The Three Kinds of Role-Playing Magic

Everyone who's played an RPG knows "in-game" magic. The stuff of clerics, wizards, warlocks, enchanted weapons, magical traps, and cursed knickers.

You could easily argue that the GM's ability to invoke arbitrary fantasy-reality and the players' ability to give life to characters are forms of performative (real-world) magic too.

A third kind of magic might be in the remnants and re-tellings of the shared fiction.

Those of us who summarize fantastical happenings as or after they transpire get the opportunity for additional twists of fantasy-reality. It's more than magical. With the benefit of even a few seconds of hindsight, you have the chance to create an adaptation that might be funnier, pithier, more memorable, more apt, or more exciting than the original performance. Not to mention additional remixing and offshoots. It's art all the way down.

If magic is the ability to bend reality, let's not forget that "post-production" magicians get a chance to work wonders too, the kind evoked by that old Hollywood euphemism, "The Magic Store."