All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
So let’s start with talking about, I always give an example from Magic of this lesson in motion. So basically this is—I talked about planeswalkers, obviously you guys know what planeswalkers are, but in my talk I explained what planeswalkers were, and then I talked about how in Avacyn Restored we decided to make a two-mana planeswalker. You might know him as Tibalt.
I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.
Okay. So today is another in my series, Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. Where I’m going over my GDC speech, which was Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons, where I talked about the twenty things I learned, or twenty of the things I learned in the twenty years of designing the same game. Obviously being Magic. So we’re up to lesson number twelve.
So lesson number twelve is, don’t design to prove you can do something. So the interesting thing about this lesson is, this is the lesson people had the hardest time with. I got a lot of feedback because obviously I did my podcast, and then I did a column based on it and now I’m doing a podcast based on it, and this is the lesson that people seem to have the hardest time with. And it is probably the lesson that took me the longest to learn.
So I’m going to walk through today what this lesson is and explain why I think a lot of people have problems with it, and I think sometimes people think I mean something slightly different than what I mean, so I’m gonna clarify some stuff.
So let’s start with talking about, I always give an example from Magic of this lesson in motion. So basically this is—I talked about planeswalkers, obviously you guys know what planeswalkers are, but in my talk I explained what planeswalkers were, and then I talked about how in Avacyn Restored we decided to make a two-mana planeswalker. You might know him as Tibalt.
And the reason we did it was, we had never done a two-mana planeswalker, and we’re like, “You know what? Let’s see if we can do a two-mana planeswalker.” Now there’s nothing inherent about the character, about Tibalt needing to be a two-mana planeswalker, it wasn’t like anything about making the best Tibalt we could led to that, it was just something we said, “Let’s see if we can do this.”
And it ended up creating a card that really no one was happy with, because we didn’t want to make something too powerful, so we sort of like—it was two mana, it could only have the power of a two-mana planeswalker, but there was expectation of sort of how powerful a planeswalker was.
And so we sort of—like, we set ourselves up for failure because the answer kind of was, it is hard to make a two-mana planeswalker that both can be two mana and be what people expect of a planeswalker. And looking back on it, and this is what ties into the lesson is, well, why did we do that? You know. And the answer was, we did it to sort of see if we could do it. And that, my friends, is a dangerous thing.
So when I say, don’t design to prove you can do something, I’m talking about it as a motivation. What I’m saying is, like, here is the inherent danger, I believe, which is, I believe people who design games are pretty much, pretty much all game players. You know. It is hard to create something that you aren’t familiar with. Meaning it is hard for example to write stories if you don’t love stories. It’s hard to make music if you don’t love music. So if you’re a game designer, odds are you’re a game player.
And what that means is that you are the type of person who really enjoys challenges. That’s why games are fun. Games are about creating challenges, you’re proving yourself or testing yourself or expressing yourself, but it really gives you an opportunity to show what you’re capable of.
And I talk a lot about the Spike mentality, one of our psychographics who—about trying to prove what you’re capable of. There’s some of that in everybody, there’s a little bit of Spike in everybody. Of you’re playing a game to kind of show what you can do.
And the danger I think is, it is very easy when you’re a game designer and a lover of games to turn everything into a game. You know. And in general that’s not a bad thing. In general, you know, one of the—like, they talk about gamification.
And what gamification is, is saying, can you take the principles of what makes something a fun game and apply it to other things? They talk a lot about it for schools, for example, which is, what you’ve found is, students can—there are certain ways to teach that students just respond better. And one of [those ways] is putting things in terms where the people are having fun learning. Games are a good way to do that.
Like, I remember when I was a kid, like we used to do spelling bees for vocabularies. Where we would do spelling bees, but we were learning the vocabulary words. Or, for example, when I was in tenth grade, we had a mock trial where Julius Caesar was put on trial and I was his defense attorney.
And it was a lot of fun because like I had to do all this research to sort of prove him innocent, but really what I was doing was studying history. Who was Julius Caesar? What did he do? How could I prove or disprove that what he did was right or wrong? And different people were, you know, different people we had to call as witnesses. And they had to study their person. All historical people, obviously.
You know, and I look through all the different things I did and the fun things I did, and that it is fun to take things you have to learn and make a game out of it. It just makes learning easier and more fun. And so in general, the gamification of taking things and making games out of them usually is a good thing. It usually takes things that are less fun and makes them more fun.
Okay, so you’re a game designer. You’re making a game. You just have—you’ve grown up making things into games. That’s why you’re a game designer. Because you already have this inclination to gamify things. Why wouldn’t you turn the making of a game into a game? You’re a gamer! It’s a game! It’s a meta-game! It’s the game of making a game! It is so attractive. It is so easy to want to do that.
And remember that when you’re playing a game, one of the goals of a game—hold on a second, I have hiccups. Let me take a sip of water here. One of the goals of a game is to test yourself. I talked about this all the time, that a game isn’t something where everything’s supposed to come easy. A game is supposed to create challenges for you. That’s kind of why a game is fun. You know.
And so, one of the things that I think happens is that people making games go, “Okay, well, let’s make this challenging.” Now, here’s the funny thing. I do believe that there’s reasons and places to make challenges for yourself. For example, I talk about “Restrictions breed creativity,” that’s a lesson I’ll get to down the road. I think it’s number eighteen. But there’s times where you want to have artificial restrictions to help you go down a different path. To help you design something you never designed before.
It’s not that you can’t sort of challenge yourself. But I’m talking about a very specific thing. Where you say, “Okay. Here’s something I’ve never done, and I’m going to do that thing simply because I’ve never done it before.” And this is why this one is tricky. This is why I get a lot of feedback on this, is that sometimes you do end up proving something that can’t be done.
My point today is not that you can’t through design prove things, my point is that can’t be your main motivation. That—so one of the things I talk about is, what is your goal as a designer? So your goal is to deliver an optimal experience for your target audience. You know. That my job when I’m making a game is to make the best game I can make. And when I say, “best game,” I mean, “Who is this game for? Who am I aiming this game at?” I’m not just making a generic game, I’m making a game for a particular audience, and I want to make my game the best it can be for that audience.
But whenever you find yourself getting a different goal, whenever a different thing drives you, you start getting into trouble. And the problem here is, trying to prove you can do something is not necessarily making it beneficial for the end user. It is making it more beneficial for you, the person making it. That when your goal shifts from delivering the optimal experience to your target audience, you start making different choices.
And that’s the key here is, I’m not trying to say today that when the dust settles, you can’t have proven something. I’m [not] saying that you can’t find ways to do things you’ve never done before. The point is, you need to get there from an honest place. You need to get there because it serves what you’re doing.
A good example is, I use Innistrad a lot, but this does illustrate the point, which is we did not start Innistrad saying, “We’re gonna do double-faced cards. Okay, well how could we make double-faced cards work?” No, we went into it saying, okay, we are trying to figure out how to make dark transformation work. How to make werewolves work. You know, we were trying to figure out how to take our themes that we were working with and make our themes do what we wanted them to do. That double-faced cards was a solution to a problem, not an end solution unto itself.
And that that is the difference, is that what you want is, you want to be able to explore what you need to explore to get to the place you want to do. And I think a lot of times when people hear this, they’re saying—like, some people read this lesson as, “Don’t challenge yourself.” Or, “Don’t push in places you haven’t pushed before.” Or, “Don’t try to break new boundaries.” I’m not saying any of that. That’s not what this lesson is. What this lesson is saying is, understand your motivations.
And one of the things that I know is, it takes a big ego to design something. And the reason is, is, part of design is taking an idea, embracing the idea, pushing it, and selling it, and that in order to bring something to life, in order to take something that doesn’t exist and—there’s a lot of willpower needed. You really have to have belief in your idea.
Like, I tell stories about how I came up with something that I thought was interesting, and there was resistance to it. Because I was doing something I hadn’t done before. But in each case, or the more successful cases, it wasn’t that I was doing it for the sake of doing it.
So I’m going to tell a story, and I’m going to leave names out of this, but we had—there was a Magicdesigner who I liked—it was someone who was a very good Magic designer, but this designer had a tendency to try to do stuff to see if they could do it. That they were, like—one of the things about their designs was, they were always trying to figure out, could we do something we hadn’t done before, and they were very motivated by—it wasn’t that they were motivated to necessarily figure out what they wanted and figure out the best way to get there, they were very motivated by doing something we hadn’t done before.
And it got them into some very dangerous places, because if your main motivation is to do something that hasn’t been done before, you start finding reasons to justify it. You go, “I really want to do Thing X, okay, what do I have to do to make Thing X work?” And you sometimes get to places where you kind of rationalize stuff. You’re like, “Well, I want to do this, and for this to be true, I guess I have to do this other thing.” And you start making decisions that aren’t about the optimal gameplay experience. It’s sort of like, “Well, I need to defend this thing I want to do. How do I defend this thing?”
And a good example I see is when people talk to me all the time about the color wheel. And one of the interesting things—so the color wheel is, for those non-Magic people listening, I get—these podcasts get some people that are game designers that aren’t necessarily Magic players. Color wheel is the five colors of Magic, talking about sort of the flavor of each one.
So one of the things I get all the time is people saying, “Hey, I think this color should be able to do this thing, and I’m going to explain in flavor philosophy why I think it’s okay.” And one of the things that’s really dangerous is that the color pie is about—I mean, when you go to the heart of the color pie, it’s about delineating colors. Giving them strengths and weaknesses so that they separate from each other. So that there’s a reason to play green, and why green is different than red, which is different from black, which is different from blue, which is different from white. That the color pie exists for delineation.
And so one of the things that’s really careful is, when you’re trying to find new space, and we’re constantly looking at, is there new places colors can go? The thing we’re careful not to do is, I never say, hey, what—could we do this in red? Like, let’s justify the ability, like let’s do something in red, and then like, okay, let me figure out why it would make sense. You know, the answer always has to be, what’s the essence of what the color is? What’s the philosophy? And then try to find solutions based out of the essence of what the color is.
You know, one of the big things that happens is, like let’s—Commander is a very popular format, a casual format, and because there’s elements of that format that push in different places than the normal game, the color pie has been sort of stretched a bit, or—some colors, red in particular, doesn’t have the tools of some of the other colors, because it’s a format that goes more to a long game, because it’s a multiplayer format that’s slower, and red has always been sort of pushed as the quicker color that tends to burn out quickly.
And so it was a mismatch. That red—you know, Commander players were always arguing about, could we do more stuff for red. And the trick has been, okay. How do we find things that are inherently red that solves this problem, vs. hey what do you need, how do we justify putting that in?
And those are—it is sometimes hard to—there’s a difference between saying, “What do people want, let me justify it,” and “Okay, let me think about the essence of what the thing is, how do we push in certain new directions?”
And like I said, this whole lesson today is talking a lot about where are your energies coming from. That is—and so I did a podcast not too long ago called, “Let the Best Idea Win.” [NLH--Not transcribed yet, here's the audio] And that podcast hit on a lot of themes that this lesson—and some of this lesson came out of similar places that that lesson came out of.
Which is, you as a designer—I think there’s a phase that all artists go through. I don’t think this is unique to game design. Where you, I think when you start as an artist, creating anything, there’s a very selfish drive that starts you as an artist. That I think that the reason artists are artists is something about what they’re doing has this need to do it.
A good example is, you know, I’ll take writing for example. One of the big questions is, how do you know if you’re a writer? And the answer is, you write. And what that means is, writers have to write. Like for example, take myself is, I do a lot of question answering on my blog. You know, I’ve answered, I don't know at this point, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, some crazy number of questions on my blog in five, six years. And the reason is that I love writing, and my job gives me some writing, I have a column that I write, I mean I write a column every week, obviously I do this podcast, and I also, I do a comic, and I answer a lot of questions.
And the reason I think I answer so many questions is, I really like writing. I really, I think I’m trying to find a place to write. And my column scratches some of that itch, but there’s a give and take. There’s a sort of a freshness to answering question that—I think the reason I write as much as I do, that I create—the reason I make as much content as I do is I just have this drive to make content. It’s who I am. That, you know, it’s the artist within me that just has to make things.
And I think that when you first start being an artist, that there’s a very selfish quality that you’re trying to—and I don’t, when I say selfish, I want to be clear, I don’t think being selfish is inherently a bad thing. As you’ll see, I believe you have to be careful how it dictates actions, we’ll get to that in a second. But anyway, I believe when you start as an artist, it is inherently a selfish thing. You’re like, “I have this need to fill. I’m gonna do it. I need to make music. I need to paint. I need to dance. I need to design games.” There’s something that’s just in your soul that you have to do.
And most people, just talking about game design, I’ve met a lot of game designers. You know. Some amateurs, some professional. But all the game designers sort of, like, “Well why do you make games?” it’s like, “Well, I—I kind of had to make games. I just, there’s something about it. I needed to do it. It fulfilled something.”
So the thing is, when you start the artistic process, I believe you start from a selfish place in that you are trying to sort of do something that you inherently want to do. Now, not a bad thing. And when I say “selfish,” what I mean there is there’s something within you that you have to meet. That it’s a very inward-looking thing. It’s, “Oh, I need to do this thing, I’m gonna do this thing.”
And a lot of creative expression is very inward-facing. You know. A lot of, for example, writing, is about finding your own experiences. You know. And that’s true of—I mean, I use writing only because I’m a writer, but whatever your art is, that you look within and you find something that is true about yourself that usually you find and you think is universal. That I had this thing, I shared this thing with people, and like, “I’ve experienced this, have you experienced this?” That’s very common.
With games, what you’ll find is a lot of people will figure out games they like and elements of games they like, and then get very influenced by those—not that they’re repeating those games exactly, but they’re figuring out the style of the things they like.
For example, I know Magichas influenced a lot of games, because Magichas certain qualities that people really enjoy. The idea of, you know, I have some say in what my game is. I have some flexibility in choosing what it is. You know. I have—the idea that you can mix and match things and find cool combos, the idea that you get to express things, the idea that—you know, there’s a lot of different elements of Magicthat people like and have turned into games. Or better yet, have been inspired to make their own game. Not hat they’re making Magic, they’re making their own game, but clearly Magic has had an influence on them.
One of these days—this one requires some research, so I need to do—but one of these days maybe I’ll do a podcast talking about all the different games that have been influenced by Magic. I actually need to do some research because there’s a lot of games out there. But anyway, that’s a cool article. Maybe a future article or podcast.
Okay. So, you’re inward-looking. Like, what I’m trying to say is, there’s something about the experience that starts from a very selfish place and a very inward-looking place. So, there is a progression that happens as you become an artist where you start by fulfilling a selfish need, and you slowly learn over time that you need to serve the purpose.
Like, I just—as we were recording, I was recording this, the Oscars were last night. Yes, the Oscars where they messed up the finals andeverything. And what happened was, there was a line that one of the—I think Viola Davis said this? [NLH--Could not confirm. Tweet me at @nlh_rt if you know.] One of the winners said it. And they said that they had an acting teacher that said something really important to them. That your duty is to the character. That you are trying to bring the character to life, and you are making decisions to do right by the character.
And what that lesson is saying is that once you become an artist, and once you start embracing your art and trying to be the best that you can be, what you learn is that you are working in the service of the thing you are making. You are not working in service of yourself. You are not—the best design or the best art of anything doesn’t come from making yourself happy.
Like when I was a kid, for example, I took acting lessons. I did a lot of acting as a kid growing up, I did a lot of theatre and stuff, and so one of the places I went is I grew up in Cleveland, and Cleveland has a playhouse called the Cleveland Play House, and they offered classes. The Cleveland Playhouse offered classes. Called Youth Theatre. Which I was very active in, I did a lot of plays and stuff.
And I had a teacher once who—we were doing, it was like an audition class or something. And he was talking about whether you had “it.” Like, what he said is, one of the things about our audition is, you want the auditioner to say that you had “it.”
And he was trying to explain what “it” was. And he was saying there’s just a quality that you have that draws people in. And he was going around, and he was saying who he felt had “it” in the audition. And when he got to me, he said, “Mark, you have it, but for the wrong reasons.”
And I spent years trying to understand what that meant. Like, how could I—the quality we needed, I had the quality we needed, but I had it for the wrong reasons. What did that mean? And I think what I finally—what he was saying, and like I said. This is something that’s sort of, through your life you sort of, like, you—as you slowly piece things together, and then you look back and all these things make sense you didn’t understand, what he was saying was, I was too inward-facing. That I was doing the things I was doing, but I wasn’t serving the character, I was serving me. I was serving the artist. And that I was capturing a lot of the essence of what was needed, but my motivations were off. What he was saying is, wow, you could shine if you get your motivations in the right place.
And that’s a lot of what today’s lesson is, is trying to understand that it is so easy to look inward. And it is so easy to make decisions, sort of what makes you happy. And a lot in life, when you are trying to do things, you know, for any sort of recreational thing, when you’re trying to do something to make you happy, hey. Pick the thing that makes you happy. You know. I don’t—I’m not trying to say that selfishness or inward-looking or any of that is a bad thing. That’s a good thing.
What I’m trying to say is, there comes a point though with art, where you have to understand. You have to at some point—part of the growth of an artist, growth of a game designer is making the following leap. Is saying, “I’m going to stop making decisions because it enhances my making of the game, and eventually I’m going to make decisions because it’s the best thing for the game.”
And here’s a good example in Magic. And like I said, this kind of ties in to “Let the best idea win.” Is, there’s a point in Magicwhere you’re very focused on, what in the set is yours? “I made this card. I made this mechanic. This element of the set is mine.” And it’s not that you shouldn’t have pride in your game. It’s not that you shouldn’t see yourself in your game.
But you have to recognize—like, at some point in Magic design, what I find is, there’s a maturing point where you’re like, “This card is an excellent design. This card is a good card. I’m proud of making this card. But… this is not the best place for this card. This card is not serving the set.”
Now, you know, I quote this a lot, so you’ve heard my, [“No scene is worth a movie, no line is worth a scene.”] Talking about in screenwriting, how a line just because it’s good can’t be in the scene if it doesn’t serve the scene, and a scene being good can’t be in the movie if it doesn’t serve the movie.
That part of what you learn, and even in writing, one of the things they teach you in writing is—so, writing is not just writing. One of the things they teach you about writing is, writing is the first part of the process. And the second part of the process is rewriting. It’s like, first get the ideas out of you, get it on paper, so that you have something to work with, and then it’s about going back and crafting that thing that you’ve made.
And one of the things they really stress to you in writing is, if you can take it out, and it still works, take it out. And the idea being, if your story can hold without those words, if your story makes sense without them, if your story can exist without them, then they shouldn’t be there.
And probably the best place to see this, I took a class on poetry. Now, I’m not big into poetry, but one of the things that I loved about poetry, and why the class was really interesting is, poetry is about conservation of words.
That it is, you know, you are so focused that every word means, like—it’s easy to throw in a word that doesn’t quite mean something in a story. Not that you should, but if I write, you know, one hundred thousand words, and there’s three words that probably couldn’t be there, eh, it’s hard to notice. When I write a sixteen-word poem and a word’s not supposed to be there, you notice.
And so the neat thing about poetry is, it really condenses you down. Like, for example, I’ll use a more modern example. Twitter. One of the geniuses of Twitter is the hundred and forty characters. [NLH--Since changed to 280[ And one of the things that I love about Twitter, that, you know, restrictions breed creativity is, I really appreciate that I have to learn how to convey something and I have to be so exact.
Like, one of the neat things about Twitter is, I write a tweet, and then I go back and I go, “Okay.” Especially when I’m over, right? I go over my 140 and I’m like, “Okay. Well, what words could I take out of this but still mean the same thing?” In some ways, to me, learning how to Twitter is a lot like learning how to write poetry.
And another similar thing. When I first did Twitter, my response to Twitter was, “Oh, this is a lot like doing one-liners in standup.” That when you do standup, there’s different kinds of jokes. And so one of the jokes is called a one-liner. Where it’s meant to be just as a quick, you know, I throw it out there, it’s funny, and then I move on.
Now, sometimes there’s routines where there’s things built upon each other. But one-liners are fun to have because they’re good to throw within jokes, they’re good to throw between jokes, they’re good to have just as a little tool to help you.
And tweeting’s a lot like a one-liner, and a one-liner’s a lot like poetry. In that it’s a (???) conservation of energy. I have one line to be funny. I don’t have time to waste, I don’t have setup. The line’s got to cover everything.
And a lot of this is, part of this transition you’re going to make, of being an artist and being a game designer, is at some point you say, okay. Like—there’s a point where you make stuff and you’re proud of the stuff and you just want to keep the stuff there. And what you find yourself doing is trying to justify why it belongs there. You know, rationalization is quite compelling.
And at some point, you make the following leap in Magic design, in game design, in any art, I guess, where you say, “I really appreciate what I’ve done. I really like what this is. But I have to let it go.” And that is one of the toughest things I think about art in general, game design, is that I think a lot of people talk about, “The hardest thing of making something is the act of creation. Creating something is so hard.”
And I actually think, emotionally, it’s not the hardest thing. Because when you’re creating something, you’re excited. And I’m not saying there’s not angst in the creation process. There is. But usually when you’re making something, there’s a joy when you’re making. “I’ve created something that doesn’t exist and I’m making it.” That can be quite joyful.
I think the truest hard part in the act of creation is not making something that hasn’t been made before, it’s taking something that you love, that you’ve crafted, that you’re proud of, taking something that you’ve made, that you really enjoy the thing of what it is, and realizing that it is not serving the larger purpose. That you have to let it go.
And that is one of the toughest things. You know. One of the things I’ve been trying to do with these lessons is jump around to show how these lessons apply to different things. So let me go to parenting.
For those of you that are parents—a lot of you aren’t parents. But one of the interesting things you learn as a parent is, what is the biggest difference between life before children and life after children? And the biggest difference is, life before children, you get to prioritize yourself. And life after children, you have to prioritize the children.
And that is something that is—some people adapt to that very quickly, and some don’t. And one of the hard things about parenting is that you have to figure out how to make decisions that are the best decision, not for you, but for your child. And what will happen from time to time is, you will—like, a lot of the time, what is best for you is what’s best for the child and everybody’s happy. But you will eventually come to a point where you’re like, oh. What is best for the child is not what’s best for me.
Here’s a good example. My father, growing up, was a jock. Wrestling was his big thing. But hew as a jock. He was really into sports. And my dad had two kids, myself and my sister. And I think my dad, you know, really looked to me and said, “Oh, this is a whole part of my life that I really love, do I get to share this with my son?” You know. “I love sports.”
And I did not love sports. You know. It was not something I ever got into. I loved writing, you know, I was on the newspaper, I loved acting and theatre and I did all sorts of theatre stuff. But I was never into sports. Never into sports.
And one of the things that my dad did, which makes me love my dad even more, is he embraced who I was, not who he wanted me to be. Maybe you see where I’m going here. In that he said, “What is the best for my son? Okay, I’m going to raise him in the things that he loves. I’m not going…” You know. “I would love it if he did this, but that’s not who he is. So I’m not going to make my son do the things that I love just because I would enjoy doing those with him.” You know. “I’m going to do the things that he loves because I want him to be happy.”
And your game is a lot like your kid. That you have to put your kid first. You have to make choices—and there—I feel like there are times as a game designer where there’s something you would love to be true. There’s something you would love if your game had. That’s something that you loved in another game, maybe? You know, something that you—maybe it’s something that you grew up with that you really loved, or there’s something about it, there’s some element that you would just love to be part of this game. Because it really meant something, or means something to you. But you have to come to realize at some point that it’s not what’s in the best interest of the game. And so you have to learn to let it go.
And that is the lesson that I’m sort of trying to get across today is, that there’s a journey that you will make as a designer. And that journey is, you know, coming to realize that you can’t come first. You know. The way I put it in my talk is, I said, “Are you delivering an optimal experience for your target audience, or is it being done to fulfill an inwardly facing need for self-satisfaction?”
So essentially what I’m saying is, are you making the choices that are in the best interest of the game? Are you putting the game first? Are you thinking about how to make the game the happiest, (???), that it can be?
You know. And that—are you serving the character? Are you serving the story? Are you serving the game? You know. And that—the parenting metaphor is actually a pretty apt metaphor. Because one of the tricky things—I mean, the one thing parenting has going for it is you can see the joy of your kids. Right? I mean, there’s payoff and reward of seeing my child happy. So.
And the game—I mean, I guess the reward there on some level is watching people be happy with your game. Watching the game make other people happy. That is the joy that you get. That when you make something awesome, when you make a really good game, that you get to see the people enjoy your game. That’s kind of the equivalent of seeing your kid laugh, I guess. Or enjoy themselves from something that they love to do.
And so the big question here—and like I said, this—I think the reason I get so much pushback from this lesson is, this is one of the most advanced lessons that I gave. I didn’t put them in any order of, like, how hard they are to learn.
But the fact that this is the one that I got so much pushback on, I think means—two things. One is, I had twenty lessons to give in an hour, so I went very briefly through them. Maybe this lesson’s just one that, having extra time to talk about it helps me really explain what it is. That’s part of it. And part of it is, I think a lot of people don’t realize they haven’t learned this lesson yet. This is a pretty advanced lesson.
Because a lot of times, there are times when you push to go in a new place, that what you’re doing is serving the game. So for example, I’ll use the werewolf example from Innistrad. When my team was trying to solve the werewolf problem, and Tom LaPille came and said, “Hey, Duel Masters does these double-faced cards, we could try those,” my first gut instinct was, “double faced…?”
Like, I really sort of, like—one of the things I’ve learned is, whenever I get approached by something that’s really out there, my first thing is going, “Wow, okay, I don’t want to do it just to do it.” And I always have to do a little bit of soul-searching.
Like, there is an excitement to doing something that’s never been done before. And I know whenever I sort of break some boundary, that I’m like, okay, there’s a thrill of just doing the thing that hasn’t been done. And I want to make sure that I’m not doing it for that. That I always have to check myself. That whenever I’m doing something that, like, okay, this… you know, this is the kind of thing that if I just let my inner self go, “Ooh, this sounds fun,” not fun for the game sense but fun in a—as a person who loves exploring things, you know, this would make the game of inventing fun.
That whenever I come across that, where I know my gut instinct is to want to embrace it, because, you know, it is this thing that would make it more fun for me, I always go, “Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Is this servicing what I’m doing?”
And I actually—with the double-faced cards, I said, “Okay. I want to do human/werewolf,” Tom says, “Look, how about double-faced cards?” Let me think about that. Okay, well, it is true that it’s in two states. Double-faced card has two states. It is true that I get to really clearly identify each side—like I—as I walked through it, I’m like, “Oh, no no no. This does serve what I’m trying to do.”
Now, I was skeptical even then. I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna put it through its paces,” but I said, okay. I’m willing to try it. It is meeting the goals of the game. It is what the game—you know, I laid down for my team the rule—like, normally when I have a problem to solve, the first thing I do is I say to my team, here’s the things that need to be solved. Here’s the—you know, the things we must have. The unconditional, you know, the non—what’s the word I’m looking for? The non-negotiables. Here are the things the mechanic must have. Here are the things it needs to do.
Now, sometimes I even come back ad go, “Oh, wow. Did we really need that?” But normally I want to give my designers a path. But the path is defined, not by what I think would be fun, but by what I think the thing needs.
So the idea is, I do think that there’s opportunities to prove yourself. I do think—like, one of the reasons I enjoy game design is, I like being creative, I like solving puzzles, I like being challenged. The big switch though was figuring out—if you just try to solve the problems as best you can, they will naturally create—like, you will get a chance to prove things. You will get a chance to challenge yourself. All those things that you as a gamer want, that if you’re true to your game, there will be challenges.
I have designed—you know, this is my—you know, October’s my 22nd year, my 22nd anniversary of designing Magic. So I guess I’m in my 21styear. And—or in my 22nd year. And the idea is, it is not like—I understand this desire to be challenged. I understand the desire to prove yourself. And my point is, you can have those opportunities. I think sometimes when people say, “You can’t prove yourself, no, I did something awesome, and I did prove something.”
And the answer is, you can prove something as long as you’re proving something because you’re working in service of the game. When I say don’t design something just to prove that you can, you know, don’t design to prove you can do something, don’t make that the motivation. That’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t make your motivation for doing it the proof. Don’t make the act of doing it the reason you do it.
That if you’re working in the service of your game, if your game says, “I need Thing X or Y,” and now I have to solve the challenge, or now I find something that I think can work and I have to prove that it can work, you know, you do—I wasn’t saying that you can never prove something in design. You can. You do. You know, I was never saying that that can’t be a by-product of what you’re doing. What I was trying to say today is that that isn’t the driver.
And that there’s a simple test. It really is that what you have to do with every aspect of your game—and I know this sounds silly, but I’m dead serious—you have to look at every component of your game, and literally say. “Am I delivering the optimal experience for my target audience?”
So let’s break that down. Optimal experience means I have a lot of choices of how I can do something. Am I doing it the best way I can? Is this the best way? I’ve gotta look at my card, at my mechanic, at whatever I’m doing, my component of my game, and saying, “Can I do it better?” You know. “Is this the best that I can do?”
Because one of the ways to challenge and prove yourself is to constantly be trying to improve yourself. You know. When you’re writing a book for example, when you’re rewriting, when you’re editing yourself, one of the things you’re always saying is, have I said this in the best way I can say it? Is there a better way to say it? Is there a better way to convey it?
You know, when I’m writing a poem, is there a better turn of phrase? Is there a better word? When I’m composing a tweet, is there, you know—can I literally choose words that have less letters in them? You know. Can I convey the same idea, but less wordily? You know. That I’m trying to fit in that constraint.
When I’m doing stand-up and I’m doing a one-liner, like, have I self-contained everything? Have I made it—you know, does the line have everything I need in it? You know, in comedy for example, comedy works on a rhythm of there. That everything has threes in them. And so one of the things about telling jokes is figuring out, are you matching the rhythm of three? And—maybe one day I’ll do a podcast on humor. But anyway, when you’re writing your one-liner, or whatever joke you’re writing, are you matching the rhythm? Are you telling the kind of things you need?
What I’m saying here is, whatever you’re doing, are you—making a dance. Painting a picture. Writing a song. Whatever you’re doing. Designing a game. Whatever you’re doing. Are you making it the best version of what it can be? When I say the optimal experience, I’m saying, “Can it be better?”
So say to yourself, “I like this or don’t like this.” If you don’t like it, obviously, change it. If you do like it, then say, “Okay, I like it, but is this the best that I can do? Can I do it better? Is there something that would better service the things I need?”
So when you’re looking at what you’re doing, you always want to be questioning, what is the goal of what you want? How do I best serve the game? What do I need to do? And then with each answer, sort of look back and go, oh. Am I best serving it? Is this the thing that will do the best?
Actually, I skipped over “deliver.” Real quick. When I say “deliver,” it’s important that.. “Will the audience see the thing I’m doing?” That part of delivering is not just “Am I doing it”—“Will the audience understand I’m doing it?”
This is another one that you have to be careful of is, make sure that if you’re trying to meet a need—I talk about elsewhere in this talk, all about how you gotta put the fun where the people can find it. [NLH--Not sure which one he's referring to. Tweet me at @nlh_rt if you know.] Whatever the experience, whatever you’re trying to get, not only do you have to make sure you do it, you have to make sure people know it’s there. Because it being there and not being seen by anybody isn’t servicing you.
So I skipped over “deliver.” So “deliver” means, are you putting it in a place that they can see? Is it in a form that they can absorb? Not that you can’t find things—like, you can hide things, I’m not saying that everything has to be out in front. But you want to make sure that when they get there in the right place, that they’re able to understand and find this thing.
So okay. So “deliver an optimal experience,” “is it the best that it can be,” and then “for your target audience.” Who are you making the game for? One of the biggest mistakes, and I’ll get into this in one of the future talks is, if you don’t understand who you’re designing for, you can sometimes design for no one.
And so one of the things you have to ask yourself is not just—okay. Have I made it something that people can understand? You know, is it the best version it can be? And, is it for the right people? Is it for the people that want this thing?
Like for example I talked earlier about making cards for a format. For Commander. [NLH--Not sure which one he's referring to. Tweet me at @nlh_rt if you know.] Well, one of the reasons this is important is, I can’t solve the problem if I’m not in the end making something they want.
Like, one of the things about in Magic, we refer to three or more players in Magic as “multiplayer.” I understand two people are “multi-.” But in Magic we mean three or more players when we say “multiplayer.”
And when we make cards for multiplayer, one of the things I spend a lot of time in is figuring out, well, what do they want? Because in the early days we would make things that like, in theory would—like, we made things that were optimized in multiplayer play without asking ourselves, “Is this what they want?”
And we ended up making a lot of cards that while were strong in multiplayer, they weren’t fun in multiplayer. And the key there is, it’s not about making the strongest version that you can make, it’s about making the most enjoyable version, that people who play it want to have. So when I say “your target audience,” I’m saying, “Are you making the thing that is going to satisfy the people that want that thing?” Understand who you’re making this for.
Now, if the thing you’re making isn’t recognizable, or isn’t the best version, or isn’t for the right people, it’s gotta go. You know. That the reason I want you to sort of do the checklist here and run through it is, it is so easy to look at things in a vacuum. It’s so easy to go, “Wow, this is a really good card. Wow, this is a really good mechanic. Wow, this is a really good component.” But… or, “This is a good line, this is a good scene, this is a good drawing of this, this is a good step.” Pick whatever you want.
That you always have to sort of stand back and look at the bigger picture. And say, you know, “Do I have it, and for the right reason?” You know. “Am I delivering what this game needs, what this audience needs, what the players need, am I delivering it in the best form I can?”
And that’s what today is about. That’s what today’s lesson is about. And like I said, I’m kind of happy that I had a podcast, because I think of all the lessons I gave in my talk, it was the one that suffered the most from being condensed in the smallest amount of space. That when you give twenty lessons, you know, in an hour, you don’t got a lot of time per lesson. You’ve got three minutes per lesson. That’s not a lot of time.
And so I’m glad to have a little more stretched-out time today. Although we actually had—we had a little traffic today, so how much time—we had a lot of extra time today, so anyway, I’m almost to Rachel’s school so I’m going to wrap this up. There’s snow here, so whenever there’s snow there’s extra traffic.
But anyway, the point of today’s talk. The takeaway I want for you. If you are a game designer, you have to ask yourself the following question. There’s a leap that you need to make. There’s a maturation that happens.
There’s—one of the ways that I think you go from being—I mean, there’s a bunch of ways, I mean, getting paid I guess is the delineated way from going from amateur to professional. But one of the big ways of sort of making the big leap from “I am doing it for myself” to “I am doing it for other people” is that guideline, of saying—of recognizing that your decision-making is not optimizing the game for you, it is optimizing the game for the game. You know. That maybe you grew up doing sports, but your kid—not into sports. So you’ve got to figure out what your kid likes. What do they want to do? What best serves the kid?
You know, your game in many ways is your baby. And there’s a lot of things you might want your game to be. You know, one of the hardest things being a parent, growing up, is learning that your child is not going to be necessarily what you want—you know, what you expect your child to be. Your child’s going to take their own path and their own form. And part of the joy in parenthood is learning to love that. That they get to be their own person and do their own things and make their own choices.
And you won’t agree with every choice they make. You won’t agree with everything they do. But you want to help them in their path. You want to understand what their path is and then optimize their path for them.
Same with your game. Your game is not necessarily going to take the path that you expected. It’s not necessarily going to be the game that you envisioned when you first started the game. But if you really want to make an awesome game, if you really want to make the best game you can, you have to let the game be the game, and you have to support the game being what it is. Not what you want it to be, but what it is. And if you do that, if every time you make a decision, you’re making a decision to make sure that the game comes first, if you’re doing it to meet the game, and not prove that it’s something you can do, that’s how you end up with a truly great game.
Okay, guys, I’m now at Rachel’s school. So anyway, you know what that means, it means it’s the end of my drive to work, so instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Bye-bye, guys.