Storytelling blogger Corvus at Man Bytes Blog is devoting his time this week to looking at the potential for story in collectible card games. They’re not the medium you’d usually turn to for a good yarn, but, as Corvus points out, a dedicated player can construct a narrative from a good game of Magic: The Gathering.

Corvus’ post yesterday raised the issue. “While CCGs ought to be an ideal storytelling medium, utilizing strictly gameplay mechanics to convey story, they aren’t presented or structured in such a way as to generally encourage this type of use,” he concludes.

“Perhaps it’s the need to invest a large amount of personal resources, both financially in acquiring cards and mentally in memorizing card-specific rules, that overrides their ability to transport the players to another storyworld without the added benefit of animated series and digital versions that take place within a virtual landscape,” Corvus added.

Magic, says Corvus, offered a traditionally hardcore game of rules and stats for a niche of gamers put off by a trend in roleplaying games towards character development and story. “Magic contained all the flavor of AD&D and none of the pesky plotline nonsense that was suddenly infecting the RPG world,” he adds.

Corvus’ second post looks at why card games like Magic don’t work as storytelling mediums. And his conclusion?

While any set of game mechanics can be treated as a narrative, there’s a tipping point at which the mechanics are so vast that the audience receives very limited returns for their application of narrative consistency. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a thing. Clearly, Magic has proven itself to be a phenomenon with strong cultural appeal and it has outlasted many of the pretenders to its throne. I cannot even fathom the Herculean task of maintaining game balance within such a vast system for 15 years.

Corvus offers an interesting perspective on an interactive medium that does not work for telling a story. I’ve never been into collectible card games, for the same reasons as Corvus. It seems that were they to become simpler and with more room for creativity outside of the rules, in the manner of roleplaying games like D&D, card games offer narratives just as valid.