10/11/13 Episode 60: Comfort

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of the parking lot! What? So I had to drop off my daughter at camp today, because for me it’s still summer. I know in the future, I think—I believe it’s no longer summer. But right now it is summer, and so I had to drop off Rachel at camp. But it is still time for Drive to Work! So—and I think I’m driving a little farther than normal today, because I had to go to camp. So a little extra content for you, I believe.

So today, I thought I would talk about communications theory! Because I wrote an article about it, and it’s a very interesting topic. Much, much worthy—or, very worthy of a little more insight and a little more depth of talking about it. So today I’m going to talk about my college education and how it applies to my current job.

Okay, so a little background here to understand where I come from. Okay, so—back when I was a wee one, I have always been very interested in media. In film, in television, in the internet, although when I went to school the internet was—was a young’un. In fact, the internet did not exist when I was in college. That’s how long ago I was in—well, it didn’t exist in any sort of real public way, I guess it existed. I was unaware. How is that?

So, I was always very interested. And in my heart of hearts, what I really wanted to do was I wanted to create television shows. Because I loved television. And I think the medium of television is a great storytelling medium.

Anyway, so the story goes, in my senior year—the summer of my senior year—or sorry, my junior year, I was supposed to travel abroad as part of a program called AFS. Which I don’t remember what AFS stands for. But the idea of AFS is, you get placed with a family in a foreign country. And then you spend the summer living with that family as sort of, you know, their adoptive family for the summer.

And so I went and did all the interviews. And then somehow, I—one of my interviews went bad. I got—I got rejected from the program. And I was very surprised, I’m like “What’s going on?” So I—I appealed, and I interviewed again, and this time my interview went really well, and they said “We don’t know what happened that last time, but, you know, welcome to AFS.”

But then, because it was late in the process, they weren’t able to place me. So I ended up not going anywhere. And I was very, very bummed at the time, it’s something that I was really looking forward to, and the idea of not doing it was—was upsetting. And my mom—so I was home that summer, because I obviously didn’t go, and my mom felt bad, so she was going to a conference in New Hampshire or something? But anyway, she said, “You know what? I’ve gotta drive, you know, to—to the East Coast.” I’m from Ohio, for those that don’t know. And she said, “Why don’t you come with me, we’ll make a trip out of it, we’ll see some colleges.” And a friend of hers was—she was meeting her friend, for the conference, and her friend was bringing her daughter, and they were planning to look at colleges, so we all looked at colleges together.

So one of the colleges that we looked at—not for me, but for her daughter, was a college called Boston University. And—well, I was there, so when I was there I discovered that Boston University had a College of Communications. Which I was quite excited about. And so a lot of times we talk about things happening for a reason, while I was really, really bummed that I didn’t get to go abroad and do all that, because of that I kind of accidentally found out about Boston University and its College of Communication.

And I went and I visited, and I was hooked. And I’m like “Here’s where I’m going to college.” I got in, and anyway I spent four years at Boston University’s College of Communications. COM, for short. I guess COC was too racy.

Well anyway, so one of the things that is very interesting is, so I was on the track to become—I wanted to write for television. And so I graduated, I went out to Hollywood, I became a production assistant. You’ve read some of these stories, and I was a runner for a while, and eventually I finally got a break and I got on staff. Of a show you might have heard I mentioned before.

And—but anyway, that was going on, and then, you know, I hit some hard times, and during that patch where I was doing a lot of freelancing, I was doing a lot of pitching at the time, I got a little stir-crazy, I ended up starting to work at a game store to sort of get out and meet people. It was at that game store that I first heard about Magic, and through Magic I ended up getting in contact with the company through the magazine, and made the puzzles, and you’ve heard all this.

But—so the important thing is, when I decided to take the job at Wizards, I really thought at the time, I’m like “Okay, well, yeah, I studied, I did all the communication work, but okay, I guess I’ll just toss that aside and I will go make games for a living.” And I thought at the time that it—my attitude really was, “Oh, well how am I going to use any communication stuff, you know, making games for a living?” Little did I know.

So what happened was, very early on, I was involved with The Duelist. In fact, when I first got to the company, when I first got hired, The Duelist actually was interested in hiring me. But I—they decided that I would work for R&D, but I would be the liaison to The Duelist.

So I ended up being the liaison to The Duelist. And then at one point, The Duelist was having problems, and they needed—oh, Kathryn Haines had left, the original editor, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, and they were struggling. And then somebody recommended that maybe I could do the job of being editor-in-chief. And I did. Although ironically, I did it while also being in R&D. And so—one of many balls I’ve juggled.

Anyway, so my first sort of—touch into communications was doing The Duelist. And then, many years later, the company decided that they were not as connected in to the internet as they should have been. I mean, we had a website, but it was very, very minimal, and, you know, The Duelist had gone away at this point, we’re like “You know, we really should take that kind of content we did in The Duelist and we should be doing that online.” And that assignment got passed down to Bill, and then Bill passed it down to me.

And so this sort of modern Magicthegathering.com, or now it’s DailyMTG.com—I was in charge of sort of putting that together. And I’ve talked about that. I don’t know if I can do a podcast on that. I’m not sure. No, I will one day.

But anyway, then I started doing a lot for the website, I started writing my column, obviously I had many columns in The Duelist. So for starters, I ended up getting a relationship where I did a lot of interfacing with the public. And then I also got very involved in sort of—the marketing and how we communicate with the public about what we do. I mean, obviously I do a blog now, and a podcast, and an article, and all sorts of stuff. I do a lot of things where I interface with the public. Big part of my job.

And communication theory becomes very important. So today I’m going to talk about kind of what I learned in college about a thing called communication theory. And—or communications theory, and then I’m going to talk about how it applies to Magic. I wrote an article on this, so some of this is me retreading the article. But I’ll go more in-depth than I did in the article just because I have more time.

Okay. So, let me explain something very quickly. There is something called “communication theory,” which has to do with understanding how people physically communicate to each other. You know. And that is, like, very much physiologically like “When I talk, what happens to the sound from my mouth and your ear, and…”you know, and how does our brain process that?

That’s a different thing than I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is what at the time I learned it was called “communications theory.” Now, I’ve—I’ve done a little—I went on the internet, and I think the terminology that I’ve learned has changed over time. Remember, I went to school twenty years ago. And so—or over twenty years ago.

So what I learned—I believe all—the stuff I learned is still true, I’m not sure if they use the same terminology today as they did then. So I learned it as communications theory, I don’t know if it has a different name now. But the basic premise of communications theory is it’s talking about media and saying “How do people use media, and how is communication shared between people?” Not one-on-one, like communication theory, but more like media-onto-individual. Meaning how does—how do you make your media such that it’s digestible by people?

So one of the things I learned in communication school—I mean, one of the most important things, and this comes through my work a lot, is the idea that if your job is to deal with humans, then you have to understand how humans work. You know. Humans are a—a very interesting bunch. In that we are very complex, our brains have all sorts of functioning that they’re still—I mean, to this day kind of understanding how it works.

But, while that is true, we are creatures of patterns and habits and there’s a lot of things that humans as a group pretty much do. Now, be aware, any kind of theory is talking about humanity as a whole. Any one person—there’s exceptions, obviously, to this. But what I’m talking about is, things that they’ve done a lot of testing, and pretty much is how humans function. Any one human might function differently, but as a group—as a race, as a species, this is how we function.

And the reason it’s really important is that communications theory says, “Look. Your job is to communicate with humans. Well, let’s understand humans. If you understand humans, it makes your job a lot easier.”

And essentially the idea is, how do humans absorb and take in media? So the thing I learned, basically, is there’s three things that you’re trying to provide the audience. The three main things. If you’ve read the article, you know this, but I will walk you through.

So the three things up front are comfort, surprise, and completion. And I’m going to explain what each of those means, because they’re actually—I’m trying to sum it up in a word, but some of these are a little more complex than a word.

So let’s start with the first one, surprise. Not surprise, comfort. Okay. So the important thing to understand about humans is this: humans are biologically built to fear things. So pretty much—the way to think of it is I would say, “Go back, look…” One of the interesting ways to understand humans as a species is to kind of go back to the beginning.

So once upon a time, we were hunters and gatherers, and look. We were very focused on survival. You know. None of this cushy “making podcasts” stuff. No, we were, you know, every day was about getting the food you need and getting the shelter you need and surviving. So when that was true, what was very important—well, I mean, and what was built into our DNA, if you will, was the idea of survival. Survival, survival, survival.

Well, what is the greatest threat to survival? The unknown. Because if you’ve done things, and they worked and you’re still alive, those things are probably good things. Meaning the known things are probably the safest things.

Now that doesn’t mean there might not be other safe things, but you don’t’ know that. And my example is, let’s say there’s a bush with berries on it. And you’ve eaten from this bush of berries. Well, you haven’t died, so what that says is “Oh, well these bushes—this bush is probably a good bush.” Because if you ate it yesterday, or a friend of yours ate it or a relative ate it, and they died, well that would be a bad bush. But you’ve eaten from them, hey! You’re still alive. Odds are, good bush.

Now, let’s compare that to another bush. That might look identical to the bush you’re eating out of, but you’ve never eaten off that bush. Now, okay—now, it looks like the bush you’ve eaten out of, so it’s got that going for it. But probably the bush you’ve eaten out of, you feel a little more confident than the bush you haven’t eaten out of.

Okay, now let’s go one step further. It’s a bush that looks nothing like your bush. Its fruit looks completely different. Well, that’s a lot scarier, because, you know, at least the bush that looks like your bush, you’ve had that fruit before. Odds are it’s the same fruit, odds are it’s safe. But now you have a new fruit. Well, this new fruit could be poisonous. Who knows?

And anyway, kind of built in to the self-preservation was this thing of—of just “Trust the known.” The known will keep you alive. The unknown will kill you. And so what happens is, humans have this natural tendency to stick to things that they know. We are creatures of habit. Humans are creatures of habit.

And one of the things I talked about in my article, which I will talk about here, is that communication says “Okay. How do we use that—how do we take advantage and use the knowledge of—of how much people are creatures of habit to our advantage?”

And the answer is, if you want your media to be successful, you need to make your media part of the habit of the viewer. And—for example, this is the classic study I always bring up, but it’s very famous and it makes the point. So there was a famous newspaper. I don’t remember what newspaper, but a big newspaper. Who wanted to figure out why people were reading their magazine. Sorry, their newspaper.

And so they had these—all these questionnaires and stuff. And so one of the questions was, “Hey, why do you read a newspaper?” And one of the answers was “To get news.” And that was #2. “To get news,” meaning the function of the paper, was #2. #1 was “Because I do it every day.” Which is, “I’ve made a habit of it.” You know. “My breakfast ritual involves me reading the paper.” You know.

Now, modern-day, the internet fills in for a lot of what the paper used to be, but, you know, one of the—like, for example, when I was building the website, one of the things I knew was, I wanted to make the destination of the website the habit. Because if I made it a habit, then people—like then I have human nature working for me, not against me.

So let me bring this up. This is—if ever there is a—a constant through my work, if ever there’s a theme that I have said, that you want to pay attention to, it is this, which is: you are not going to change human nature. Human nature is more powerful than you, the designer. And that your job is not to figure out how to change human nature, but how to design something that works with human nature. You want human nature helping you, not hurting you. Meaning if your game is trying to make people do something functionally different than they want to do, you are fighting an uphill battle.

Whereas, if your game rewards people doing what they naturally want to do, you know, the wind’s at your back. And I mean—I will say this time and time again, I mean it’s a theme that runs throughout my work, which is part of being a game designer is making something that fits with your audience, which are humans. That you have to match human behavior. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever fight expectations or fight human nature, but you have to do it very carefully and very—pinpoint points. And the main crux of what you’re doing cannot fight it.

So for example, I was making a website for Magic. Well, I wanted to make sure that I played into what humans wanted. Now, humans love patterns. Love love love patterns. In fact, there’s all sorts of psychological tests and stuff they’ve done where you put humans and put patterns in front of them, and they will complete the pattern.

Human brains—so why do we complete patterns? I’m not 100% sure. It has something to do with how we learn, is my guess. That I think what happens is, humans are pretty smart, and one of the ways that humans are smart is, the brain comes pre-loaded. So the way to think of it is, when you buy a computer, there’s some program that comes pre-loaded with the computer.

The same thing’s true for humans. When a human is born, the brain comes pre-loaded with certain things. Well, why? Because it’s supposed to help the human adapt and learn and survive. And one of the things the human brain does well is it learns really well. The human brain’s amazingly good at learning things. You know.

And so one of the—one of the ways it helps you learn is it attracts you to patterns. Because in general, patterns are good to know. Patterns help you. Patterns get you math. Patterns get you language. Patterns get you things you need. And so the human brain just thinks out patterns. So, what communication theory says is, “Okay, humans like patterns, patterns are comfortable, let’s do that.”

So for example, I can use a magazine, but a website’s very similar. You ever notice in a magazine, how like there’s sections of the magazine, and the same sections are in the magazine every time in the same exact place? Like that—if you sort of just broke apart your magazine, like, it just—it’s formulaic where things are, because the magazine has a structure to it.

Well why—why do that? Now for one, it’s easier to put it together. I mean that—you know, if you know I need section A and section B and section C it can be put together easy, but the reason to do it isn’t the ease of putting it together. Although that’s a nice side bonus. The real ease is, it makes it comfortable to the human. That when you pick up a magazine that you know, you just know where things are.

Websites, same way. We go way out of our way to make sure the same things are in the same place. So if you like Magic Arcana, it’s in the same place every day. You know, if you like Card of the Day, it’s in the same place every day. So part of comfort is making something that reinforces a pattern.

And so the thing about—about humans is, there’s certain patterns that we will follow. The biggest pattern is the pattern of a day. You wake up, you go to sleep, you wake up, you go to sleep, there’s certain things you do every day. Eating, for example. I mean, there’s just certain things that if you monitored your day, if you actually wrote every single thing you did and wrote down the time you did it, what you will find is, a lot of what you do, you do the same time very day.

And your body in fact gets used to that. You know what I’m saying? That your—when you try to change your schedule, for example when you change time zones, you know when you travel, what you’re doing to your body is just like your body is used to a certain biorhythm, a certain schedule, and like you’re just throwing your body for a loop. Your body’s saying, “What is going on?” You know. And then your body will slowly get adjusted to the new time zone. Then you go back, and like “What are you doing to me?”

So it is very important to understand the rhythm and the patterns, and then match that up. So one pattern is daily. Daily’s a very common pattern. The second big one is weekly, and the reason for that is, we have a structure to a week. A week is Sunday through Saturday. So “Oh, every Monday night, you might do something.” Or every Saturday morning, you might do something. So there are patterns that you set weekly.

And the third big one is monthly, which there are certain things that happen infrequently, but, you know, “Oh, the first Friday of every month I pay my rent.” Or whatever. There’s certain things that are on a monthly schedule.

So, those are the three things that humans have kind of learned to do. I’m not saying you can’t learn things at other time frames, but those are the three big ones. Those are the ones that humans naturally set up, which is daily, weekly, and monthly. So when we set up the website, for example, we had to make sure there was daily content and there was weekly content. We do a little bit of monthly content, but the website works better with daily and weekly.

So what that means for example is, there are certain things that will be there every day to show up. Card of the day, Magic Arcana are two examples where, you know, I know if I go to the website, that’s going to be there every day. And understand that the way we do it on the website is we just do weekdays, but humans will separate weekdays from weekends because, you know, you have other patterns that make you do that. Also, you act a little different on the weekdays than you do on the weekends because your schedule is different. Daily features is where we get the columns. Like “Okay, well every week, we’re going to have a column and bring that to you.”

Now, another thing about comfort is the presentation of where the comfort comes from. So another truism that I like to say is that people don’t connect with ideas, people connect with people. And so one of the reasons we—when we did the website, that we had columnists was that I want you to connect to design. But you can’t connect to the concept of design. But you can connect to a designer. Aka me. You know. We had Development content. Well instead of connecting with the concept of development, you know, we started with Randy Buehler, and, you know, now there’s Sam Stoddard.

And that—the idea is, there’s a person there to connect with. You know. We have a Timmy column. We have a Johnny column. We have a Spike column. You know. We—but in order—we have to give you personality. Why? Because once again, it is more comfortable. That you understand that. You know. That people can relate to people. And so if you have someone who has a constant voice and a sort of constant message to them…

And another thing we did, and we did this in The Duelist, we do this online, is the column is about something. It’s not just like “Eh, so-and-so talks about whatever they want to talk about.” There’s a theme. I talk about design and design principles. Now, I mean, I’m willing to stretch it a little bit, but if you notice, I always bring it back to design. I bring it back to what the column is about.

You know, if I’m going to talk about my wedding, let’s talk about building to a theme. You know, if I’m talking about my dating, I’m talking about design mistakes. That I always tie my thing back to my theme, because hey, this is what my column is about, people come to read it because they know “Oh, it’s about this thing.”

Same with my podcast. My podcast is about doing design and related Magic stuff—things. You know. It’s not like today in podcast I go, “Making cupcakes!” You know. Not that I’m very good at making cupcakes, so that would be a very bad—a very bad podcast. My wife makes good cupcakes though.

So anyway—so when I talk about comfort, what I’m saying is that it’s important early on, when you bring comfort to somebody, that you do it in a way—on many levels. You know. For example, I’ll give you a different thing. I talk about this in the column, which is story structure.

Because one of the things that’s amazing to me—so all stories, for those that don’t know, have a thing called “three-act structure.” Like, there’s a color wheel to represent colors, stories have something called “three-act structure.” And the easy to think of—the easiest way to think of three-act structure is beginning, middle, and end.

The middle is about twice as big as the beginning or the end sections, but if you see a movie, there is Act I, we have what we call “plot point,” where something happens. Act II, which is most of the movie, then a plot point, and then the end of the movie. Maybe one of these days I’ll do a—a podcast on three-act structure. It is fascinating.

But the thing today that’s interesting is that Act I is very much about comfort. What that means is, Act I of a story is, let me ground you in the world of the story. Let me make you connect to the story. I want to take the main character and maybe some other characters, and make you connect with them.  “Oh, I’ve experienced things like that character. Hey, I kind of relate to that character. Now I’m on board, and I—I’m connected to the story so now I care. I have an emotional bond to the story. Hopefully an emotional bond to the main character.” You know.

And that a lot of communication theory says “Okay, this comfort is very important, because humans—humans function better when emotionally invested.” That if you are—so for example, you’ll notice that when the newscasters report a story, so let’s say there’s a… there’s a cruise ship that sinks in the Mediterranean. Or whatever. What do they want to do?

They want to find somebody from the local area. Okay? So I’m from Seattle, so let’s say there’s a sinking cruise ship. The very first thing that the news people will do is they’re like, “Was anybody from Seattle on that cruise ship?” And if there were, then the story’s about “Hey, meet… Bob. Bob lives in a town near to you. Bob experienced this bad thing. Wasn’t that bad? Maybe we can talk to Bob.” You know?

Why do they do that? Why does the news do that? Because when you see Bob from your local neighborhood, you’re like “That could have been me. I could have been there. Wow. Imagine someone like me having that experience.” And it just—it makes it more personal.

And it makes it—when you boil down to it, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but humans are very egocentric. Which means that you believe in the things you believe in because they’re things you’ve experienced and understand. And the reality is, it’s so much easier to understand why things that matter to you matter than things that don’t matter to you. And it’s not—it’s not a bad thing, it just—it’s just from a pure experience standpoint, I’ve experienced these things. I understand them.

So for example, in Magic, one of the common things I run into is somebody says “Oh, I’m confused, here’s how I and my friends experience the game. Why doesn’t everybody experience it that way?” And I have to go “Oh, that’s…” you know, “Your experience is something of you and your friends, but that’s not—it’s not true of the whole group.”

Like one of the big problems I have with my blog is, I will say “We’ve done, you know, market research, or whatever. We have data that show something to be true.” And when I say true, I mean, you know, for the majority of the audience it is true.

And then I always get someone going “No, that can’t be true, because I’ve experienced something completely different.” And then I sort of say “Well, okay, you experienced something different, but that doesn’t mean you’re the majority.” And people will have a hard time, because they’re like “No no no, I’ve experienced this.”

Or, for example, “This is what Magic means to me. This is the kind of game Magic is to me.” Well, we make something that’s not for that kind of game. “Why are you making these cards? They’re worthless.” “Oh, well they’re not for you. You play a certain way of game, this is for a different audience. They’re just as valid, they also play the game.” You know.

And that—the egocentrism. Which is an inherent part of humanity. An inherent part of the human experience. And so part of making sure that the thing you’re doing connects is making people understand, you know, that—how it connects to them.

So here’s my—I will now sell the metaphor. I think I’ve talked about this before, but this is very important. Another creative thing that’s very important is the importance of the metaphor. I never metaphor I didn’t like.

So, why metaphors are so important. Which is, I’ve just explained that people—if they can emotionally connect to something, they will bond with it much easier. So if you have something and you want somebody to understand it, what you need to do is take it in the terms that it exists, and translate it into terms they understand. That’s what a metaphor does. A metaphor says, “Here’s something you do not comprehend. I will take something you do comprehend, and use that as a tool to help teach you what that thing is.”

So for example, let’s say I have some complex scientific process. And then I compare it to, you know, how you feed your dog or something. And you go “Ohh,” like, all of a sudden, ding ding ding! Like this thing that was this foreign thing—because if you don’t understand something, if you can’t connect it to something that you personally can relate to, it just is unrelatable. And it just—it’s distant. You know.

That one of the reasons, for example, that one of the reasons I write a lot of articles or do a lot of podcasts where I talk about personal things is… so for example. I could have written an article just about design mistakes. I could have written an article just about building toward your theme. You know.

But all of a sudden, like—I’ll take my design article, my, you know—like, I tied it to my relationship with women. And in most cases my failure—my dating foibles and things I did wrong. And what happened was, (???) with that article was, it did a really good job of people understanding. Because you know what? Everybody’s had dating problems. It’s super-universal.

And what happened was, I would say “Look, here’s the mistake I made, here’s why I make it, and here’s the same mistake! I’m making the exact same mistake but as a design. As a designer.” I mean, one of my beliefs, by the way, if you ever (???) me, is I’m a big big believer in just things being holistic. Meaning that the way you design, and the way you live your life, they’re all connected. You know.

The mistakes I are the same mistakes I make in life. And that if I understand my mistakes in life, I get better at design. I understand my mistakes in—if I understand my mistakes in design, I get better at life. And I truly believe that to be true. And that’s why I’m constantly striving to get better, because every time I get better in any aspect of my life, I get better at all aspects of my life.

And the reason I—I’m very gung ho to try to help all of you and try to—you know, in my column and my podcast and such, offer advice where I can is, you know, hey. Any time I can teach something, and—you know, I love teaching things. Because, you know, when people teach me things it’s an amazing gift. There is no gift—few gifts quite as amazing as giving somebody knowledge. Because if you give them knowledge that’s appliable, you’ve now affected their life.

You know, like one of the things that’s amazing to me is, I get a lot of letters. A lot of very nice letters. I know you think all my letters are people like calling me the devil, but I actually get a lot of nice letters, and the letters are usually like “Here is how Magic interacted with my life—or, even “Here’s how my columns or some thing I said interacted with their life,” and how it was just a positive experience. Because of that, they learned something, and it—it made things better for them. You know.

That when I wrote my dating article, I had all these people write to me and go “Oh my gosh! You just said some stuff I—that I never thought about. Yeah, I do that all the time. I didn’t realize I was making that mistake!” You know. And a lot of people were like “Thank you very much.”

And that—it means a lot. I mean, one of the things—the reason—one of the reasons I enjoy doing all the social outreach that I do is, I do—I do believe that my job is—on some level, I mean not, you know, but is trying to help people, make people’s lives better. I think games make people’s lives better.

Not only—not only does it entertain people, which awesome, but—but it teaches. Games are an awesome teaching tool. I think there are a lot of very, very valuable life lessons that come from teaching. You know, that come from—I mean, that’s—you can learn—you can explain something, they go “Oh, I can apply that.” You know.

And that one of the things, and I’ll probably do a—I’ll probably—I did this as an article once, but I meant to do it as a podcast, life lessons, just like, “Here’s things I’ve learned.” You know. And how I apply them to design, and… anyway. I’m deviating a little bit.

But so, the main point of today is that if you want to connect to the audience in anything, in a game, in a—in a article, in a movie, that what you need to do, #1, is connect—make it comfortable. And what that means is, A. Find a connection between you and the audience. So that it’s not something that’s external but internal. And something that they can personalize. And they can connect to their own life. Put it in a form that they understand, you know, put it in a—make it—even if they have to learn the form and then repeat the form, you know, make a formula they                 can get.

And that doesn’t mean you can’t change your formula up. But you want them to become familiar and comfortable. So you have to give them things to become comfortable with. And then, make it part of their habit. You know, especially for media in general, which says “Look.” You know, “If I’m going to make a website and I want them to experience my website, then I have to make sure the website matches them.

What do people want from a website? They want daily content. And they want weekly content. And you need to make sure that if you do your website correctly, what happens is, every day they visit your website. It becomes part of their habit. Part of their experience.

And once they do that, once it’s part of their experience, you’ve got to keep human nature working for you, because now, breaking that cycle is fighting human nature. Now, human nature’s got your back. Human nature’s helping you do your thing. You know. Human nature means that your audience is seeking out your media every day, because you’ve gotten them to make it part of their—of their life. You know. That you—you’ve involved it in their life.

And there’s nothing more personal than someone’s life and their pattern and their schedule. That to become part of that, that’s very personal. You know what I’m saying? Like, I’m touched beyond belief that there are people that are like “You know what I do at, you know, midnight on Monday night or 9pm…”—where you are? “I read your article. That’s what I do.  Do I wait later in the day? No! I read it when it comes up.” You know.

And that—that means a lot to me that people, you know, that—that something I’ve done become a part of their life. That is—there is no greater compliment than “I have made you part of my life.” You know. And that is—that is very touching. Like I said, I get a lot of letters and stuff that—that—I mean, I realize that what I’m doing has an impact, it’s one of the reasons I like doing it.

It’s one of the reasons I keep seeking to do more. It’s like “I write an article. And then okay, I’ll do a blog. Okay, I’ll do a comic. Okay, I’ll do a podcast.” I’ve run out of things to come up with, but if you have ideas—plus I’ve run out of time to do it. Once I’m doing it on my drive to work, I’m not sure when the next bit of time is.

But anyway, so—so understand, you want to connect with people. What comfort means is—is—as I’m trying to find here, is you want to make what you are doing part of your audience. You want your audience emotionally connected, you want your audience to be involved with it. You want your audience to make it part of their schedule. You want your audience to make it part of their life.

That is what media—or anything, really, it can be games, it can be anything. I mean, when I talk about media theory, the coolest part about it is, what it really is talking about in communications theory is how to communicate with humans. It doesn’t matter what your source material is. I believe that games communicate with humans as much as a movie, as much as a article, as much as anything. You know. And that the—part of being a game designer is understanding that. You know.

So let’s apply this to games real quick. Okay? Well if I want to—if comfort’s important, how do I apply that to games? Well, one, I want the rules to make sense to my audience. They have to naturally make sense. They have to—so I talk all the time about why I work with intuition. Like why I do things that are intuitive.

Because if your game does what the audience expects it to do, human nature’s at your back. Okay? Once again, I—if I can stress one thing in this podcast, no matter what you do, have human nature at your back. Don’t. Fight. Human. Nature. You will lose. Humans are way more stubborn than you are, I guarantee it. It is very, very hard to change human nature. And even then, maybe you can change one person.

Changing a lot of people? I’m not saying it’s impossible, and there are people that do it, and there are inventions that fundamentally do do it. But those inventions have something so awesome to offer that they bend human nature, are few and far between. They exist. And I’m always amazed when one happens.

In fact, that’s, by the way, how I know something truly amazing is happening, is I see myself bending my schedule around that thing. That is how you know that something has potential to affect the future is if it makes people change their schedule. That is a very rare thing. You know.

Like, I remember the very first day I got an answering machine, and I just—the thought process of—because before, answering machines existed, most of you probably didn’t—are too young for this, but if someone wanted to reach you and you weren’t there? They couldn’t reach you. You know. And all of a sudden, like there is a means by which they could leave recordings.

And then cell phones came along and said, “You know what? They can reach you anywhere!” You know, and that—each of those fundamentally changes how people function. But they were so valuable that people were willing to change how they function around them. But that is a truly breathtaking invention. And I’m not saying that maybe you can’t invent that, but as a general person, when you’re making something, be aware that it is hard to fight human nature. And that if you can have human nature at your back, you know.

So lesson #1 for today. Obviously this is going to become—this is going to be a three-parter, as I see work, so I managed to get through comfort today, so—I’ve turned this into a three-parter without even realizing it. The lesson here today is—for games at least, your games have to be comfortable to your audience. Your audience has to walk in the game and understand things. And what that means is, A. Your rules have to be intuitive, and B., your flavor of your game has to be something the audience can bond and connect to.

And that’s why flavor is so important. Because flavor will help explain mechanics. You know. Like one of the reasons flying is so valuable is that what does flying do? What flying would do! You know? It’s like, “Oh, I get it, it’s flying. I can’t block it. It’s up in the air.” “Oh, I get it. It’s flying.” You know. Same with trample. Same with most of the things in our game, it’s like, “Oh, oh, I see what it represents. Oh, okay, well the game—the mechanics now match what—now it matches my experience.” Okay?

So if you’re trying to use comfort to your advantage, what that means is that you have to make sure that your game has a rule set that people understand and a flavor people understand, and that they’re all working together in conjunction. Because you want your audience, when they sit down to play the game for the first time, you want them to feel a sense of comfort with the game. The game does what they expect it to do. Not—it doesn’t jar them—when you jar somebody in your game experience, you better have a really good payoff for doing that. Whereas if you sit down and it does what people expect, that feeling, that sense of comfort is really important.

But wait! Shouldn’t your game surprise people? Why yes it should! But that is next time. When I talk about surprise.

So anyway, taking my daughter to camp did in fact add some extra time to this podcast, so a little bonus for my—from my daughter to you.

Anyway, like I said, I’m going to turn this into a three-parter, I did not know that when I started. But it’s pretty clear that I could talk a lot about these topics. And they’re fascinating. I—I find them very, very fascinating, so hopefully—hopefully you do too.

Anyway, so today was all about comfort. Next time will be all about surprise. And the one after that will be all about completion. As we walk through communications theory.

But anyway, that being said, I have to go do something that has become very comfortable to me, and part of my life and my pattern, which is I need to be go making Magic. See you guys next week.