I am a fantasy nerd. I love it. I read it. I write it. I play it.

Therefore, I don’t think much about why I love it – there’s no reason to, I just do. It’s like loving puppies. Nobody thinks about why puppies might be so appealing to the general masses. They just are. (There are biological and behavioral reasons for it, but that’s beside the point.) So when one of my friends asks me, “What’s so great about fantasy? About magic?” I’m not quite sure where to start.

Why would magic appeal to people in books and video games? There are so many ways I can go with this, but I think I’ll stick with what I know: why it makes me happy. Maybe it will give me some insight. Into what, I’m not entirely sure.

I think the biggest reason for my love of magic is close to everyone else’s, at least on the surface: it allows you to do anything. Does your laundry need doing? Magic it clean! Does that annoying neighbor bang on the walls at night? Get some peace and quiet (one way or the other), conflict-free, with magic! You want to be able to fly, or build castles in six hours, or cure cancer? Magic is your route.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. In every fantasy world, there are rules for magic. There are tests or years of study needed to become a magic-user. There are rules that that magic-user needs to follow. In fantasy novels, there is usually some kind of magic school that the magic-users have gone to or need to go to, and they are long-term deals, rather like real-world school. Harry Potter has Hogwarts, in which any witch or wizard must spend seven years of their lives – and if they want to go on to the better jobs, they have to go through an extra three or four years of schooling after leaving Hogwarts, which is rather like graduate school. Earthsea boys aspiring to be wizards don’t necessarily have to go to Roke, but if they want to be respected and gain “superior knowledge” in magic, they do seem to end up there, where they often spend several years learning as much as they can. The Discworld series’ Unseen University is the only place on the Unnamed Continent where men can learn to be wizards (the witches have inherent magic, and learn from one another), and they spend a lot of time not doing much, because it’s apparently very difficult to conduct magic in any case, even on a world as magically charged as Discworld. In worlds where there aren’t magic schools, apprenticeship is the route to magical learning. In Howl’s Moving Castle, it is established that, with no existing formal school, master magic-users take apprentices: Michael is Howl’s apprentice, Howl was Mrs. Pentstemmon’s before he gained mastery. Schmendrick, the aptly-named wizard from The Last Unicorn, had a master named Nikos. There are a lot of hoops to be jumped through to gain magic in fantasy fiction: it doesn’t just happen, a character doesn’t just have it.

It’s not actually a quick-and-easy fix, either. Each world also has rules for what magic can and cannot do. In Earthsea, Harry Potter, and other books and series, wizards can’t bring the dead back to life, for example. (That seems to be the general consensus in most fiction.) In Earthsea, wizards cannot steal each other’s true names or wrench them out of someone else by force. Most spells, in any world, require some sort of return: maybe in energy, or time spent learning the spell.

(Lord of the Rings does not factor into any of this. Tolkien is very specific on what magic is in his world: who has it – i.e. Elves and Wizards, who are demigods anyway – and how it is inherent in their people, and how they cannot teach Men and Dwarves and Hobbits what is not inherent to them.)

So then why would magic appeal regardless, if it’s not as easy to gain or use as we thought? I think it has something to do with those exact qualities and how they pertain to storytelling. I will try to better explain myself in a few brief points.

1. If it’s hard to gain, then the characters who gain magic have earned it. They deserve to be able to use magic, if they took that time and went through the trouble to do it. It’s also part of why we like proactive people in our society – when they want something, they go out and do what it takes to get it. They are people we admire, just we admire magic-users for bothering to gain something that we’d all like to have.
2. If it has rules governing it, it’s a bit easier for us to grasp. We understand the world as having basic rules to it: rules of gravity, of physics, of the sun rising in the east instead of the south. If magic, a force that we can never understand, has some rules, we can get some sense of it within a story.
3. If it has rules governing it, it’s more convincing as a storytelling device. I don’t know about anyone else, but I really hate deus-ex-machina characters. They’re generally magic-users, and they make the climax of the story very, very boring. Their job is to appear on the scene at the last minute and just magically make everything okay. That always strikes me as lazy on the part of the author – that they use a character as a cop-out instead of taking the time to think it through and make up something more exciting. (Rachel, Gandalf does not do this. He does appear on the scene, occasionally magically, but he does not make everything better. For example, he loses against the Witch-King as Gandalf the White, so even uncloaked then, he has limits.) Having limits on magic in general allows the other, non-magic characters to do things, too, which in my experience makes the story more engaging.

Furthermore, in novels, magic can’t do anything you want it to because you, the reader, are not the author and therefore have no say in what can and cannot happen. Because it’s not you making up the magic, you have no control over it. The reader is just along for the ride.

By contrast, one would think that fantasy video games allow for that control, but that’s not the case there either. Generally the player is given set characters, some of whom can use magic while others can’t. The player cannot chose who is given those abilities and who isn’t. The player also cannot control what type of magic – and there are always “types” of magic – each magic-user is. When I play Final Fantasy X, I get two magic-users: one for “white magic” and one for “black magic.” White magic is for healing your party, black magic is for hurting opponents: a complete separation of the character’s skills. In Fire Emblem, I can have four types of magic users, should I choose to actually use them: healing magic; anima (which is given names recalling nature: the spells allowed to this magic-user are called “Thunder”, “Fire” and “Blizzard”); dark magic (which is very powerful but apparently eats the user’s soul); and light magic, which is different from healing magic in that it is used to damage opponents instead of healing your party, as the name might otherwise suggest.

I like the choices available to me with the different magic types, but I’m also aware of the limits of choice there: I can’t, say, make one of my magic-users use a spell that makes all of my opponents do the Chicken Dance. I can use Fire on them, though, because that is within my magic-user’s skill-set, which is determined by the programmer.

In the end, magic within games and novels does not allow for the free choice it seems to offer at first. Everything that is presented to the reader or player is what is available to them: in other words, what you see is what you get. Within those confines, however, I find I still enjoy both fantasy games and novels for what they can offer me. Besides, if I really want to have a magic-user be able to manipulate their own bones and use them as weapons, I can go write that myself. And I have.