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Jan. 17, 2025 - Davis Aurini
06:29
Magic, Mana Crystals, and Fiat Currency

I reflect upon an old game from the nineties, and what it says about the nature of magic and money.

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So I'd like to tell you about a game series that really captured my imagination as a young man.
One of the old DOS video games that you have to run through DOSBox these days.
It was a game called Masters of Magic.
And it was a forex game.
Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.
You're thinking Sidmeier Civilization, but in an Air Sotz post-apocalypse 1400 world with Dungeons and Dragons magic.
The game was fantastic for how incredibly unbalanced it was.
You had flying units that you couldn't do anything about if you were a ground unit.
You had units that were immune to magic, others that had other vulnerabilities.
The big game of rock, paper, scissors.
But the thing that always struck me about the game was the three types of resources that you had.
You had food, which would run out every turn.
You had to constantly be producing food to feed your armies.
You had gold, which was, you negotiated for it, you found it in layers, but mainly you got it through taxation.
then you had man now man is this is an interesting thing So there's two basic ways that you get it.
Either you capture a elemental node on the world and you bond with it and you're getting a whole ton of mana from that every turn.
Or you get it from religious buildings.
If you manage to build a cathedral in one of your towns, you're getting a ton of mana from the worship happening there.
There's a third way.
And this is the one that always struck me as odd.
Sometimes you'd raid a dungeon and you'd find mana crystals inside of it.
And in fact, if you had any mana left over at the end of your turn that you didn't use, it didn't rot like the food, but you saved it in your vault next to the gold in the form of mana crystals.
Which really just makes you wonder, what the heck is a mana crystal?
And what's even weirder is that you had alchemy in the game, and alchemy was just the ability to transfer gold into mana crystals and mana crystals into gold at a two to one ratio.
So you're always losing whichever way you go.
But if you run out of gold, you can turn some magic into gold.
You run out of magic, you can turn some gold into magic.
It always struck me as so bizarre that there's this consistent exchange rate between magic and gold.
But you know, this begs the question, what is gold?
What is money?
There's going to be an exchange rate between a mana crystal and an ounce of gold.
Well, what's the gold good for?
What is money good for?
If you're going to give a definition of what money is, it's The abstract concept of useful human labor distilled into a physical form that you can hold.
So if you think about it, the idea of like what is useful human labor?
Obviously, digging a trench all day and then filling it back up tomorrow, that's not useful labor.
Useful labor only exists in a context.
A bottle of water is really useful to you if you're in the Sahara.
It's not so useful to you if you work in a water treatment plant.
It's entirely context dependent upon the location, the skills necessary, the demand for it.
Like there's really no such thing as useful human labor as an abstract.
There's just useful human labor in the particular.
And yet we managed to turn it into a gold coin.
And so maybe that concept of mana crystals, what is mana?
What is faith?
Because faith can absolutely move mountains.
And to people that have no faith, they can't even do commerce without somebody clipping the coins.
So in that sense, I suppose, distilling religiosity, belief, high trust societies, distilling that into some sort of mana crystal isn't really any more absurd than distilling useful human labor into a gold coin.
But where this gets really interesting, if you want to talk about actual magic, imagine not just being able to trade and negotiate in tokens of useful human labor.
Imagine being able to manufacture those tokens.
How would you feel having that ability?
You'd probably think yourself a god.
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