Lessons from a Magic 8-Ball | “Objects that Know”

My Magic 8-Ball provided a sense of guidance, certainty, and validation growing up. It was similar to other premonition artifacts and tools I loved to use at the time — personality tests, blood type tests, birthstones, “which house are you” quizzes. I could use them to understand more about myself, what I should do with myself, and what choices I should make when faced with uncertainty. These tools and objects allowed me to do that. Whenever I shake a Magic 8-Ball, I can almost hear its ominous, all-knowing voice reply back with “As I see it, yes”. There is a sense of trust in its all-knowing presence, its advice, and relief in being able to hand-off the responsibility of ‘knowing’ to something beyond myself. There is an exchange of power from myself to something beyond, and a belief system of faith and mysticism even in a toy.

These resonating themes of mysticism, faith, power, and vulnerability between knowledge and lack-there-of are applicable to designing even contemporary technological products today and are themes that are consistently challenged as we deal with artificially intelligent ‘thingness’. While the Magic 8-Ball is designed as a toy for the most general of questions and proposals, it points at much wider conversations around artificial ‘knowingness’’. I want to use this opportunity to explore these greater topics of knowledge, magic, and power, and how the design of the object alludes to key challenges in designing technological artifacts today with the Magic 8-Ball as the foundational reference point.

History of the Magic 8-Ball

Originally called the Syco-Seer, the first rendition of the ball was, in fact, a can with two sides and a six-sided die inside. It was only after multiple renditions did the original creator, Albert Carter, the son of the spiritualist “Madame” Mary Carter, and eventually his two business partners, Max Levinson and Abe Bookman, land on the final design we know today, which consists of an icosahedron (a 20-sided die, for its 20 possible answers), a blue dye dissolved in a “Bubble Free Dye Agitator”, an inner shell where the liquid and die is held, and its main magic 8-ball shell.

While there are numerous lessons that can be drawn from the history and individual renditions of the Magic 8-Ball’s development, the core of the history may be found in its first intentions and its final re-design and approach to being a toy.

Albert Carter, who seems to be equally notable as the inventor of the Magic 8-Ball and a drunk, was influenced from his mother’s work as a spiritualist and created the Syco-Seer as a “portable fortune-telling device that any spiritual seeker could use at any time or place” (Cillenia, 2012). This influence directly ties the design of the Syco-Seer to spirits, ghosts, and complex life — involving mysticism and connection to higher agency beings from the beginning of its creation. This component of its origin story, however, risks invoking immediate cynicism due to the popularity of spiritualism post World War II in the 1940s and 1950s. Looking for relief, families often turned to spiritualists to grieve and connect with their loved ones lost to war, leading to a correlated rise in hoaxes and scams.

The rebranding of the Syco-Seer in 1950 to a toy allowed the creators to distance spiritual practice from the object itself, allowing audiences to rely on it for more common, unrelated day-to-day tasks. It removed a heaviness tied more strongly with objects of faith, and spiritual belief systems.

Sublimity, Magic, and the Known vs. Unknown

Despite the branding of the Magic 8-Ball as a toy, there is an intentional quality of magic designed into the object. Through its opaque, black dye, the slow fade-in of the answer dice and its response, and the mysterious and wise nature of its language, the Magic 8-Ball commands subtle sublime and ephemeral characteristics that reinforce the all-knowing power of its answer.

The ball exemplifies James Auger’s definition of the romantic sublime and how the shift into ephemeral objects can objectify one’s ‘pleasures of the imagination’. By creating an object that hides how and why it works, Albert creates a completely unknown logic, through which the notion of magic can live on. This magical element is what engages audiences’ sense of mysticism and increases its all-knowingness in the object. As a consequence, audiences must continue to suspend knowing how it works in order to maintain the illusion of magic. In some ways, it is similar to that of a magician, where “the illusion dies when the magician reveals his sleight of hand, so the technology becomes distinguishable from magic when it becomes familiar.” (Auger, 2012)

This romantic sublime is a key characteristic choice in design today. By suspending the user’s ability to know its inner workings, user’s may value the product at a higher level than the original components combined. But, this choice involves a trade-off. An object that hides the way and reason behind how it works can be interpreted as dishonest, and encourage a culture of pure consumption compared to honest and transparent creation.

Being in Context

One of the strongest core components of the Magic 8-Ball is how generally applicable its answers are. By design, the range of possible answers are for yes-or-no formatted questions, and are split in three ways: ten positive, five negative, and five non-committal. Due to the general nature of its answers, the objects succeeds at being applicable for all forms of yes-or-no question, context, and person. It succeeds at being for group use, personal use, and all other contexts in between. Not only this, but the Magic 8-Ball succeeds at validating the user’s needs no matter how correct or incorrect the answer may be (so long as the question is not factual).

The design of the Magic 8-Ball plays into an inherent need in human-nature to find guidance, to validate and confirm our own desires, decisions, and actions. From asking “should I call my friend today?” to “should I go to college?” the designed responses of the object are varied and general enough to adapt to any possible context. Whether the user agrees with the result or not, it has succeeded in helping the user feel confirmed in a moment of indecision.

Authority to Thingness

Finally, there is an inherent authority that results from the conglomeration of components discussed previously in the Magic 8-Ball. The magical nature of the opaque dyes, slow reveal, and seeming logic, to the definitive, omnipotent voice and applicable answers, results in a belief that the object itself has knowledge and is capable of communicating and asserting it. This form of design plays into the greater theme of animism in objects, discussed by designers such as Elaine Scurry and Cameron Tonkinwise who implicate that animism within the context of design allows for audiences to reinvestigate the ontology of the thing itself as well the nature of the artificial world. The Magic 8-Ball assumes an artificial intelligence and animism in and of itself, through the physical form, visual design, and interaction paradigm it reinforces, establishing an authority for how and why people should use and believe in its effect.

The degree to which the Magic 8-Ball is considered artificially intelligent and animate, however, is lessened due to the fact that it is designed, branded, and marketed as a toy instead of a serious religious, or mystic artifact. By designing it as such, Albert hands authority of the original question and decision back to the user. There is no spiritual consequence for disobeying the Magic 8-Ball’s decision, no fear or condemnation for deciding not to believe in the Magic 8-Ball’s authority. Without this fear, Albert relinquishes stress that may otherwise exist of obeying the omnipotent opinion in the first place.

Designing the Artificially Intelligent

The themes discussed in this essay look towards greater topics of applied animism in objects, and how we design authority, and life-like qualities into form and interaction. Now in the world of digitally enhanced and dynamically responsive objects, such as AI-infused speakers and physically responsive phones, we may look towards the Magic 8-Ball as an example of how we might design the artificially intelligent in form, interaction, and experience. It allows us to consider the layers of capacity an object can have in our lives, should we let it. How can something artificially designed to be perceived as animate? To what qualitative degree can someone’s belief system grant, conscious or sub-conscious, authority in their lives to the inanimate? To what degree should they do so? Are mystery and sublimity a requirement to make something feel ‘alive’?

I hope this short analysis of the Magic 8-Ball showcases the complexity of designing something to be perceived as ‘intelligent’. From the consideration of aesthetics — how all-knowing should the language be? How mysterious should the result seem? To contextual application — who am I talking to? For what purpose do I seek guidance or validation? The Magic 8-Ball reveals the effects of personifying an object into a ‘thing’, and the subtle changes they may cause in our posture to the artificial world.