There's some hilarious meta-fiction going on at Penny Arcade, by the name of Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. It started out as yet another one of their grating high school in-jokes, but Tycho and Gabe managed to find a way to make it relevant to their fans: hand over the keys.
To understand this link, you have to bring along several culture-underground touchstones. You have to know what a Wiki is, foremost. You have to have somehow been in gaming in the last twenty years. And it won't hurt to have been annoyed by one or both, because that makes the whole concept funnier.
And actually, you don't need to read a damn thing, because it's the simple concept that's so great.
As I said, Tycho started the avalanche by off-handedly mentioning some stupid Dungeons & Dragons ripoff he once imagined when he was young... whether he really did or not isn't of much consequence anymore. His idea was a thin outline of battling wizards (on a world subtly named "Battal"), magic spells, and packed with important fantasy buzzwords like "heirarch" and "realms" and such. Except for the silly trivium of the wizards' familiars being living oak dressers (furniliars), the base is all very pedestrian.
Then he opened a Wiki and let the PA horde fill in the blanks.
Soon the whole thing blossomed into something that you would think was very, very real (a la Michael Chabon's Escapist comic book, which pretends that the Escapist - a super-hero created in his novel "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" - was published across the decades in hundreds of comics. Which he wasn't.) The Wiki has a massive amount of shrewdly detailed pages, discussing the history of the world of Battal, of the games and cartoons it inspired, and of the franchise itself. All thrown together by complete strangers keen on constructing a post-modern fantasy parody.
Wired has an article up about it, and the quote that got me was this:
"(These worlds) are the half-ass bullshit used to underlie the money-printing extravaganza," of game systems like Wizard of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering collectable card game, explained Holkins. The Saga exists in part to prove the facileness of such back stories and in part to acknowledge the culpability of fantasy fans who buy it all, no matter the quality.
Goddamn.
That is balls-out truth. When I first got into Magic (during 3rd edition, or "Revised" as we called it back then), there was no story. Just cards. It didn't matter how a Mahamoti Djinn and a Sengir Vampire and a Kird Ape got together, they just did. You summoned them and they fought to the death. Nobody cared about Clan Sengir in those days, we just pumped up our vamps with a Nettling Imp combo and went on with our day. As I got into the game and searched out the older cards - "older" meaning cards printed in the previous year! - I discovered the some of the flavor text alluded to a cohesive story... by name, The Brothers' War of "Antiquities." I was pretty excited about that.
Then the sets dragged on and on and before I knew it, we were expected to care about some failed Han Solo screen tester named Gerrard and his rag-tag group of heroes with an edge. The "Weatherlight" expansion was pretty much the death knell of my interest in Magic. There was this air of desperation to it, the characters were all simply begging you to like them. The hype was everywhere because the characters were everywhere. You were no longer playing yourself as a powerful spellcaster, you were re-enacting the events of Gerrard's Irregulars. It was a fabricated, soulless story designed to lift Magic above being just a game and into a franchise. And we all knew that, and we didn't care, because we just wanted more game cards. Unfortunately, the continued success of the game must have been attributed in part to the new storyline, because Wizards has continued to waste resources on developing the gameworld in every set.
And it doesn't help that Magic has had historically terrible flavor text anyway. Everybody, and I mean everybody, talks like action movie heroes. Full of badass irony. Or ironic badassery. And how many times did the game designers find it hilarious to have the flavor text be a scream? Like, "AAAIEIIIIIEIEEEEE!!!!!" This is where I point to Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, she of the worst flavor text lines ever written.
All very much like Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. It's a gutsy move to boldly finger Magic (among others) the way PA is with Epic Legends. (And just a little suspect given their proclivity to creating their own useless, pandering franchise characters... and given that their own card game is coming out next year!) But that's exactly what these guys do well, when they bother to do it: lift the shroud of nerdery and acknowledge that not even the inmates can take this asylum seriously at all times.
Also, Xbox 360s have crashing issues! SPOILER.
