We're Nerds, Let's Play Magic: A team building activity for scientists

by James Keegans

Scientists come from all backgrounds. Scientists are diverse, and much effort has been made in recent years to dispel the myth that science is done exclusively by old white men in old white lab coats. I believe there may be one stereotype with a grain of truth, however:

Every scientist, deep down, is a nerd.

How do we know this? Well, take the SLURM Workload manager for example - anyone involved in high performance computing will be familiar with this. You're probably also aware that it's a direct reference to the Slurm soda from Futurama [1] - one of the finest comedies ever written. The scientific literature, in all disciplines, is littered with references to comic books, the Lord of the Rings, the X-Files and more [2]. We're nerds, and we want people to know it.

I think that is to be celebrated. There's a certain mindset that you have to have to do science. Precision and focus to ensure that the results you show and the experiments you do are robust. Attention to detail. A considered approach to problem solving. I suspect that's the same reason that so many of my friends and colleagues in astronomy, and STEM more generally, enjoy board games, pub quizzes, and role-playing games.

And Magic. ​

Physicists love Magic. 

Some physicists love Magic so much they reference it in their plenary talk titles [3]. My head of department once said to me that Magic: the Gathering is a game for lawyers - with rules so complex they fill a 300 page document. But I think a game like that is not just for lawyers, it's for us nerds too, and it's a great way to get to know people and to throw off the stresses of a researcher's life, for an evening at least.

'I had Zenegos out, stole a scute swarm and made 3 land drops'
'Oh nice, so obviously you stomped them?'
'No, one of the other guys had a Phyrexian Rebirth and populated the token. We all got murdered by 39/39 horrors.’

This is a mildly paraphrased conversation I recently had with my head of department, where he told me of the ups and downs of our university's board games evening. He and I, along with a few other colleagues, have a nearly-weekly Commander night - nearly because the stresses and strains of academic life do mean we miss around as many as we hold. But for a few hours a week (most weeks), we have the opportunity to relax, discuss work if we want to, and mostly just have a fun time with a pile of expensive cardboard. It turns out that the kind of exacting mind that enjoys designing code, analysing data and synthesising literature also enjoys playing one of the few games in the world that can claim to be Turing complete [4] - you can build a computer with a Magic deck, although it may take some time to run a simulation on it. 

While I personally feel some measure of an ethical quandary consuming product from Wizards of the Coast presently - with swingeing layoffs [5] and $1000 proxies [6] - it is undeniable that the game is incredible. I have introduced it to colleagues, all of whom have loved it. I have played it with astrophysicists from across Europe. It is almost universal in its appeal - and it is because we are all nerds. We enjoy creative endeavours, - science is a creative process - and designing a deck from the ground up can be as creative and personal as any other hobby. We also enjoy taking the time to get to know each other, to discuss our problems at work or with our research and to solve puzzles together - be that in a game of Magic or any other boardgame. It is the intersection of intellectual stimulation, and mindless fun, that I think appeals so much to the nerd in me.

Team building is a vital part of academic life. We spend so much time with our colleagues, and long hours are the norm for many of us. As a community, we probably need to address that at some point - burnout is a real concern for many. But while the long hours stay, and hopefully after they are gone, we need ways to socialise and communicate with the people who we spend a large part of our lives with. Magic is just one of many ways to do this - and it's an incredibly fun way that appeals to a scientific mind. If you haven't yet, ask around your department and see if there are board game nights, or a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and if there aren't why not propose one? We're all nerds; let's embrace it.


References
[1] Jette, M.; Grondona, M. (June 2003). "SLURM: Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management" (PDF). Proceedings of ClusterWorld Conference and Expo. San Jose, California.
[2] Chandrasekaran, Arun Richard. "Pop-culture references in peer-reviewed scientific articles." Matter 4.3 (2021): 759-760.
[3] https://indico.ihep.ac.cn/event/11934/contributions/14661/ 
[4] Yin, Howe Choong, and Alex Churchill. "A Programming Language Embedded in Magic: The Gathering." 12th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2024). Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2024.
[5] "Hasbro's 1,100 layoffs have hit D&D and Magic: The Gathering hard, as a growing list of staff announce their departures"
[6] "Magic’s $1000 30th Anniversary set evoked nostalgia, but for whom?"