I have a good reference book titled “Swords and Circuitry” that hits on this at a few points. I quote here from the book:

“Ask yourself how important you want magic or technology to be in your world. Is it powerful or weak, rare or common? If it’s powerful and rare, then the people who wield it are likely to be feared or distrusted, or revered. Either way, it will most definitely affect their cultural and social standings. If it’s weak and common, then nobody is likely to treat it as anything special, and everybody will largely ignore its presence in the same way that we don’t think much about the miracles of telephones, television or the Internet. Establish for yourself how easy it is to access these tools of power, and be rigorous about applying that concept at every level of your world.”

From that, I take the common/rare and weak/powerful axes and think a little about how those might apply in common game design. The norm is powerful and common, by and large, so, as with anything common, it really becomes mundane. Part of the “magic” of magic is that it is unusual in our real life experience, and it’s a source of wonder and a little fear.

That’s what made the first couple of Harry Potter books so fantastic; they explored the wonder that Harry discovered when he started discovering magic. By the last two books, the series was little more than a teenage soap opera/coming of age story in a magical world that had long since become rather mundane. The sense of whimsy and discovery had been lost to the machinations of the storyline.

We see the same in the industry. Yes, magic should be magical, but it’s really just treated as another set of tools and/or weapons.

I would LOVE to see a game that really digs into the nature of magic, the implications of introducing it to a world, and letting players really dig into the research and manipulation and customization of magic. The Dragon Knight books by Gordon Dickson are part of another great series that explores the nature of magic, albeit in a very different way than the D&D mechanics that we have grown accustomed to. (Or the Final Fantasy/WoW version.) Even Tolkien had wondrous, elaborate magicks, far from merely bending special effects to further suit rather shallow game mechanics.

Psychochild has a good article up as well, digging into mana and alternate methods of altering the combat minigame and resource management in the same.

In some ways, playing pokemon feels way more like playing a mage than WoW does to me. Which is just weird.

I remember never really feeling happy about how magic-users and clerics fitted into the game. You don’t really imagine them as typical adventurers.

And it’d make a great MMO.

I guess part of the problem is that you leave casters with a different (and rather more expensive) minigame compared to melee classes?

Introduce players to the wonders of physics when they cast a fireball into a 10×10 foot room with their friends in front of them and they’ll soon learn. (Or down a dead-end corridor, etc etc. The possibilities for DM “hey, this is what would happen!” evil are endless.) Though in all fairness our group was awesome and we ended up playing Ars Magica, so I guess we had the crotchety studying magus thing down pretty well.

I suspect it comes down to the old “it’s not heroic” enough. Designers DO just assume everyone wants to hit things and/or carry a big gun because it’s what many of them want to do. It’s not about learning how to do magic (and spending the time to become so damned knowledgeable), it’s about loading up on fireballs and lightning bolts. The whole idea of the wizard as solitary keeper of lore (and as someone who has had to study his ass off to learn & manipulate all this freaky magic stuff) is vanishing, and it’s vanishing from fantasy literature too. Now it’s mostly about tapping into the “stream of magic” which is basically the wizardy version of having a big honkin’ gun.

Meh.

No other game has copied this, perhaps because people really just want to be point and click killers.

However it has been like this for a very long time. I began playing AD&D in 1978 and players were already using Wizards as a shotgun loaded with Fireball-calibre ammo even back then.