Chalk - So Do You Wear a Cap? The Unofficial story of Magic: The Gathering

S o do you wear, you know, a cape or something? Poppy asks me. Because I could definitely imagine you doing actual magic. Like tricks and stuff.

Poppy is trying. A great friend, she always forgives me my eccentricities, but this particular pearl is passing her by and I cant help but feel stranded in some humiliating time warp, where I live out the same faintly ridiculous conversation again and again. Yes, I sheepishly admit, I regularly play a mysterious card game. No, I say, it is not like snap. Yes, I suppose you could call it a cross between stamp collecting and Dungeons and Dragons. No. Youre right. Not many girls play it.

The cape question is at least wonderfully leftfield. On a drab winter morning in yet another new and unfamiliar hometown, I am happy to settle for that. This time it is Berlin. It has been numerous cities and countries before. Various social settings. Different friends. But somehow always the same unease grips me as the conversation plays out a sense of never quite knowing if I am happy enough with who I am to reveal all the components of my identity. Never quite knowing how much I want to be defined by belonging to a community of others in this instance, card-gamers. Similarly, never wanting to be defined by the judgements others cast on tribes which are not their own. If you have tried as best as you can to walk your own path, however much of an illusion that may be, it is not trivial to hand the power of sweeping generalisation to an interlocutor who may wield it indiscriminately.

Nonetheless, like a recalcitrant alcoholic at an AA meeting, let me start that same conversation all over again. Hello. I am Titus. And the card game I play is called Magic: The Gathering. Thankfully, I am not alone in this world. Since the game exploded into being 20 years ago this year, 12 million of us in 70 countries around the world have picked it up and become hopelessly, inexorably addicted. We meet in sweaty, poorly lit backrooms to play a fantasy game with special, sometimes valuable, collectible cards, Some of us even make a living out of it, raking in prize money at professional tournaments, writing about the game for its legion of fans or speculating and trading on the fluctuating value of the cards used to play. Most though, simply have cupboards full of expensively acquired cardboard to which they feel a puzzling emotional connection. To which they compulsively add via eBay or other online retailers when no one is looking. To which their thoughts drift during mundane conversations with friends or partners. Whose completeness (or lack thereof) keeps them awake at night. Whose contents and possibilities make their mind spin and drive some online to play the game there, against distant opponents.

Whether I am always comfortable with the notion or not, I belong to a vast and motley crew of Magic players. That is either reassuring proof that I am not deranged or that a significant percentage of the worlds population is. I hope to settle that question one way or another during the course of this story, which, like the best of stories starts a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

U senet. Two simple syllables, which once represented a glittering new way of communicating, but which have long since receded into the past as the digital ages advances have clocked up (and in some cases cocked up) at an astonishing rate. Usenet was the text-based precursor to the World Wide Web and was in many ways like cyberspaces old west. It was a wild frontier. Sparsely populated. A far-off and unfamiliar idea to all but the most pioneering of souls. In 1991, it boasted around 12 million users worldwide, almost exclusively techies, academics and pornographers. It handled two, sometimes three, gigabytes of traffic per day. By contrast, in 2013, over two billion of the worlds population are online and gigabytes of traffic have long given way to petabytes. Still, there are Usenet archives out there, where former devotees can pour over the traces of their rambling, un-moderated discussions like historians poring over sepia-tinted photographs.