thevriscourse:

Facebook dreams of capturing all that is social (which is to say everything), and while Artifact has a different target in mind, the underlying principle of enclosing more is the same. Artifact does to Magic what Facebook did to friendships because capturing metagames is not, in the end, all that different from capturing the social. Dr. Garfield was right that “games without metagames … don’t really exist.” Yet where he saw metagames as the essence of what made games matter, Valve saw an opportunity to turn Magic’s metagames—its proxy cards, its aftermarkets—into markets of its own, a transmutation only Steam was equipped to do.