Cody A. Peters

lbst 330 final

LBST 390, Tutorial N0. 1: The Culture of Magic: The Gathering
By Cody Peters.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Gillian Crowther, Department of Anthropology.
For this tutorial project between myself and Dr. Crowther, the learning outcomes were fairly straightforward. We set out with the intention of me conducting independent research and compiling it into a coherent research brief in which I would discuss the research findings and explain their significance. As seen throughout the course of the tutorial, I believe I have done an adequate job of assessing information, conducting one on one interviews, and then compiling the information gained from these interviews, coupled with my own personal knowledge on the subject area, into a coherent and interesting research brief on the culture surrounding Magic: The Gathering in the Greater Vancouver area.
As for unanticipated learning outcomes, the most surprising aspect of going through with this project was discovering the wealth of different levels and layers that are related to Magic: The Gathering culture, and how diverse and stratified the culture truly is. Talking over the different details and intricacies with Dr. Crowther truly brought to light the potential for further research projects and even my personal graduate project to be based around the Magic: The Gathering culture in Vancouver.
The research methods utilized in this tutorial, namely one on one interviews and ethnographic studies, were very sustainable As the project centered around the culture of the games players and their personal understanding and participation in this culture, participant-observational ethnographic research worked quite well in obtaining an understanding on the different cultural aspects of the game, as well as the different emphasis placed on each aspect by individuals.
As mentioned earlier, I had previously not planned on doing interconnected tutorials or graduate projects, but as Dr. Crowther and myself went through this project, we realized the immense amount of information and stratified levels of culture that can be seen throughout Magic: The Gathering. As such, it has given rise to several different project ideas centered around the game and its culture, and as such I am basing my next two tutorials around different aspects that I have realized have a much greater depth of detail than I had previously thought.
As such, I am planning to utilize the different aspect that I am studying throughout all of my tutorials to generate a more in-depth, and holistic understanding and highlighting of the culture of Magic: The Gathering as a graduate project. I am unsure of what direction I plan to take with this information, but I am quite certain that my graduate project will center around my tutorials.

As more of a writer, not an illustrator, I really prefer to utilize the digital medium. While I can write quite quickly and efficiently with pen and paper, my handwriting is not the clearest. I do feel as though I miss some of the level of creativity that I feel is inherent to writing with pen and paper though. There feels like there is some level of inherent personality that comes with writing on paper that comes across as lacking when writing on a word document. I think the same thing goes for drawing or painting; there is the very real risk of “messing up” what you are working on in a non-digital medium, and that adds personality. Every single one of the pen strokes or paint drips is original, irreplaceable, and unique. Meanwhile, in a digital medium, one always has the ability to “undo” whatever “mistakes” they may have made during their creative process, and I feel like that robs a little bit of the artistic integrity of the piece. That is not to say that digital art or writing do not have artistic integrity, but it feels like hand-made art has that extra level of authenticity that cannot be re-created in a digital realm. Even for writing, there is constantly a spell-checker going in the background, you have the ability to look up synonyms or alternative ways of wording a phrase, but with pen and paper you have to do that yourself; there is a level of accountability and originality inherent to pen and paper that just isn’t there in a word document. You know for certain that it was the author that wrote that sentence if it is in ink, but if it appears on a blog post or a twitter feed, there is always that chance that it is not from them, that it was copied and pasted from someone else, or simply not written by them. That is not to say that there isn’t the chance of plagiarism in a physical media, but it is so much easier and so hard to tell the difference in an online or digital medium. I think it is the combination of risk and accountability, as well as originality that makes me inherently drawn to hand-made art over digital art; which is somewhat hypocritical of me since I personally prefer the “lazy” method of writing on a computer over doing it by hand. I think that is why I do not truly consider myself an artist; I do not have that same level of commitment.