This is a heavily edited version of two and a half hours of conversation with illusionist and writer Mariano Tomatis, author of books such as Il mio libro di magia (Tlon, 2024), Incantagioni. Storie di veggenti, sibille, sonnambule e altre fantasmagoriche liberazioni (Nero, 2022), Il Segno del comando (Mesmer, 2023), and Guida ufologica al monte Musinè (Le lettere scarlatte, 2025), which he presented during the latest edition of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival. I first met Tomatis in 2018 at Videogiocanda, an video game-focused event within the Giocanda festival in Pavia, and saw him again the following year at Game Happens in Genoa. It was clear to me that he had a real interest in play and video games, which, like magic and speculative fiction, expand the boundaries of what we believe is possible and invite us to imagine “what if…”.
You do outreach work on magic, and in particular on mentalism, the theatrical discipline that simulates mind-based superpowers. In your talk with writer Loredana Lipperini in Trieste, you defined mentalism as a form of illusionism in which “we suspect there’s something real behind it.” We might not believe that someone can literally read minds and know which card we’re thinking of, but we might believe they can read our body language, or something like that. The history of mentalism is full of pseudoscientific explanations for how it works, starting with the research of the eighteenth-century physician Franz Anton Mesmer.
When science set out to determine whether Mesmer’s so-called animal magnetism had real therapeutic powers, the answer was that it was just suggestion. But now that you have removed animal magnetism and replaced it with suggestion, the mystery remains. What allows, for instance, words to have physical effects and induce altered states of consciousness? Often, the false produces the true. And that makes it worth investigating.
In Trieste, we spoke about your video series Mesmer in pillole, in which you show tricks, offer critical interpretations, and explain how they work. You told me that “sometimes the explanation is more beautiful than the trick itself.”
I’m drawn to the figure of the magician who openly admits to lying, invites the audience into a shared understanding, and offers them the chance to become agents themselves.
If I show you how the trick (or the video game) works, you can perform that trick and develop video games.*
This, however, must not replace the moment of astonishment: first there must be surprise.
Because you’re not just debunking something. You’re revealing the trick, but at the same time you want to preserve its wonder and the sense of possibility it creates.
Debunking postulates a clear opposition between good and evil. Good is the one who reveals, it’s the light of the Enlightenment. Evil is whoever operates in the shadows to create deception.
In 2015 (“La «neutralità» che difende Golia. Scienza, feticismo dei ‘fatti’ e rimozione del conflitto” on the Giap blog), you questioned the existence of absolute neutrality, of a scientific and rational discourse detached from narrative and free of bias.
Official culture pretends to be neutral while hiding its bias. If you are a wealthy, white, heterosexual, cisgender man, you can pretend to speak from a neutral position because the entire society has been designed around you (and built for you). To dismantle this, one must appeal to what feminism and postcolonialism offer, but science does not want to see this stuff; it feels itself to be on another level.
And usually debunking convinces only the people who already think that way.
We have an irrational side that tends not to be narrated. But the survival of magic in culture tells us that there is a natural resistance that makes those debunking projects a bit naïve. That’s why I believe that deception can sometimes be an effective way to teach.
This whole approach to enchantment and its unveiling was very interesting to me because it’s rarely discussed in video games, even though it works in a similar way. I often quote a 2018 interview with Dan Houser, then creative director of Rockstar Games, the company behind Grand Theft Auto (1997–ongoing). “Games are still magical. It’s like they’re made by elves. You turn on the screen and it’s just this world that exists on TV. I think you gain something by not knowing how they’re made” (in Sam White, “Red Dead Redemption 2: The inside story of the most lifelike video game ever,” GQ UK). The reference to magic here becomes functional to processes of alienation; it serves to conceal the labor behind a video game.
There’s a duo of illusionists from Las Vegas, Penn & Teller, who have built their career upon the act of unveiling, transforming the explanation of the trick into a spectacle. This is strongly opposed by the purists of deception, by those who want to preserve secrecy, but in cinema we are already used to it: in the special features of DVDs we see how special effects are constructed, without this ruining the magic. One uses a language to tell that language.
So if, to tell a video, like a film, I use a video, like a DVD extra, to tell a video game I cannot use a video.
No, no, you must do it with a video game.
A video game released this year comes to mind, Despelote (Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena, Panic). Its scenes are monochromatic, with grainy backgrounds. At a certain point, toward the end, it is as if the effect were switched off, and we find ourselves inside the 3D scan of a park in Quito (Ecuador) on which the setting was based. Meanwhile, the voice-over begins to recount the development of the game. The video game shows us its factory inside the video game itself.
In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012), Michael Saler traces, so to speak, the prehistory of this “showing the suture,” to use the expression of the writer Wu Ming 1, isolating those syntactic and narrative markers in Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Doyle that prevent readers from immersing themselves too deeply and allow them to periodically leap out.
The philosopher Andy Clark, taking up Heidegger, notes that “The effective use of tools […] often involves a kind of flipping between invisibility-in-use and availability for thought and inspection” (in Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 2003). An alternation between immersion in magic, or in the world of a video game, and emergence through a critical break in immersivity.
I think the point is to set up an interactive experience that is emancipatory rather than subjugating, a safe place in which to experiment with perceptual limits, with errors… I make you choose a card and guess it because I have led you, without your knowing it, to choose the card I wanted. Then I point out which mechanism of your brain I exploited. You experienced surprise and understood one of your limits. I find this idea—that illusionism at its best can create a kind of in vitro situation in which to experiment—interesting because it also has aesthetic implications; it is not a cold laboratory situation. Unlike scientific experiments, it sometimes resonates with more instinctual elements: surprise, disorientation, fear.
It is said that play takes place within a “magic circle” that is in some way delimited (in space, in time, thanks to specific social conventions) and within which specific aspects of reality are taken, synthesized, and modeled, so that we can play with and experiment with them precisely in a safe space.
One can tell the magic circle as you have narrated it, that is, in a way that also highlights its emancipatory potential, as a place where interesting and new things can be produced, possibly a strategy of resistance… and instead there is a more cynical and mainstream reading in which there is a caste—the illusionists—that has drawn that circle on the ground to force you inside it and prevent you from adopting other points of view that would allow you to see the trick. There is this idea that magic was born on the day when a caste of people separated themselves from the masses and understood that they could manipulate them using tricks, and that they will therefore try in every way to preserve that knowledge in order to clearly delimit who is above and who is below. It is a story told by the victors. It places supremacy at the center, the naturalness of hierarchies… and what if magic had a different history? Could it be that the shaman was the person who chose to put care at the center, and that magic was a tool for healing, that those tricks served to stimulate effects in the brain, like the placebo effect, and not to subjugate? A rereading is possible that calls into question magic as merely a tool of domination.
*https://www.the-bunker.it/en/2025/02/18/luigi-mangione-has-ended-up-in-a-video-game/
Matteo Lupetti