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Instant Replay, Part II

It's been a busy year, and we're not even a week into it yet. My third week at a new job, along with editing AtJ and my other two jobs, plus familial obligations, have conspired to keep me too busy to pay attention to much.

So it's only now, as I sit down to write this column, that I've had a moment to notice that our esteemed Managing Editor is soon to be our erstwhile Managing Editor. Woah! I, of course, wish Ted the best of luck in his new position, and would like to be the first to welcome our new insect overlords.

But I digress.

This is, for those keeping score at home, the second part of my response to some questions raised in the forums. I'm going to skip most of the background and go straight to some abstract issues of judge quality and consistency. Part I can be found here.

The rules of Magic have come, by any measure, a long way since the inception of the DCI. Both the Comprehensive Rules and the various documents governing tournament policy are vastly more clear and (in my opinion) more fair than they were back then. However, it is true that there are still loopholes, gray areas, and rogue judges, enough to ensure that rules lawyers will have forum material for some time to come.

And frankly, I think that's fine.

There are several elements of Magic that compell us to accept a certain level of vagueness in our Penalty Guidelines and Universal Tournament Rules. Chief among them is the complexity of the game. The greatest asset that the game has is that it embraces complication. This is what allows us a game that is fundamentally different from Chess or Go—we are virtually always adding to the size of the game space (and thereby, it's complexity) and only rarely do we update the rules to make the game simpler (the sweeping rules changes of 6th Edition are the best example of that).

Secondly, the kinds of situations that people are concerned about here—where something is wrong with the game and a judge is trying to rectify the situation appropriately—exist in a certain class of tournament issues: those where the DCI tried taking a hard line and being less flexible, and found that approach to be unworkable. In the past, you could find players receiving match losses for minor clerical issues with their decklists. That's a policy that makes it easy to be consistent, but it's not nearly as fair as the current policy, which recognizes that people don't leave off the full name of their legends to try to gain an advantage. Similarly, the canonical approach to handling missed Braids, Cabal Minion—"your Braids, game loss; his Braids, warning"—failed to appreciate the complexity implicit in two people trying to negotiate a Magic game without the assistance of a Magic Online program enforcing the rules for them.

A policy as simplistic as "your incorrect action is your game loss" is too much a blunt object, and prevents most judges from productively applying their expertise. So is "correct all problems immediately and retroactively without penalty". These are clear policies that lead to unhappy results for everyone. While we may never achieve consensus on what exactly is fair, we owe it to our players, and to the game, to work towards a model that is understandable and reasonable. To avoid doing so for the sake of perfect clarity would be to sacrifice the soul of our events.

That's my explanation for why we'll never eliminate the tension of "how do we deal with this?" for every last situation. It's time to move on to "what does the DCI do to mitigate the ambiguous situations when they pop up?" I think it's entirely reasonable to ask why this isn't a problem.

In a nutshell: the DCI and the judges in the program are working hard to be consistent and fair, and to make sure that we are all in the same ballpark about where the vague lines are drawn. I'm pretty sure it's working.

The biggest and best thing the DCI does, beyond crafting the rules as carefully as they can, is to encourage judges to get together and talk about judging. It's a big part of the organization of the Pro Tour: bring in judges who will talk to other judges and carry the knowledge and data they pick up back to their local communities. It's the driving force behind the various mailing lists, which have Wizards-sponsored judges assisting in answering questions and driving discussions of situations exactly like these.

Hand in hand with this is the DCI's mission of promoting quality in the judge program by recognizing and encouraging the best judges. It does this through the judge level program, straightforward rewards (judge foils, trips to exotic cities to attend Pro Tours and Grand Prix, etc), and, often, things as simple as personal encouragement. The net result is that the people who are working at Pro Tours, and the people who are certifying new judges in your area, are those who care enough to put some serious effort into understanding the rules and conveying that understanding to other judges and players.

Some of you may feel that the DCI doesn't care about the quality of judges, and I will say flatly: you are mistaken. If you observe behavior that you feel to be out of line by a judge, I encourage you to let the DCI know about it via email: dci@wizards.com. I can assure you that these things are investigated and followed up on. Judges can be grilled both casually and formally; they can be asked to retest; and they can even be demoted, becaus there is no profit for any of us in allowing incompetant judges to keep working. Judges of all stripes (sorry, couldn't resist) are now required to demonstrate their ongoing competence or face demotion. This will probably result in some greater degree of turnover of judges, but it's really what's best for the game.

That's all been pretty abstract, I think. In the end, does the resolution of a situation at a PTQ depend on which judge is closest to the match? To a degree, yes. But that's true of every situation of any complexity. I'm a computer programmer in my day job, and how exactly a job gets done—even with detailed specs—will absolutely depend on which coder it ends up with, even if between two people of equivalent skill and background. Chris and I may emphasize different aspects of the decision-making in our writing, but we're both aware of the issues, and in the rare cases where you get an actual different answer out of us, I think you probably still got a fair shake either way.

I hope this hasn't come across as too defensive. It's an issue that a lot of judges are spending a lot of time thinking about. "Fairness" and "consistency" are naturally somewhat at odds, since we can't consistently agree about what "fairness" is. But by talking, and thinking, and being open-minded about it, dedicated judges can get pretty close.

Until next time, happy New Year.

-Seamus