There are distinct advantages and disadvantages to working with digital media as opposed to traditional sources. Digital media are often easier to work with. They make things infinitely more searchable and easy to transmit. Thanks to the church’s efforts in digitizing old records, family history work moves at an unprecedented pace. Digitized books make enormous corpra available to researchers, and most of our entertainment is transmitted digitally.

Even though digital media is often easier to work with than physical sources, making a digital copy can be incredibly difficult.  Last class we started to talk about this. To get our Duffy poems, a bunch of students had to transcribe them. That’s a lot of work.

The researchers in “A Quantitative Approach to Beauty” knew that digitizing things is hard. They got around that problem by using someone else’s digital copies of the artwork.

Okay. Now I’m going to “come out” about something.

I’m a pretty avid Magic the Gathering player.

Source: http://logonoid.com/images/magic-the-gathering-logo.png

I think it’s really fun. Before I was married, I would go play several tournaments a week. I still read Magic articles every day.  I’ve taken a lot of flack for it, so I usually don’t tell people. However, I thought I’d bring it up because Magic’s digital interface is a great example of digitizing difficulty. In 2002. Magic Online was launched. A paper card game, they realized, would have a difficult time surviving in an age of digital games. So they made this.

Source: https://mtg.aminoapps.com/page/blog/is-mtgo-getting-an-upgrade/a85edf6d-1bd3-433f-aa93-c089a0a23d0f

What is going on? Is this the ’90s?

The interface looks terrible. But visual issues are only the start.

Magic Online is full of bugs. Some cards don’t work the way they should. The game lags. As a new player, it is almost impossible to jump in and start playing. It feels like Magic Online is stuck with the paper game’s properties from 1993. They didn’t try to take advantage of what a digital medium has to offer, but tried to transliterate a complex paper game onto a computer. It didn’t work very well. Making digital copies can be really hard.

After 15 years trying to patch up this crummy attempt at a digital version of a paper game, Magic decided to start from scratch. They will be launching Magic Arena next year. It looks like this.

Source: http://www.manaleak.com/mtguk/2017/09/wizards-unveils-magic-arena-future-magic-digital-next/

It took 15 years to get a decent digital copy of a paper card game. Digital copies are difficult, but make new things possible. Now, instead of having to find someone in Provo to play with, I can play with people from around the world in only few seconds.

Which is good, because if someone saw me playing Magic, they might make fun of me.