Magic sucks. We’ve fucked it up. We’ve made it boring. We’ve taken something that, conceptually, contains the range of all things unexplainable, extraordinary, and mystical, and compressed it into essentially an invisible sack of hand grenades.

This isn’t just a problem with video games. It might have started with Dungeons & Dragons: D&D was originally created by combining the strategic play of war games with the high fantasy setting of The Lord of the Rings, and this origin still shapes what games are today, as well as what magic is within those games. However, while wizards and magic were an important part of the stories of Middle-Earth, these elements didn’t readily map to war game mechanics. Reading the books, it’s sometimes difficult to tell what’s magic and what’s just everyday cleverness, what’s mystical knowledge and what’s just regular everyday knowledge. Most of the time, Gandalf is a badass, largely not…