Yoda
I’ve been a Star Wars fan a long time, but the peak of my obsession was probably between 1996 and 1999. (It was hard to sustain after I met Jar Jar Binks.) It’s difficult to describe, or even to remember in retrospect, exactly how immersed I was in that galaxy far, far away. I quoted the films often and seemingly at random. I engaged in Star Wars trivia contests with my friends at lunch. I read Star Wars novels voraciously — fiercely careful, of course, to read them in the canonical sequence — and even got into arguments on the Internet (the kind where you find yourself citing your IQ as proof of your argument’s superiority) about the relative quality of these novels.
Perhaps nothing captures the depth of my fascination more than the fact that I played the Star Wars Customizable Card Game. In my defense, I was never a serious player — for example, I never attended a tournament, and I played far more often with my brother than with anyone else. I also never sank the kind of money into it that was required to build a genuinely competitive deck. (If you don’t know how customizable card games such as SWCCG, or its vastly more popular cousin, Magic: The Gathering, are played, you’re probably better off. The fact that I played any CCG other than Magic suggests that I wasn’t satisfied with just any nerdy pursuit; I had to assiduously avoid the one that was most popular among my fellow geeks.) I basically had the starter set (or, to be more precise, the Introductory Two-Player Game) and a fairly small collection of additional cards from booster packs I’d bought. I also traded with a couple of friends.
Trading in a customizable card game is similar to trading any other type of collectible card; many of us grew up trading baseball or basketball cards and remember that what you wanted was essentially the following:
1) a card you like or think is “cool”
2) a card that is unusually rare
3) a card that is unusually valuable (usually correlated to #2)
If you collect any of these types of cards, what you basically do is convince your parents to buy you packs upon packs of them, searching persistently for the one that will satisfy the above criteria, at which point you declare that it was “totally worth it.” Your other (and perhaps preferred) option is to find some idiot kid who will trade you their awesome card for a modest number of cards that you convince him are equally awesome but are actually worthless. (This is how I parted ways in fifth grade with my Nolan Ryan, the only decent card I ever acquired in the short time I dabbled in Major League Baseball.) We might, in adult parlance, refer to the aforementioned idiot kid as an “arbitrage opportunity.”
It’s basically the same with CCGs, except that there is an additional dimension: value in gameplay (usually correlated to #2 and #3 above). This value can be measured in many ways, some of which include (abstractly) offensive power, defensive power, and the ability to radically disrupt the flow of a game (for example, by redistributing resources or changing what your opponent is permitted to do). As I mentioned, I never played Magic, but even I knew that the Black Lotus was one of the best (in all the senses I’ve outlined) cards you could get, even if I didn’t understand why.
Being a financially sensible preteen, I never took the quest for the rarest SWCCG cards as far as some people, but I did buy the occasional booster pack to see if I could strike it rich (which in practice meant finding a card of a character whose name you actually know: Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and so on).
I remember when the Dagobah expansion set, christened after the remote, swampy planet that a little green man named Yoda called home, was released in the spring of 1997. I was in seventh grade and, like all seventh-graders, couldn’t wait. After much cajoling, I convinced my mom to take me to Sci-Fi City, the go-to comics and collectibles shop in Orlando, to play the Sunday afternoon booster pack lottery. Since the place was in another part of town, I offered to pick up a couple of packs for my friend Drew and deliver them to him at school on Monday. And so it was that I returned home with four Dagobah booster packs in a small plastic shopping bag.
I opened my two packs immediately. I did the usual thing; like a battered victim of domestic violence covering for his abuser, I told myself that some of these cards were actually pretty good, that it would probably work out better next time, that Princess Leia really did love me after all. I called Drew — in those days, I actually used the telephone to talk to people other than my parents — and let him know what I’d gotten. I then asked him:
“Want me to open your packs, to see what you got?”
“No, thanks, I’ll just take a look at them tomorrow.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, man, don’t worry about it.”
“Alright.”
You can guess what happened next. After an appropriately brief bout of conscience, I picked up one of the remaining packs and began, carefully, to open it. I pulled the nine cards from the plastic wrapper and looked through them slowly.
Nothing remarkable, as far as I could tell. I slipped the cards back into the wrapper. I picked up the second pack and opened it, just as delicately as I had the first.
I looked at the top card. Nothing interesting. I moved it to the back of the pile.
I looked at the second card. Again, forgettable. Behind it went.
And holy shit. There he was. Yoda. Power 2, Ability 7. The greatest Jedi Master in the goddamn galaxy.
I had a very bad feeling about this.
My mind raced, trying vainly to catch up to my pulse. What the hell was I supposed to do now? He told me not to open his packs, and this was probably exactly why. Now I had this once-in-a-lifetime card, a Yoda, for Christ’s sake, and I was supposed to give it to someone else! How could I have come so close, yet so far?
I honestly don’t remember it, but somehow, I must have come to a decision. I picked up the phone and called Drew again.
“Hey.”
“Hey. So guess what?”
“What?”
“So, uh, I opened the other packs…”
“Wait, why? I told you not to do that.”
“I was curious.”
“But I told you not to.”
“Well…one of them had a Yoda.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and well, I was thinking, technically, since I bought these packs, they’re kinda mine.”
I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, or any of the multiple conversations we had on this topic over the next couple of days. The final outcome was that I gave Drew the Yoda and some of the other cards that had come in his packs, in exchange for the rest of those cards, as well as some cards from his personal collection. I remember negotiating on exactly what cards he would need to give me to fairly compensate me for the Yoda.
In other words, I traded him his own card.
I can say with conviction that this is, by far, the most unethical thing I have ever done in my life, and hopefully the most unethical thing I will ever do. Astonishingly, it did not ruin my friendship with Drew. But what shocks me most in retrospect is how easy it was to convince myself that this course of action was reasonable. Of course the cards were technically mine! Trading him the Yoda was doing him a favor! I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
These kinds of rationalizations dominated my thoughts in the following days, but, looking back, they were probably only on the surface. What lay underneath, I imagine, was a classic sense of pre-teen victimhood. Why was it that other kids always got the great cards? Shouldn’t I get a great card every now and then, too? On some level, I must have decided that actually keeping the Yoda for myself would simply be too much; but extracting payment for it was like levying my own karmic tax against the universe for giving me such rotten luck. After all, if that pack had just been one of the first two I’d opened, it would have been as though I’d gotten a Yoda, not him.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think this victim mentality is the most common motivation for these types of unethical acts — more commonly, such acts are perpetrated by people who feel that they are somehow special, that they deserve more than the common man, that the fact that they are clever enough to get away with something entitles them to the rewards, however sordid, of the thing they got away with. I’ve seen all these explanations cited for the wildly immoral behavior of men like Enron‘s Jeffrey Skilling and Adelphia‘s John Rigas.
I certainly don’t think that I am anything like them, nor was I at age 11. What this story does show, however, is that it is very easy for good people to do bad things if they aren’t careful. It only takes one brief, irrevocable moment of weakness or confusion. Life offers us plenty of temptations to abandon or temporarily forget our principles, and it’s up to us to try not to.
No. Do. Or do not. There is no try.