All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
![Giant Growth]()
The other thing surprise does is surprise will say, well, I don’t have all the information. I have to make a logical guess. I have to sort of go with my gut and figure out what’s going on. And I don’t for sure know, so when you make a mistake in a game without complete information, meaning there’s some surprise elements to it, you feel a little better. There’s some ego protection. Because if I make a mistake, let’s say I block and you have the Giant Growth, I go, oh, I didn’t think you had it. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know for sure.
I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.
Okay. Well, today is another in my series, Ten Things Every Game Needs. Today is surprise! Yes, number six. So, so far we’ve talked about goal or goals. About rules. About interaction. About a catch-up feature. About inertia. Well, today we are getting to surprise. Okay. So let me start by explaining, there are actually two different kinds of surprise. And so I’m going to clarify those as we talk about surprise.
So surprise number one is what we call hidden information. Which means, one or more players in the game is aware of something that the other players are not. The other type of surprise is something in which no player knows, it’s information that nobody has.
So for example, hidden information, a good example of that might be a card game in which you have cards in your hand that are relevant, but the other players don’t know what cards you have in your hand. Magic does that, poker does that, there’s a lot of games in which I know something that other people don’t know.
Now, an example of sort of general surprise is when there’s some factor that affects the game that keeps happening, everybody knows about it, but nobody knows when those factors are going to happen. So a good example of that would be, for example, in poker, when cards are turned face-up. Everybody gets to see what the cards are when they happen. It’s information for everybody. But it’s not something that you are well aware of ahead of time. Meaning, “Oh, I didn’t know that was going to happen.” Now everybody at one time knows it’s going to happen. So anyway, we’re going to talk about both kinds of surprise today, and the value of them.
So let me start by—so I did a podcast, three podcasts actually, talking about communications theory, and there’s three principles of communications theory. Things that humans just need, that communications is built around. Comfort, surprise, and completion.
So surprise is one of the three things. And what I said at the time was, you can go listen to the whole podcast, is once humans are comfortable, they’re in the spot where they’re ready for surprise, because they don’t want surprise if they aren’t ready, that surprise can make things a lot of fun.
And the reason is, it is just neat to not know something and then learn about it. There’s fun inherent in that. One of the things I’ll get to, I haven’t got to yet, is in your game you want fun, so surprise is one of the things that can bring fun to your game. When you don’t know things, it definitely can be—there’s a lot of entertainment value to having something that you can’t predict. And when it happens, you’re like *gasp* “Oh, I didn’t see that coming!” or “I didn’t know!” And there’s drama and suspense built into surprise. So it is fun to have something happen. And games are entertainment. You want to make fun moments. You want the players to sort of have that thing.
Now, another big reason that surprise is so important is that you want things to be different. That you want variety. So one of the things surprise does for a game is it brings variety to the game. That if you don’t know what’s going to happen, essentially, in order to have surprise in the game, you have to build into the game some sense of unknown.
That when I say surprise, what that means is, if players always know exactly what’s going to happen in the order it’s going to happen, the game has no surprise. So in order to add an element of surprise in, it means you usually have to have some element of either randomness or decisions by players unknown by other players. Those are the two main ways you get surprise. If either nobody knows that’s going to happen, that’s the general thing, or one player makes a decision, the other players don’t know the decision they’ve made. And both of those allow you to get to surprise. Like I said, sometimes it surprises one player, sometimes it surprises all the players.
And another key thing is that you want some drama in your game. So the reason that we have surprise in communications and entertainment is that you want people to—there’s a lot of fun in trying to predict what is coming. So for example, you want your game not to be too predictable. That if your game is totally predictable, it can get boring. That A., players always know what to expect, so there’s no sort of the joy of the unknown, and you want to make games—you want games that have replayability to them. You want games that players cannot get bored. And if the game state is always the same and you always are aware what it is, it’s easier to get bored by it.
Now, there are games that don’t have the element of surprise. Chess probably being one of the most famous. There’s not a lot of—I mean, there’s a little bit of surprise in chess based on players have knowledge other players don’t have, so even in a game like chess, even in game in which there’s no randomness, there’s a little bit of what is my opponent going to do? I didn’t expect him to do that, oh, that move, I wasn’t prepared for that. So even chess has a little bit of surprise.
So surprise doesn’t have to have randomness. It could just have players making decisions that the other players have to anticipate, and when the players do something they don’t, that you can get surprise from that. But in general, surprise does a good thing to make your thing both not predictable and create a little sense of drama built into it.
Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about the value of hidden information. Because hidden information is pretty important. So number one, there is a lot of strategy you add to a game when you add in hidden information. And—okay, to be clear, there is strategy in a game with any surprise, the reason is, reacting to surprise or predicting things that might happen is unto itself a strategy. A skill. Something you can prepare at. So if you are playing a game, if you know the possibilities of what could happen, you will play differently than if you have no idea what’s going to happen.
And so one of the ways that surprise helps create strategy is as you play a game, even though you don’t know specifically what’s going to happen, you start to learn the things that could happen. And so one of the ways that strategy comes out of surprise is from playing the game, you start to learn what can happen, and you can adapt to it. You can make choices knowing what the options are of what could happen. And also, there’s a lot of skill to responding to things that have happened. You didn’t prepare for it, but when it happens, there’s skill in responding to it and dealing with it.
When I did my podcast on randomness, I talked a lot about how you kind of want randomness earlier in the game, so there’s skill to people responding to the randomness, rather than randomness at the end of the game, where the game ends for a random reason.
Okay. (???) hidden information. Hidden information adds another entire layer onto the game that’s a very important layer. And what that layer is is, when one player knows something that the other player doesn’t, you bring in personal communication skills. That at first, when you’re playing a game, you’re playing with cards and manipulation and logic and stuff like that. But once you start bringing in humans, you get this neat thing, which is you know something that I don't know, so now part of my game is trying to read my opponent.
And there’s a lot of fun in that. Humans really, really enjoy interacting with other humans. It’s a skill that’s vital for life, it’s something that people really have to be good at, and games is a means and a way for you to get better at life skills. It’s one of the great values games do. And interpersonal communication skills are very valuable. I’m playing with somebody…
So for example, there’s a game called Diplomacy. I don't know if you’ve ever played Diplomacy. Diplomacy is a game in which it takes place in like, I don't know, World War I Europe, and it’s a war game. But what happens is you have to talk with other players and get them to help you.
And players can say whatever they want. Maybe they will help you and maybe they won’t. But you have to trust some people, because you have to make moves dependent upon other people doing things they’re saying they’re going to do.
So one of the big things about Diplomacy is, there’s a lot of surprise in “Will people do what they say they’ll do?” And so one of the skills of the game is trying to predict, is this person going to be truthful? Are they being truthful? Are they going to be—when they say they’re going to be on my side, are they? Are they playing me? Are they trying to betray me? You know, there’s a lot of fun reading of what’s going on.
Or even in a game like Magic, where I draw a hand and I have cards in my hand, and I’m going to cast the cards, and I’m playing knowing that I have these cards in my hand, and you don’t, can you predict what I have based on how I play?
You know, so there’s a lot of skill that comes from knowing that one person has information. And you can read it in multiple ways. One is through how they play, you can gather information from how they play. The second is reading the person themselves. In that there is a—one of the things I will say is, people—you are making a game for people. Understand what people like, and allow people to do that.
Well, one of the things people like is interacting with other people. We are social animals by nature. That we like to interact with one another. And so having a game that forces some interaction, especially personal interaction, you know, interpersonal—like, I have to look at them and I have to—are they bluffing? You know, can I read them correctly?
Like, one of the things is, sometimes—so here’s a typical situation like in Magic, where I attack with a creature, and on board you have a creature you can block, that I would never attack with normally. If I had no cards in my hand I wouldn’t attack. It’s a bad attack
Obviously, I am pretending as if I have something in my hand that would change the value of that attack. So I have a 2/2 creature, you have a 3/3 blocker. Normally, if nothing else is going on, it’s a horrible attack. You’d block and kill my creature, I wouldn’t kill your creature, it’d be dead. But, because I have cards in my hand, I can sort of create the illusion—and maybe it’s not even an illusion. But I say to my opponent essentially, hey, I’ve got something in my hand, you might not want to block. You might want to let my creature go by.
And the other player has to look at me and figure out, am I telling the truth? You know, do I really have something in my hand that they shouldn’t be blocking? Or am I bluffing? Am I trying to get extra damage in a place where I don’t? And the fact that there’s hidden information allows those moments to happen. There’s a lot of fun in trying to sort of push an agenda where the opponent has to figure out what’s going on.
That in general it is fun to read the game state and figure out what’s going on, but if you have complete information—so here’s another important thing. If you have complete information, you feel obligated to solve the problem. You know, if you have complete information, you’re like, okay. I should be able to make the correct decision here, and so I need to figure out all the information.
And the reverse is, let’s imagine that you do something, and I have no cards in hand, but I manage to—well, not really surprise you, but I manage to do something based on all open information. You then feel bad. You’re like, oh, well, what you could have done was something that I could have figured out, I didn’t figure it out, oh, I feel horrible. I’m a bad player. I didn’t see that. And you feel bad. It’s a real feel-bad.
So another thing that surprise does is it does some ego investment that’s very important, is it helps protect the person by going, well I didn’t for sure know you know, like—one of the things that we talk a lot about is, people will attribute their successes to things they did, and attribute the failures to things outside their control. So success is inside their control, failure is outside their control.
So what happens with success is, let’s say we get in a situation, I read you, I read you correctly, and I do the right thing. I go, yes, I figured it out! I am a skillful player. I deduced this. Now let’s say I miscorrectly assume it, it goes wrongly, I go, oh, oh, I missed. Well, I didn’t know. You know. It was unknown. I was doing the best I can but I didn’t know.
So the first thing is completely, like, hey, I’m a good player, I feel good about myself, and you’re very charged that the surprise allowed you to feel like you have a sense of mastery. When you miss, because it’s unknown, you have an out to go, well, I didn’t know, and that way you sort of protect yourself. Like, it’s not that you made a mistake, look, you did the best you could with the information you had, and you just didn’t know.
So see that surprise here does a very important thing, which is it helps the player have successes where they feel good about themselves, and have failures where they don’t feel bad about themselves. And that is very important.
Okay. Also, in general I talked about before, that there is a lot of skill in reacting to unknown things. Of saying, I wasn’t prepared for that to happen. And so one of the things—this is both strategy and fun I think, which is it is neat to get in a situation that you never planned for, and then have to get out of it. That’s a lot of the fun of gaming, is saying okay, I didn’t prepare for—I didn’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but now that I’m in this situation, okay, how do I adapt? What do I do?
You know, there’s a feeling of the back to the corner. And that when you manage to pull it out, when you manage to sort of take something you weren’t expecting, but react on the fly and do something about it, it’s really, really good. It’s very encouraging. You know, that it’s a great throw—I talked about fiero, where you’re sort of in the zone, and one of the ways to get sort of in that zone is when—the key thing I think to fiero is, you’re in a place where you know there’s danger, you know that things might not go right. The reason that there’s a thrill is, I’m in territory where it’s an unknown, and I manage to have mastery where danger could have happened.
So I talked a lot about I went to GDC this year, and had a talk by a woman named Erin Hoffman, who talked about what fun is. And she was saying that fun—I think I talked a little about this in my GDC. But it’s very important to this point. Is that you want—fun is a sequence of events where you use a mastery loop to get from an emotionally unhappy place, usually fear-based, but an unhappy place to a happy place. I think that she says use a mastery loop to move from fear to happiness is the general idea.
But really what she meant was, you’re in an unhappy place where bad are happening that you—something in the game’s like, oh no, I don’t want that to happen, through your own mastery loop you get to a place where you’re like, oh, I’ve succeeded, I’ve done good things.
And that fun is that you need a sense of danger, you need a sense of bad things could happen. You know, when there’s no sense of danger, there’s no threat of anything that’s going to happen bad, it’s not as fun. That a lot of the fun comes from, I know I was in a horrible place, like bad things could happen. The game could have blown up in front of me. But I managed to somehow, through my own grit, I managed to find a way to save it. That is intensely fun. That is really fun.
And surprise is a lot of the thing that helps your player get there. Because they don’t know what’s coming. If they knew what is coming, then there’s this expectation that they would accomplish what they needed to do. And that that ability tor react is very strategic, and very fun, and adds a lot of neat game moments.
Okay. Another thing that surprise does is it lessens complexity. What? Here’s why. The player feels obligated to process all information they have. Because, once again, if you lose with information you had available, you feel real bad about yourself. You feel dumb. You go, oh, I walked into that! You know.
So, one of the things is, your player feels a need to process the information. And if you have too much information, you overwhelm them. That’s the problem with complexity in general is, is the player going, okay, I gotta take all this stuff, and I gotta keep it in mind.
So one of the things surprise does is surprise forces the player to go, okay. There’s things I don’t know. And the less experienced the player—the more-experienced player has fun figuring out what they don’t know and how to prepare for it. Right? The strategic thing to do when you’re more experienced in the game is to say, okay. I know the game has these six outcomes or whatever the number is. I’ve gotta prepare for any one of them.
The less-experienced player thinks less ahead. Just because of the nature of experience. So they’re unaware, but the nice thing about the less-experienced player is they go, I don't know! Don’t have to worry about it, I don't know! When it happens, I will have to deal with it. But I don't know now. I can’t do anything. And so the less-experienced player doesn’t feel the obligation to figure out—you know, they’re not there yet. They’re not at a point where they’re like, I know the options of what might happen. They’re not gonna do that. They’re like, I’m dealing with what I can deal with.
And so there’s just less things I have to deal with that—you know, that if somebody else has a hand of cards, a more-experienced player will try to read the opponent to figure out what’s in their hand. A less-experienced player goes, I don't know, when they cast it we’ll find out, and they don’t feel a need to do that. So it lessens the need to try to figure out the complexity on the board or whatever. And it just makes it easier, the game is less tense for the beginning player because there’s less things they have to track.
And that is important. It’s another reason that surprise is a big value to you is, you want to make sure the game keeps changing, but you don’t want the players to always have to track that information. Tracking it creates complexity, complexity can be very overwhelming, especially for lesser players—less-experienced players.
And that you want your game to have strategy built into it, so more experienced players with time can use that information, but surprise does that. Because within your game, there’s some subset. It’s not infinite surprise. Certain things can happen. Experienced players will learn what those things are, and they can start anticipating. Less-experienced players can go, you know what? I don't know, and they don’t have to worry about it until it happens. It makes both people happy.
Okay. Another thing that it does—I talked about this a little bit about the personal interactions. It adds a different level to your game that’s really important. Which is, your game has components they have to figure out, they have to deal with. But this surprise now adds both adaptability and personal interaction to it. So it adds layers to your game. And that’s very important. That it means that the game is about different things.
That one of the ways to keep your game exciting is, if you’re always worrying about the same thing, it gets monotonous, and it gets tiresome. But if you keep having to shift your gears, okay, I gotta worry about my hand, about the board, about what my opponent’s doing, if you keep shifting where your focus is, it makes the game more dynamic. And it makes it—that it’s not the same thing again and again. And so surprise allows you to have moments where you’re shifting where your focus is. And that is important, to keep a game dynamic and keep it from getting stale.
In general, by the way, another in the same regard is, if players can completely predict what’s going to happen, there’s much greater chance of monotony in the game. That one of the things that you want is you want some things to happen that your player can’t anticipate, or that they anticipate incorrectly. Because that means that the game will surprise them.
Surprise, obviously, makes the game have more freshness to it. When you don’t know everything, things will happen that you obviously didn’t know, and it will make more variety in the gameplay. You know. You don’t want monotony. You don’t want a player playing a game and go, oh, this is just like the last time we played. Because what will happen is, at some point, they’ll stop playing. They’re like, well, okay, I got it, I’ve experienced this game.
Once a player goes, I’ve experienced this game, and feels like they’ve had everything the game has to offer, they’ll move on to another game. They’re like, okay, I’ve got it. I’ve got this game. Okay, good, let’s go play another game.
But if you put enough surprise in your game, your game reinvents itself. Your game says, okay, I thought I knew this game but I didn’t. You know. Something Magicdoes insanely well. Because I play with sixty cards from a giant pool. And my opponent does the same. And every time I play an opponent, I don’t know what deck they’re gonna have! They might have a completely different deck.
And even when we play, because you draw your hand and there’s a deck that gets shuffled, and you know, there’s hidden information in hands. There’s so much going on that no two Magic games are the same. And that really makes it very dynamic. That’s a big part of why people play Magicfor so long. You know, the average Magicplayer plays for like, right now, for like nine and a half years. That’s insanely long. That’s longer than most games even last. And the reason is, the game keeps reinventing itself.
And I don’t just mean between games, but even within the game. That there’s so much surprise built into it, that there’s a lot of—you can’t always predict what’s going to happen. Even, by the way, when you’re playing the exact same deck against the exact same deck. That there’s still moments where, like, even though I’ve played this matchup, oh, this combination has never happened before. I have to deal with it.
Okay. Another very important part of surprise is it creates moments. So let me talk about what I call the story narrative. So one of the things that’s very important for your game is, you want the player while playing your game to feel as if the game itself is sort of a story. That there’s a narrative to it. And that good gameplay, you want your player to be able to walk away, go talk to somebody else who in theory knows the game, and be able to sort of share the game with them.
So I talk a lot about what we call the metagame, which is Richard’s term for the game around the game. So I don’t mean the metagame like what is the right play in the tournament, what I mean is the metagame, the Garfield version, which is, a game is more than just the act of playing. The game has to do with every interaction, everything you do that has something to do with the game.
And one of the most important things is the interplay between people. That if you want to create a community, you have to make things where the community people can share things. So one of the ways to do a very strong bond between the community is if games take on a story narrative. If when I play a game, something happens, and then I can go to my friends who also play the same game and share the story narrative. Here’s what happened in my game. And I can entertain them because there’s a neat story narrative.
And surprise makes for great story narrative. It makes for great moments. You know, think about this. If you’ve ever talked about a game, usually the story is, I was in such-and-such situation, and then this thing happened! Now, if this thing was a known thing, it wouldn’t be as exciting a story. But this not being a known thing—I was all prepared for Thing X, but Thing Y happened. That’s the exciting story.
The same reason that surprise works so well in storytelling is because it makes for good stories. I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t expect that. Well, guess what. I was playing a game. And here’s what happened in my game. Bam! There is an exciting story narrative. And that’s really important. That if you want people to bond between your game and create communities, you need to have the act of gameplaying being something that’s shareable. And that’s really important.
Now, there’s a lot of different ways to share games. Magic, for example, people will share deckbuilding, and there’s a lot of other components, there’s creating and things. But, the key thing is, Magicdoes a good job of, okay, I was playing another—you know, we’re wizards, we’re planeswalkers dueling with Magic, here’s what happened. I cast this creature. They cast this spell. And then this happened. (Verbal fanfare) You know. And it creates an amazing narrative. And that’s really important. That if you want your players to be able to share with one another, you want your game to have that story narrative.
Okay. Let me hit a few other things. One of the things I try to do is to talk about how each one of these ten things helps you with the other ten things. So I’ve already talked about how it helps you with fun, how it helps you with strategy, so let me hit a few other things it helps you with.
A catch-up feature. So one of the things that surprise can do is, surprise can allow you to come back. That there’s a lot of neat moments where it looks like I’ve lost, but because there’s surprise, you work in the game places for that catch-up. You know. Ha-ha, I have this. You didn’t know that. And that fact that you didn’t know that means that I can now surprise you, maybe I even have a tactical advantage because I knew something you didn’t know. And even though it looked like I was in trouble, I had this ace in the hole, I had this card that you were unaware of, or this game element that allowed me to come back. So it can—you can use surprise as a means to help you with the catch-up feature.
It also allows you to do something slightly different with the catch-up feature. It allows you to have one player appear as if they’re in a worse position, and the catch-up feature isn’t actually them coming back, but them revealing information they had all along. So it lets you feign weakness. Surprise allows a catch-up feature in which it’s not that you were necessarily behind, it was you appeared to be behind. But there was an unknown thing that actually allowed you to have more play than you realized.
Okay. Surprise also allows interaction. A., like I said before, there’s all the human interaction, that if there’s hidden information, I have to glean what my opponent knows and doesn’t know. And I have to make decisions based on how I’m reading them. There’s that interaction.
The other thing is, when—you even get shared moments together, when something happens and everybody has to react to that. You know. Like when you’re playing a game where all of a sudden something gets revealed, all the players might go, oh my goodness, this thing has happened, and there’s a bonding moment with the players—you know, for example there’s a lot of cooperative games where—and this is a good example of surprise and the open-ended thing. Where all of the players are playing against sort of the game, and the game keeps surprising you and doing things. And then you as a player—sometimes interaction isn’t against each other, sometimes it’s with each other. You know. The response you have, and if you have to figure out what to do.
Surprise also brings inertia to the game, because you can layer in things they don’t know, and those things can help push the game toward its conclusion. Oh my goodness, this big thing happened, and that’s going to completely change the nature.
I know Risk: Legacy for example does this thing where you have things in envelopes. And you know, you can open up the envelope and those things have major changes in what’s going on. But sometimes those major changes help push the game toward the end. You know. This thing happens that helps one player, helps another player, or changes the game state in a way that can increase it to make it end sooner.
Surprise could actually add to flavor. Sometimes, you know, one of the neat things about flavor and about storytelling is if people don’t know everything. So sometimes, one player gets to know something that other players don’t get to know.
A really good example of this might be a murder mystery game. Where everybody gets the information and you’re trying to figure out this murder mystery. But different players know different things. And the fact that one player can reveal something, you can have a lovely flavor moment where like, the fact that one player knows and another doesn’t, unto itself is really flavorful. You know.
Because one of the things that’s neat is, in real life, everybody doesn’t know the same thing. You know. And that there’s a lot of fun of role-playing—like, a lot of the neat thing is, when you’re playing roles, it’s like, I know something you don’t know, it’s a really good way to capture something.
And also, another neat thing about surprise is, a lot of times surprises are wrapped in flavor. Like in Monopoly, when you get a Community Chest or Chance, things can happen. Sometimes it affects only you, but sometimes it can affect the board. You know. Sometimes, what happens? Oh, this whole thing changes, it affects everything, and people are like, oh, that now changes things. We now have to react to that. And that the flavor can be a lot of fun. That a lot of times, that surprise allows you great flavor moments.
Okay. The last one, which is very important, is that it provides the hook. So the hook is the last one of the ten, a hook has to do with selling your product, which is, I need people to go, that looks cool, I want to buy that. That’s what the hook’s all about. And so surprise features a lot of times can do that.
So for example, there’s a game called Perfection. I don't know if you guys ever played it. So Perfection is a puzzle game. And the puzzle game is, you have all these pieces, and you have a board, and you have to fit all the shapes into the place they go on the board. And there’s forty shapes or something. [NLH—25 shapes.] The surprise factor is that the board, there’s a timer on the board, and it’s gonna pop, and all the pieces are gonna pop out if you don’t—you have to get all the pieces in and turn it off before this happens.
So the reason the game is exciting is not because you have to take pieces and put them in the thing. The reason it’s exciting is, at some point it’s going to explode. So there’s this tension that’s happening, because you don’t know when it’s going to explode. And if you’re hurrying to try and get it done, at every moment, there’s just this knowledge you have that this thing’s going to happen.
So, by the way, I didn’t mention this before. Surprise doesn’t necessarily always have to be 100% unknown. Perfection’s a real good example. You know the board is going to pop. You know that’s going to happen. What you don’t’ know is when it’s going to happen.
So sometimes a surprise is partial. Meaning you know some component of it, but you don’t know every component of it. You know, for example, somebody, you know, one person in this game has the ability—like, Werewolf, the game where you’re trying to figure out who the werewolves are. Well, somebody is the werewolf. It’s not a surprise that there are werewolves, it’s a surprise who’s the werewolf. You know. In Clue, you’re trying to figure out where the murder mystery happened. So sometimes, it’s when. Or where.
Or—you know, that surprise can have a lot of different facets. Surprise is not just one single thing. Surprise means is, there’s some facet of the game that I don’t know. And sometimes, and Perfection’s a great example, sometimes knowing something about it, knowing a thing is going to happen, but, you know—like I said, the entire hook of Perfection is, bam! It’s going to pop up. In fact, they show it on the commercial, bam! All the pieces pop out. You know. That is a big hook of the game.
And so surprise can be a big hook. If part of the game is, hey, I don't know when something is going to occur, or there’s some cool thing that’s going to happen that I’m not prepared for. I think that Risk: Legacy, a big selling part of Risk: Legacy is this idea of radical things can happen. And not only can they happen, they’ll forever shape the game. And not just this game, but future games. That was a real neat thing Risk: Legacy does. Because what happens is, once you change the board, in future games the board is changed. So it has a permanence.
And surprise—like I was saying. Surprise is this neat thing where it adds texturing in so many different places. You know. That it creates suspense, it creates interpersonal dynamics, it creates—like I said, all the stuff I’m talking about today. That, I mean, it provides hidden information. It can make fun, strategy, help with catch-up, interaction, inertia, flavor, hook. It helps lessen complexity. It allows neat interpersonal things. It can create moments and help your story narrative.
Surprise is this very versatile tool. It’s funny, as I walk through the ten, some of them—like the goal or rules are much more in stone what they need to do. You know. A goal has to provide a certain focus for the game. But surprise is a tool that can do all sorts of things. And you have to figure out where and how to use surprise. What I’m saying is the game wants surprise. What I’m not saying is how the game needs to have surprise.
That that is one of the neat things about this component is, it’s a very versatile tool, that there’s a lot of ways to create surprise, there’s a lot of ways to use surprise, there are a lot of things surprise can do. It’s a very dynamic tool.
And like I said, it is so endemic to the personal experience, you know, it is part of communication theory because it’s something that humans relate to, and it’s something that humans need. And so it’s important when you make your game, figure out how to get surprise in your game. You know.
And like I said, even Chess, even Chess has elements of surprise, because players are gonna do things that other players don’t know. But it’s important to figure out where the surprise falls in your game, how you use it, what it’s doing, what its purpose is, you know. And that’s my sort of goal today is explaining to you that it’s this important tool, that you need to understand the value of it and what it can do for you, and then how to use it.
But anyway, I’ve just pulled in the parking spot, so you all know what that means, that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. So thanks for joining me today, guys.