Games and Fiction
In computer and role-playing games which feature magic, a common game mechanic is a limited pool of mana which is depleted when the character casts spells.
Fantasy writer Larry Niven in his 1969 short story Not Long Before the End described mana as a natural resource which is used or channeled by wizards to cast magic spells. He expanded on this idea in other works, notably his 1978 novella The Magic Goes Away. Mana is a limited resource in Niven's work, a fact which eventually will lead to the end of all magic in his antediluvian fantasy setting when all mana is depleted.
Many subsequent fantasy settings (role-playing games in particular) have followed Niven in his use of mana.
In the Ben 10 cartoon franchise, a race of energy beings called Anodites are said to be made of pure mana.
In the card game Magic: The Gathering, mana is the resource used to cast spells. It comes in five colors, each color being naturally generated by a different land type (white mana from Plains, blue from Islands, black from Swamps, red from Mountains, green from Forests).
Read more about this topic: Mana
Famous quotes containing the words games and, games and/or fiction:
“Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)