1. Introduction

A few basic ideas and the concept of a rational, complete science of magic

Imagine that you are living inside of a giant computer for a moment. Apparently there are a number of people who have trouble not doing so, with or without medication; pondering that they're inside of the Matrix or that the universe is really a giant Turing machine being administered by some poor immortal guy out of pebbles who reads xkcd.

But ignore the life-and-death questions for a moment. Suppose you were inside of a giant computer and knew how it worked. In fact, let's say you rewrote the firmware a little to your convenience because you built the damn thing, and you wanted an effective, reliable and unambiguous way to control it without technology. You might build in a verbal command system, like an old DOS program that takes input from a numbered menu.

Suppose for the sake of argument that you did, and didn't go some unreasonably convenient psionic route instead. You'd get fed up with the limitations of the commands you programmed in pretty quickly. So why would you settle for it? You wouldn't. You'd revise it, adding features and variable parts of your speech so you could say "make a glass of water for me" or "make ten glasses of water for me" without hard-coding each case. Before you knew it, feature creep would be so huge that you'd be sick of all of these specialised commands... and like so many software engineers before you, you'd throw your hands up in the air and write a complete scripting language. Like TCL or Bash, only with Blackjack and hookers.

This is the basis for a spoken magic system as it appears in the typical fantasy novel. Obviously extensions for a written version or two need to be added in order for things like runes and scrolls to work, but the basic engine needs only one expression method. The trick from there, then, is to apply principles of various programming facilities to different regions of the magic system. D&D's Divination might, for example, be all about calls to a massive database with its own specialised set of keywords. (The puns about Oracle are overwhelming at this point.) In order to be successful, though, it would require an amazingly powerful pattern recognition engine built into the universe; literally the ability to interpret material objects, emotions and concepts as something like Platonic universals.

Of course, this isn't the only aspect of magic that need be considered. For a system like a traditional game where one can have an artificially limiting trait that reflects skill, we can introduce ideas like mana economy: like a power grid (or like resource management in Total Annihilation) the caster's body and various artefacts produce a given amount of mana (perhaps of various types) per unit of time, and increasingly powerful functions in the magical language draw mana at similarly increasing rates; e.g. a spell to physically move an object through the air costing a certain amount (increasing linearly or otherwise) for a given distance.

All of this might make for a very interesting MMO mechanic, and it's something Catherine and I considered in our early plans for an Inkspill MMORPG, set in Thet. We ended up developing ISPC instead, but with my recent renewed interest in Footprints, something may happen with this after all! As the current plans are to implement this system as an extension to Lilitic, it seems sensible enough.

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