The Limits of Visual Magic: Part Two

Okay, so picking up where we left off yesterday.

We have the card that changes a couple of times—either visually or in an implied fashion.

The testing we did gave slightly higher scores for both impossibility and enjoyment for the implied change rather than the visual change.

My feeling was that when something happens that is that visual, a spectator’s mind has nowhere else to go besides: “I guess there’s something funny about that card.”

I don’t like the “Too Perfect Theory” mainly because the name is so inaccurate. Every effect people use to illustrate this theory has one big glaring weakness. It should really be called the “One Big Glaring Weakness Theory.”

If a cop pulls me over looking for a dead body in my car, and I say, “You can look everywhere except my trunk,” that’s not The Perfect Crime. That’s just me not accounting for the most obvious solution.

That’s usually what happens with tricks that people label as Too Perfect—there’s an obvious solution the performer has accounted for. Your first job as a magician is to eliminate those possibilities. That’s not a problem with the trick. That’s a problem with the performer.

So what happens if we account for the “trick card” explanation in the visual card change? How would that affect the spectator’s perceived impossibility and enjoyment of the effect? And how would we even go about eliminating the “trick card” explanation?

Well, to explain that, you need to have an understanding of the layout of the performing setting during the testing.

The testing was done for five participants at a time, around a circular table, with the performer a few steps back from the table.

So, in performance, the card would change once, then again, then the performer would step up to the table and slide the card to the person at position three to examine. Then it would be passed around the table for everyone to look at.

The reason this clearly gimmicked card could be examined is because the person at position #3 was not another random focus group participant. They were also a magician who would switch in an examinable card in the process of sliding the card off the table. But they sat through the entire testing, playing the part of another spectator (and helped out secretly with a couple of other aspects of the performance as well).

We did five rounds of this testing, performing for 20 people in total.

With the added element of the card being examinable at the end, the “Impossibility Score” rose from 6.8 (when we tested it as a non-examinable trick) to 8.9. This is a huge rise, but not surprising to me. We had tested “examinability” in the past and seen that it had a significant impact on how impossible audiences would find an effect.

The more intriguing thing to me was the other number—the enjoyment score for the effect.

With the unexamined visual card change, the enjoyment score was 6.2.

With the examined visual card change, the enjoyment score was 6.5.

So it went up a little, but not significantly. I was surprised by this because in the previous examinability testing we did (linked above) when the impossibility score rose significantly, the enjoyment score rose significantly as well (on average).

Why didn’t this trick have a similar boost?

That question led me to re-examine some old testing results. The conclusions I drew from that re-examination and how it’s affected some of my thinking in regard to magic will appear in the final post in this series next week.