The Nine Billion Names of Keyforge

Keyforge (2018) is a new card game by Richard Garfield (designer of Magic The Gathering, not so much a card game as a way of life…). It is a Collectible Card Game (CCG) and so seemingly one of those pits of time and money that can be this kind of game. What makes it different is that it is a unique game as each deck is just that, generated algorithmically. There are, the makers say, "104 quadrillion possible decks".So, rather than building decks with cards, what you have are different decks you play against each other. The decks have a different mix of three factions, drawn from Brobnar, Mars, Sanctum, Logos, Dis, and Shadows.

One of the other things is unique and algorithmically generated is the deck name. The result is a strange poetics. What Keyforge reveals is the autonomy of the signifier (what we usually think of as words), the material ‘bit’ of language, that shapes and generates meaning. These signifiers generate signified, ideas, out of the material manipulation of language. In line with the linguist Saussure, it is not that language reflects the world, rather the system of language, which is arbitrary, constitutes our world.

What Keyforge reveals is the strange material space of language that pre-exists us and even ‘speaks’ us. Here a procedural algorithm makes a certain kind of sense, beyond even human control. There have been problems...

The most notorious problem deck name is "Titanflayer, the Farmer of Racism" (so far)

Here is the statement by the manufacturers:

Archon names in KeyForge are procedurally generated by an algorithm that pulls from a list that includes tens of thousands of words. The result is that every Archon name (i.e. every deck name) generated by the algorithm is unique. Regrettably, some of the words that were included in the pool created the potential for defective Archon Decks with an unfortunate pairing of words.

We could just consider this an error, rapidly and responsibly dealt with by the company (which it is). We could also consider it the fault of humans, who did not sift or limit the signifiers used (why include "racism" at all, as many asked?)

The algorithms that generate the Keyforge names forge those names out of our signifiers. In doing so they reveal our unconscious. Especially if, as Jacques Lacan argued, the unconscious is structured like a language. Freud had revealed, in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, how slips of the tongue can reveal our desires and intentions. What an algorithmic ‘slip’ can reveal, which obviously seems to lack any intentions or desires, is. Ironically, our desires embedded in language.

What Keyforge reveals is the intersection between the seemingly neutral world of language and the "stuff" of enjoyment. The rise of the alt right, the resurgence (again) of active and explicit racism, seem to make a “Farmer of Racism” a figure of our moment – “racism” grown, or tended, or “organically” generated… Lacan said that racism would resurge as a result of spreading competition over enjoyment (jouissance – the French signifier has the radical sense of sexual enjoyment).

Too much? Just a card game? But the storm around the names, and the other "unfortunate" names are sexual (“General Bonerider Cult”), suggest something about our language and our enjoyment.

If that's not enough the mass scale of this experiment, even if not successful by CCG standards (it seems a lot of people hope Keyforge will fail), is a remarkable poetic experiment as well. We have witnessed the emergence of drone poetics and algorithmic poetics, but Keyforge is that as a kind of concrete "flash" poetry. It might not even be surprising that such a poetic experiment, like so many other modernist experiments, should court reactionary or politically dubious sentiments...