The Limits of Visual Magic: Part Three

Before I continue in this series, I should probably make clear a differentiation that might not be obvious.

In this series of posts, I’m thinking about tricks where the magic happens visibly. A card that changes into another card with no cover is an example of that.

But there are many effects that register with an audience through their eyes that I’m not counting as “visual magic.” For example, if I take a bottle and put it in a paper bag and then scrunch up the paper bag, the audience is seeing that magic take place. But they’re not seeing the magic moment itself happening visually. They’re not literally seeing the bottle dematerialize. They saw a bottle placed in a bag. Then they saw the bag get crunched up. The magic happened somewhere between those moments. Just like some of the test groups saw the face of the card, then the face was turned away from them, and it was a different card when it was turned around. That’s magic that they perceive with their eyes (as opposed to, like, mentalism or something) but it’s not what I mean when I talk about “visual magic.”

That’s probably clear, but I just wanted to get that distinction on the record.

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In the last post, I wrote about testing a visual card change. When we re-tested the visual card change and allowed it to be examinable at the end, the scores for how “impossible/amazing” the trick was increased significantly. But the score for their enjoyment of the trick didn’t go up that much.

In previous testing that we did on examinability, when the “impossibility” score went up, the “enjoyment” score went up similarly.

[You can’t really compare the raw numbers between these two tests because they happened five years apart and we had different instructions and a different scale that people were rating on back then. But you can make assumptions based on the percentage changes in the scores.]

In that testing, we performed a color-changing deck routine, a coin routine (where three copper changed into three silver (or vice-versa—who knows, who cares)), and a Rubik’s cube effect where a cube instantaneously solved itself.

In that old post, I wrote:

While I had assumed being able to take a look at the object of a magic effect would make the trick more powerful, I was a little surprised by the magnitude of the difference. But another surprise came when my friend looked at the scores given for "overall enjoyment." When comparing the examined tricks to the non-examined tricks, he found that examination increased the overall enjoyment score by almost 25% on average.

I asked my friend to break down the per-trick increase of enjoyment that made up that 25% on average.

The card trick went up 33%
The coin trick went up 28%
The Rubik’s cube trick went up 14%

Here I saw, again, that the trick where the magic happened visually (the Rubik’s cube effect) did not have a correspondingly big increase in the enjoyment factor, even when impossibility increased significantly. (For that trick, the impossibility score more than doubled.)

Ignore the “examinability” aspect here because that’s a different subject and doesn’t really play into the conclusion I was coming to, which is this:

I think there is a limit to how much audience’s can appreciate magic that happens visibly.

This is why the enjoyment scores for the visible tricks we tested were the least impacted by increased impossibility scores.

And while I don’t personally quantify “enjoyment” when I perform, I do quantify the memorability of a trick, as talked about in this post. That is, I keep track of how long after a trick the person I perform for still talks about it or mentions it. And that’s probably fairly comparable to enjoyment.

When I scanned through my data for “memorability” I saw that most of the highly visual tricks I did had little to no resonance. People rarely brought them back up again.

Here is my theory:

500 years ago, when you pulled off the chicken’s head (that’s not a euphemism for masturbation) and re-attached it, I think people said, “That was some kind of trick or this man is a genuine wizard.”

These days, the “wizard” thing is off the table. So it’s just. “That was some kind of trick.” In other words, “There’s some way of making it look like you pull off and reattach a chicken’s head that I don’t understand.” And at this time in the arc of humanity, people are just much more comfortable with the idea that they don’t know how something happened. Through all our waking hours we are surrounded by technology that we don’t understand. So just seeing something that you can’t explain isn’t the experience that it was 500 years ago. Or even 50 years ago.

The impossible has lost its novelty.

When they see a card that changes visibly in front of their faces, they pretty much have a grasp on the nature of the experience: “This is a magic trick and I don’t know how it’s done.” I think they appreciate it visually, but I think it’s limited in the enjoyment they can take from it.

But when the card changes in an implied way, they have less of an understanding of what they just saw. Did the card itself change? Or is there some possible way it could be secretly switched?

And if you add more of a narrative on top of the change—maybe you say it’s part of something you’re practicing to cheat at a poker game later; or you say the card never changed, you actually got them to misremember the card they saw—then you can create even more fuzziness around the nature of what they just experienced.

And I think that “fuzziness” is part of what people appreciate or hold onto most from a magic trick these days. They don’t just want to see the impossible, they want to experience the mysterious.

Impossible ≠ Mysterious

An impossible visual trick is just another one of the many things they don’t understand.

One final piece of evidence I have for this comes from the “memorability tracking” I’ve done for almost six years now.

A lot of the quick, visual tricks I have in my repertoire are ones that I often perform in the Distracted Artist style. That is, I perform them on the offbeat, as if unintentionally. And then there are times when I perform them in a more traditional style. And the memorability scores for the Distracted Artist performances far exceed the traditional ones. Why should that be? In one case I say, “Watch,” and I ball up my napkin and make it vanish. In the other, I wipe my face after the meal, ball up my napkin, and make it vanish without paying it any attention. Then, when my friend comments on it I say, “Oh did I make it vanish? Oh yeah, I guess so. It’s an old habit. Muscle memory.” In theory, you might expect the performance where they’re focusing on the napkin and watching it disappear would be more memorable than the one where the trick happens incidentally. But that’s not the case. The Distracted Artist performance makes the nature of what they just saw a mystery. And that’s the element that seems to stay with people.

I believe the tricks that really resonate with people are not the ones where they’re just saying, “How did he do that?” It’s the ones where they’re saying, “What exactly just happened?”

When a trick is too visual, it removes the “what” aspect and leaves only the “how.”