Like many, I came to Artifact with some Magic: The Gathering in my
sordid nerd-history. As a lad I first watched Magic being played by my
older cousins in the mid-to-late 90s.
After some false starts where my garbled understanding of the rules
resulted in multiple and humorous misinterpretations of the game, I was
playing with a Magic crew of my own by the early 2000s. These six to
eight of my closest friends and I spent many happy years in middle and
high schools playing cards around the library tables at lunch.
However, as is so often the case, the continental drift of college,
career, and life eventually broke our little group apart. To me, the
dissolution of my interest in Magic: The Gathering is representative of
the dissolution of my childhood crew and all the good times we had
together at school, at each others’ houses, and at state and local
tournaments. These are the memories that leaped to mind when I heard an
interview with Richard Garfield wherein he claimed that the major
philosophy behind constructing the Artifact social scene was
re-capturing the “Magic around the kitchen table” feel of a physical
card game. I was a bit skeptical that a digital card game in 2018 could
bring back the glory days of old where we had to walk uphill, both
ways, in the snow, to get to the card shop. Regardless I was intrigued.
I'll admit that until it came time to write this article, I hadn't
given the whole “physical card game feel” philosophy much thought. I've
simply been playing Artifact as the next step on the road to my gaming
hermitage-queueing game after game of Expert Phantom Draft. After the
slow disbandment of my high school gaming crew, I cycled through some
games and settled on DotA where I gained a new crew of friends who I
have at this point been gaming with for five or six years. However,
even that association has begun to fray as all of us have stepped
further into our career and family lives.
For a guy in my situation who can’t always find compatriots to play
with, Artifact presents an opportunity to flex the strategic muscles
that sometimes atrophy in DotA where you first have to wrangle the four
cantankerous cats that are your randomly assigned teammates before you
can execute anything resembling a game plan. What's more, Artifact
doesn’t have a mechanical component for my aging gamer’s reflexes to
deal with. Artifact has lived up to my hopes and dreams in these
regards, but for this past week, I’ve felt that something was missing
each time my opponent’s throne fell. For a time, I figured that this
was the absence of a progression system or any sort of meaningful stat
tracking. Winning a game of Artifact always feels like such a big
accomplishment, but it doesn’t always feel fulfilling.
It wasn't until the other night when I happened into the Discord of
another gamer enclave I sometimes guest with that I realized that a good
portion of what I was missing in Artifact was social. The guys based
in this particular Discord haven’t followed the narrative I outlined
above. While lots of friend groups tend to drift apart and associate
less as the ties that brought them together fray-geography, interest in a
game, what have you-these guys have continued to play different games
together over the years. When I stepped into their Discord that night,
they were just beginning an in-house constructed tournament with five
people. I stayed in their discord for a couple of hours as they
proceeded to play each other. What I heard in their discourse did indeed
bring me right back to the Magic days of old. Most of these guys had
not followed Artifact as closely as I did through the beta, and in some
places, their understanding of the rules was still lacking. This would
be a big disadvantage in the Phantom Draft I was doing at the time, but
for these guys goofing around with their friends, it obviously didn't
stop them from enjoying the game at least as much as I was that night.
Indeed, I’d argue that the shared experience these guys were having at
the game was more rewarding than the tickets and packs I was likely to
amass on my Gauntlet runs.
You see, Artifact is a game of great depth and as such makes for some
exciting moments that are just better when shared with your friends.
In one short week of playing, I've had so many games come down to the
wire or turn on an amazing play. Winning like that feels wonderful but
not as wonderful as sharing it with somebody who understands what you're
talking about. Being able to brag about the time that you took a pile
of garbage draft deck and piloted it past some morally bereft individual
who somehow managed to draft two copies of Axe
is almost worth more than actually getting the win. Similarly, the
sting of defeat can be much cured by having a sympathetic shoulder on
which to cry your frustrations at having mismanaged your resources in
leaving his last tower alive at one health when your opponent had lethal
the next lane over. Because it has a powerful in-game tournament
system and a lack of any sort of ladder system that focuses gameplay in
one venue, Artifact is a fertile ground for these types of social
interactions, and therefore does indeed capture some of the essence of
sitting around with your friends and playing a physical card game.
That being said, what I’ve been missing wasn't just friends. Artifact is a one-player game and there is no way to interact with your opponent
in the game client itself, so right now it feels difficult to form any
sort of human connection in-game. If you aren’t coming to this game
with your group of friends in tow, or you're having a hard time getting
the frayed edges of your gaming community together on this, Artifact’s
bounty can feel limited and hard to expand upon. Don't get me wrong, it
plays well in a vacuum and the addition of a personal progression
system will go a long way towards making Artifact the ideal companion in
your gamer hermitage. However, I think the most important mechanism
that Artifact needs in order to feel really good as a pastime is more
opportunities for people to discover and engage with new gaming
communities. I don’t think Valve necessarily has plans to add anything
in the near future that will facilitate this further because the
community tournament system is already and place, and that ought to be
the method by which we are finding and developing new communities. I
think the best thing we can hope for from Valve is that when they do
introduce strong stat-tracking and a progression system that it is
designed in such a way as to avoid undermining the community
environments that Valve is trying to encourage.
I didn't intend for this article to end as a plug for the
Artifact.game community tournament, but its timing is pertinent. It
should be mentioned that I’m not on staff for Artifact.game, but enjoy
contributing these articles because it is a site designed for the sole
purpose of forming the type of community that Artifact really needs and
is designed for. My Hope is that in short order the internet and perhaps
even the real world will be dotted with little Artifact communities
that can talk about the game, compete in the game, and, above all, enjoy
the game together.
This Content has been taken from https://artifact.game/component/k2/the-gamer-group-a-discussion-on-the-social-aspect-of-artifact
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