm?
That probably has an obvious answer, but not the one I will give you now. There’s also a certain information balance between a player’s mind and the other systems that person role-plays to be part of. Creating a character within the realm (as opposed to just create a test account), makes the bridge between your collection of knowledge and ability to process knowledge and the MagicDuel world. I just provide the tools needed to make all these “bridges” point in the same direction.