wizard bodies

I've been spending a lot of time around 12 year olds this week teaching at a
summer camp and between watching their devotion to Magic cards (collectable
card game like Pokemon where you pretend you're a wizard and the object is
to cast spells [cards] to destroy your opponent wizard/playmate) and my
younger brother's to sim city style war/strategy games (I think the big
one's called Divide and Conquer) I've been thinking some about the way kids
play-act "superpower" these days.

I grew up reconstructing myself as powerful individuals, using costumes,
swords, and first person video games to pretend. Today, more often I see
kids of the tween set getting their thrills from facilitating complicated
networks of interlocking elements (like card games) - juggling rules and
protocol savvy to wage out who is the finest administrator, not who can
yell, swing, zap, and so forth the wildest.

In a sense it's just another observation of collection/network mania -
beanie babies, friendster, pokemon - but I'm looking at the card phenomenon
and kids here specifically because I'm fascinated with how sedentary they
are while they pretend - there must be something visceral about playing
spell cards against each other that takes the place of running around in the
woods all day.

Watching them I got the picture in my head of a distributed body that is
articulated by the cards. In this situation, they act-out "superpower" not
by assuming the role of a super-hero who transgresses the limits of their
ordinary body; instead they become a posthuman force that surpasses bodily
limits by obliterating the original and distributing it throughout networked
satellites. And of course what I'm describing doesn't apply exclusively to
children, but culturally it's so natural and rampant I feel like it's this
imprinted impulse now.

Kevin