What is magic?

The way I see it, magic is no different than any other physical law, but one which is both not fully understood (usually) and requires a life form to make use of, and thus cannot be effectively used by technology (since non-living material cannot make use of it).

For example, midichlorians in Star Wars which enable use of the force. They exist only in living material, and it is not fully understood how it works (which is shown by the lack of technology emulating use of the force).

This basic equation of requiring a life form and not being fully understood is what defines magic in probably 95% of modern fiction.

However, if you look back in human history, the definition of magic would not nescesarily include needing a life form, since any unexplainable event was often thought of as magical (or a work of the gods, which is essentially the same thing).

Edit: Then again, now that I think about it, the 'requiring a life form' prerequisite found in modern fiction stems from the first part, as life is not fully understood yet, and thus makes for a good conveyor of a force which is also not understood fully.

So I would change my definition to a somewhat unknown law of nature which is channeled (conveyed?) through some sort of object which is not fully understood. This definition expands it to the stories about magic from black holes and other such phenomena which are non-living and yet not fully understood, rather than confining it to living creatures. In short, magic IS the unknown.

As far as your other questions... My definition makes them to general. It essentially changes them to: If you were in a universe with different laws of physics, what would you do?

IMO it ceases to be 'magic' when it is fully explained, and it is nothing more than another law of physics.

Edit: And now that I think about that, for it to permanently be magic rather than becoming just another law of physics, magic must be unpredictable and sporatic, and be completely unable to be defined; keeping it permanently an unknown, at least in part.

Well, in literature one of the answers is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Clarke's 3rd law)

Which, over the years, brought on things like: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indisinguishable from technology.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Mostly magic is just stuff that operates outside of our current understanding of nature and physics, or appears to (i.e. stage magic).

Frankly I think that that definition of magic is the result of the abuse of Arther C. Clarke's 3rd law, because there is an inherent question of perspective in it. Sufficiently advanced technology may appear to be magic to us, but it certainly wouldn't be magical to the people who created the technology. Therefore it is not magic.

The way I usually think of magic is being any force or power that is inherently inexplicable by the laws of physics of the world alone. Although I guess that brings about the question of what defines the laws of physics of a world, and I have no good answer to that.

Magic is anything that you cannot explain/understand. See also: Conspiracy.

In games and fiction, magic is whatever the author or lead dev says it is. And sometimes it's a slippery thing like the One Power in the Wheel of Time series--no one with training ever calls it magic in the books, but the Aes Sedai do get called witches.

In 'the real world,' magic is typically a stage name for skill with illusions and/or sleight of hand, or an aspect of a religious system such as Wicca or Haitian Vodou.

As Wintersong said, magic is a system of technology that can not be explained and or understood. If you completetly understand how magic works, the mystique is gone and it becomes just another form of mundane technology.

Beg pardon, but isn't that a contradiction in terms? The Greek roots of the word technology roughly translate as "craft saying." A technology is a way of doing things (often, but not always involving physical tools) that you can explain to others so that they can do those things also.

If I could snap my fingers and produce a fireball, I could probably teach you how to snap your fingers so you could make fireballs as well. The thing is, neither of us know how it works or why. If a third person were to come in and say "oh yeah thats magic, you are pulling in energy from the Ether" well what the hell does that mean? It would still be magic to us.

This "magic" works in a predictable fashion, and because of that you can teach someone else to use it. But what keeps it from being technology is that no one knows how it works. Even if one person understood the process in detail, it would only be technology to HIM, to everyone else it would still be magic.

Just imagine what cavemen would think if you gave them a box of matches.

Bah, the whole "magic is just a matter of perspective" thing is crap. That something is only magic until you understand it, and at that point it's technology - that's just silly. If that's how most authors used magic then I wouldn't be the fan of fantasy that I am.

I mean, if you think about it we don't completely understand technology either. It's impossible to completely understand it without perfectly understanding the physical rules of the universe - which is probably physically impossible for any intelligence within the universe to achieve.

If I can snap my fingers and produce a fireball, and can teach another person to do the same, then I obviously have some understanding of how it works. I might not understand all the mechanisms and rules behind it, but I have an idea. It's the same thing with technology. I personally could teach you how to calculate the probability of an electron to tunnel through a potential barrier because I understand that - but I don't have a clue where or what the unaccounted 70% of our universe's energy ('Dark Energy') is.

The stereotypical wizard is someone who spends enormous amounts of time pouring over magical books and figuring out how to do new things. If magic were inherently incomprehensible then all magicians in said world would just be people bumbling into magical feats. Without having a clue how their magic works they wouldn't ever be able to reproduce a single magical feat. Even the understanding that "Oh, when I move my hands thus, I make a fireball" is understanding. It's not very deep, but you have to start somewhere.

That said, it is kind of silly to argue about something completely fictional (as far as we know :P). It's just that that take on magic seems like it would lead to some pretty boring fantasy. And it's extraordinarily simplistic and the result is technically just a science fiction book where none of the science is understood.

What they think and what it is are two different things. What if I showed you a perfect hologram of pink elephant walking through a forest, and didn't tell you what it was. You would think it's a live pink elephant, but really it's just a hologram. Just because you think it's a live pink elephant doesn't mean it is one.

he probebly wouldn't think much of them at all, since he wouldn't bother to try to strike them on the funny side of the box.

Followed by him clubbing you on the head for trying to steal his mate, or so he thought.

The point is, the major difference between technology and magic is that magic cannot be fully understood, otherwise it just becomes technology. Sure, you may be able to use it, but you don't know the underlieing principles which cause the magic to exist or be able to be used. If you do figure out how exactly it works, you can bet that it will be emulated. And by that I mean it will be used as technology in a machine or other device, and thus it will BE technology.

Therefore, I stand by my reasoning that for something to truely be permanently considered magic, it must be at least partially unexplainable in a way which cannot ever be resolved by our human understanding. If it can be fully understood in all its workings, then it will eventually fall under the catagory of technology rather than magic.

Its also relative to who is trying to understand it. What is technology to us can be magic to someone else.

Too much explanation spoils the magic.

I think being ineffable is probably the crucial point of magic. It should work as Luther's description of reason being the greatest enemy that faith has. Trying too hard to understand or investigate magic in an intellectual sense should make it irreproducable, perhaps because it's linked to a particular state of mind. That is, if you understand thoroughly what to do in a situation, through experience and prior planning, you can slip into 'the zone' or 'empty mind'. With magic, it will only ever work if you are in that state, and the work you do to get there must not be explained rationally in plain language, but rather described in evocative metaphors that don't actually need to tell you anything.

That, I think, is the best way to do magic in a story.

In a closed setting you also have to be careful to give your magic a cost. If you don't then magic is essentially free. People would have nothing to stop them from solving every problem with magic. Conversly you have no good reason to stop them from using magic when it would do a lot of good.

That assumes it is very broad magic. Books like Harry Potter have this sort of magic with a huge range of effects, probably infinite range of effect, but there are many fictions which have much more limited magic, more of situational use type stuff. For example, in Lord of the Rings Gandalf is able to use some magical abilities (such as driving away the Nazgul on the Pelenor) but that doesn't mean he is able to conjure himself up a cookie every five minutes. The biggest problem I see with the broad, far reaching magical effects is in order to create a good story, one must come up with all sorts of out of place rules and regulations for magic which are often completely arbitrary.

alway brings me back to my main point for magic in Elemental: it is what the devs say it is, and thematically it is nearly infinite in story potential when compared with 'mere technology,' at least until the story begins to include some metaphysical 'laws.'

If you want to talk in psuedo-physics terms, magic is power, otherwise known as the ability to do work. Game metaphysics will define the source(s) of this power, the entities and objects that can store and/or channel this power, and the types of work that the power can accomplish. None of that absolutely requires quantitative treatment at the UI level (obviously the engine will use math), except that because this is a 4/5X game, there will probably be an uproar if we don't see mana metered out like gasoline or electricity.

And depending on who you ask, magic is everything.

If somebody out there decided to write a 'magic fantasy' book on the premise that everything is magic, simply because there is somebody out there who doesn't understand it... Fantasy doesn't require magic, but if you're going to call something magic it damn well be for a better reason than "some people don't understand it, therefore it's sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic to those people, and therefore it is in fact magic." It's a terrible idea, which is probably the reason why nobody has done it.

But Luckmann is right. Magic is whatever the creative mind behind the story wants it to be; it can run the gammut from nothing to everything. Just in my opinion the latter is just a silly and meaningless relabeling of what normal people would call technology.

So is the One Ring (and other rings of power) magic or technology? What about magic swords and armour and all sorts of items scattered all throughout the fantasy genre? If you want my opinion, I'd call them a combination of magic and technology (unless of course the item or device were created solely by magic - in which case it's just magic). I'd say the rings of power are examples of such a combination - Sauron crafted them using a combinatino of magic and 'technology.'

Just because magic can be understood doesn't mean it must necessarily be harnessable by technology. I could easily invent a system of magic in which no mundane (non-magical) device can ever directly use magic. But I could power a device using magic - but that needn't make magic technology. If you disagree with me on this point, then if you ever read a book where a bridge or other structure is kept intact via magic, then you had better think to yourself 'Hey, magic is technology! It's being used to strengthen that bridge!"

The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from that statement is the following: magic and technology are tautological. In the real world. We don't understand anything about this world we live in "fully in all its workings." In fact I'd argue all we have are lots of crude approximations, and all we will ever be able to do is make them less crudel and no matter how much we refine them, they will always be crude. Although, to complicate things, you also stated that things we consider technology aren't really technology. We build computers, but we don't fully understand the quantum mechanics that makes them work - so really, computers are magic? Everything humanity has ever accomplished is really magic, then, because we don't understand any of it fully.

Its interesting to see where this question led.

My original intent was that people would post magic systems based on how they viewed magic working in the world, or their own world.  Instead what happened was a more philosophical debate about what the real defination of magic is. I considered trying to redirect it but decided this was too interesting to interrupt.

Anywho, its been a very fun read thus far.

Ooooh. Well in that case... Let me fire up the burners and see what I can come up with by tommorow.

Also Pigeon, what I mean by "magic is everything" is that magic can be anything and everything depending on who you ask, much like art in general.

That is not what I meant. Those are examples of technology imbued with a magical effect; entirely different than being able to utilize magic in the way I meant. How I meant it is technology is unable to cast magic, and while it can be imbued with a magical effect, that effect cast on it cannot be cast by other technology. Casting a fireball is no different than imbueing certain properties into a sword. The only difference is the material it is being cast upon... Casting a fireball is just imbueing air with a large amount of heat. No matter how good an item is, it cannot cast any spells.

Yes, anything we do not understand could be considered magic. The only reason it is not thought of as magic is we have left the medeval peasant view of the world and entered into a thought process created in the Enlightenment period. We now think more rationally about the world, and use reason to see through the veil of the unknown, and guess that what is hiding behind it is predictable and can be accurately modeled, even if it takes another 200 years to figure it out. With our knowledge that nature can be broken down, described, predicted, and modeled, we then make the conclusion that any property which is unknown will eventually become known to us, or at least future generations of us. Thus we no longer see the unknown as 'magic' but as the unknown, which we then strive to turn into the known. For it to be understood as magic, it must be widely understood that it cannot be described, predicted, or modeled.

This was my first response to the OP. But given the follow-up in reply 20, I'll offer up the WoT One Power schema as a fictional example I think about lots now that these boards are active. Basic 'system' traits include:

• The ability to wield the Power is inborn (only a small part of the population can channel, not everyone can learn 'magic')
• Every channeler has a personal limit to the amount of power they can wield, and pushing that limit risks burnout
• Natural skill counts for something, but training can dramatically improve channeler effectiveness
• Channelers have inborn affinities for the different elemental aspects, e.g. some channel Fire more easily than Earth
• Different tasks require different strength and skill with elemental aspects, e.g. creating cuendillar (sort of WoT adamantine) requires strength in Earth
• Some channelers can make objects that increase any channeler's 'throughput' capacity (angreal, sa'angreal)
• Some channelers can make objects (ter'angreal) that use the Power to do things (e.g. establish audio communications over a long distance), sometimes with no need for the user to be a channeler

I have know people who through innate ability and extensive study/practice have been able to do things like charm difficult people, understand other people's motivations (thus predicing their actions) and use their subconscious to find objects they lost.  I cannot do these things nor can I fully understand how they do them.  Are they doing magic?  If so, does that mean that there is 'magic' in the real world?

Some people charm cats and horses.  Some people predict the weather.  Some inspire others to follow them.  These are not 'casting fireballs' but if we limit our definition of magic to our pre-concieved notions, might we be missing what really goes on?

I'll use the example of the One Ring again. Sauron didn't just make a ring and cast a spell on it. Magic (although in Tolkien's world 'lore' would probably be a more appropriate word) was an integral part of the creation process. And the result of it all was a ring with a will of its own. It intentionally affected the people around it in very specific ways. It intentionally changed its own weight and size to achieve its own purposes. That sounds to me like a device capable of casting its own magic. So therefore, magic in the Tolkien universe is technology? (Tolkien himself would be very unhappy with that considering his association of technology with evil, specifically Sarumanm, in LoTR).

Regardless, even in a system where magic can be well-understood, there is nothing preventing that system to have rules that prevent mundane technology from casting magic on its own. We have complete freedom when defining systems of magic; if two people agree that if technology can cast magic it's not really magic, then you created a fictional science instead.

And my whole point is that what we think and what really is can and usually are two very different things. We can think something is magic when its really just really cool technology; therefore it's really not magic. Iff I woke up tomorrow with the ability to shoot fireballs from my fingers, teleport, conjur up objects from nothing and scry distant locations all just with my mind, I would be inclined to think it's magic. That said, if some scientist came up to me and then showed me convincing evidence that nanobots were implanted into me during my sleep and that they are responsible for my newfound abilities, then the conclusion would be that those abilities aren't magic, and never were magic, despite what I may have believed.

But most scientists agree that we will never have a perfect understanding of anything in the world. It's not unreasonable to assume that we will come ever closer to understanding everything, but not even the fastest increasing functions can reach infinity in a finite number of steps. We can describe, predict and model the rules of the world, but we might never be exactly right (and there is no way of ever knowing if we are exactly right, anyway). So then technology is magic. Plain and simple.

If something is only magic if it cannot be described, predicted, or modeled, then it's just a completely random, chaotic force (even that is a bad description, because chaos can be described, predicted and modeled, too). Nobody could effectively use magic because they'd never have a clue what they're about to do with it, of if they'll even manage to do anything at all. Wizards of fiction are obviously capable of describing and predicting the effects of magic and magic use. If they weren't, then they wouldn't be capable of doing the things that grant them the title 'wizard.' You can't intentionally shoot a ball of fire from your hand without being able to predict that your actions will result in a fireball. And you could never teach someone else to shoot a fireball from their hand if you can't describe how to do it.

I still think that the 'magic' should be left for a system inherently separate from or greater than physical laws. It doesn't mean that magic can't be understood or studied, it just means that it's fundamentally different than the mundane laws of the universe.