10/11/13 Episode 61: Surprise

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So last time, I started talking about something called communications theory. Which I had done an article on. And—for those that might not listen to last podcast, go listen to it, this is Part II. I was talking about what I had learned in school. I went to communications school—to be accurate, Boston University’s College of Communication School. And what I realized is what I learned about communications has lots of applications towards game design. And so I’m talking about sort of what I learned, this one particular theory I learned, and then I’m talking about how it affects game design and other aspects of media and such.

Okay. When last we left, there were three major things that communications theory says that you need for your audience. To make them happy, essentially. So one is comfort. And I talked a lot about that last week. Oh, the one thing I did forget last week, let me quickly sum this up is, I talked a lot about individual game design. But I didn’t talk about sets and making Magic sets, and being that “Hey, this is about making Magic sets,” when we talk about comfort, I forgot to add—get this in before I get to the next part.

Is when you’re making a set, one of the things that people think a lot about is, and we’ll get today to surprise, is the new thing. But another very important part of a Magic set is, if a Magic set doesn’t feel enough like Magic, the audience will reject it. You know, if we made a set where everything’s different and people just go “I can’t—I can’t connect with this! It’s too different!” It would be a problem. Now, people like new things, and we’ll get to surprise in a second, but it’s important when designing a Magic set that you have enough comfort. And what the comfort means is, enough familiarity.

Now luckily, if you understand how Magic is designed, the crux of each Magic set is very similar. There is a formula, if you will, to how Magic sets are put together. Now, there’s room for variance, but the core essence—you know, common green will have a Giant Growth spell. Common red will have a Bolt of some kind. Common blue will have a counterspell. There’s just things that we have. And certain colors do certain things and that’s true, you know, there’s constants. The color philosophy’s a constant. The—you know, the percentage of creatures is roughly a constant. You know.

There’s a lot of things we do that, even though there’s differences, there’s lots of similarities. And that’s really important, because when people come to your game, especially come back to your game, they want to recognize it as the game they love. Yes, they want to see new things, but they also want to see old things.

But that’s a segue  into new things! Okay, so last time I talked about sur—sorry, I talked about comfort. Next I’m going to talk about surprise. So these two things kind of sound contradictory, don’t they? Humans, they—they fear change and they—they really like things they know and are comfortable to them. Also, humans like surprise! Wait a minute! Humans—fickle humans!

So, let me explain this, because this concept is sometimes confusing people in a vacuum. But luckily, I can explain it to you. What humans like is: once there is a level of comfort, once they’re in an area where they feel safe, then they like an element of surprise.

So what that means is—so for example, I’ve been using a bunch of different examples here to talk about this. So, I used movies last time to talk about—or stories. I mean, not particularly movies, but stories in general. And Act I, I said, is about comfort. Act I is about “Let’s get you familiar with the people and the place of the movie. Or the story.”

And the reason for that is, you want the character—sorry, the character. You want the—the audience to bond with the character. And with the situation. And so the first act is mostly about getting you to go “Hey, this person in some ways is like me. I understand what they’re going through. Wow, I can relate.” And then Act II is where the surprise comes in. Act II is where something happens that doesn’t happen to you. You know.

So Act I is all about “Hey, meet this guy. He’s kind of like you.” And then Act II is, “Watch something happen to him that will never happen to you.” And so once you create a level of comfort, then surprise is something very positive. So why? Why is surprise positive? To the best of my ability, here’s what I—here’s my theory what I think is going on.

Humans have curiosity. Why? Why do—so I explained last time that, like, built into our genes is this desire to, like, clutch to the known. To make sure we stay safe. So if that’s the case, why do humans have curiosity? And the answer is that there’s—different parts of the body doing different things. One part of your body just—part of your brain—the very—the reptilian part, I guess if you will. It’s just trying to keep you alive. Just trying to keep you safe. It’s like “Where’s food? Where’s danger?” It’s just trying to keep—just trying to keep you alive.

Another part of your brain, little more advanced part of your brain is like, “I need to learn things. Knowledge is important.” You know. “How do I do what I need to do? I need to learn.” And so part of your brain is very, very geared toward learning. I talked last time about how pattern recognition is part of your brain’s—a tool of your brain to learn.

So another thing, another thing that comes in pre-built into the human brain, to use my computer metaphor, is curiosity. And the reason of curiosity is, humans naturally have this quality to want to understand thing they don’t understand. Which forces them to kind of leave their comfort zone.

And the reason that is important is if you study learning, one of the thing about the human brain is that the human brain—essentially, you create pathways. Every time you use your brain, you create neural pathways. And the idea is, humans that—the human brain is constantly evolving and changing and every—every—every time you learn something, you’re affecting your brain and changing your brain.

Now when you’re real little, when you’re young, your brain is even more—more plasticity than—than it will later. But even throughout your life, even later in life, your brain still has the ability to change. And it’s interesting, because I—I had a real talk—I had talked to a neurologist one day just about—somebody I had met on a plane, and we got to talking about our careers, and I talked a little bit about game design.

And what he said that he loves, as a neurologist, is that—like scientists understand so much. Doctors understand so much about the human body. But that the brain is like—not that they don’t understand some stuff about it, they do. But that it’s—it is this really, in some levels, still a mystery. There’s so many things the brain does that they’re still just trying to understand.

Because the brain is this amazing thing that just—you know, one of the things that’s interesting is, each person’s brain is unique, and as you get experiences, your brain does different things. So—but one of the things is, the brain craves new experiences, because new experiences create new neural pathways.

And so one of the things they talk about when you have a kid, exposing them to a lot of different things is good, you know, letting them try out different things. Because you want the brain to sort of have the opportunity to test out different areas. And curiosity is kind of the brain going, “Give me more stuff! Give me more stuff! I need more stuff!” That it is the brain kind of seeking out more information.

Now, another part of the brain, you know, which is a different part of the brain, is definitely going, “Be careful. Be careful. Be careful.” But this part of the brain is like “No no no! Learn! I want to learn! Show me new things!” And so what—the way—the compromise the brain came to is one part of the brain goes, “That’s dangerous!” And the other brain goes “I need to learn!”

So what they’ve come to grips is, the brain says, “Okay, okay, okay.” You know. “As long as something is deemed safe, you know, then can we explore?” And the brain goes, “Okay, okay, okay.” So humans are happiest when they’re in an area they have some understanding of, and some sense of safety. Now, there are obviously people who push to the danger edge, and there’s a lot of risk-taking that goes on in humanity. But we’re talking about the crux of humanity. They’re most comfortable learning in a—in an environment which is comfortable.

So for example, in media, like let’s take the website. So we want to create a structure to create comfort. How do we do that? We create daily content. Every day you come, there is Magic Arcana. There is Card of the Day. There’s certain things, you know, decklists, and there’s things that are everyday.

And then we have a weekly thing. There’s columns. Every Monday is my column. Every—you know, there’s people that show up at this exact same time every week. So we create a comfort, a pattern for you. If you show up in any one day, you know exactly what to expect. You know the columns that will be there, you know the daily content that’s going to be there. But we have feature articles. Sometimes we have articles that just go up on a random day. We don’t tell you when they’re going up. They just go up.

So why do we do that? And the reason we do that is, we want an element of surprise. Because if you know exactly what’s going to be there every day, it can get a little more routine. You know. And it’s comfortable, and people like the routine, but if you just throw a little bit of surprise in there, it makes people even more eager to come. Because not only will they get the things they already know they love, but maybe—maybe there’ll be a little treat for them. Maybe there’ll be a little surprise.

And the way the human brain works is that you do not need to give it a surprise all the time. You need to give it a surprise some of the time. They’ve done a lot of testing—so for example, this is a classic science experiment with… monkeys, I think? And… I think it’s a monkey. It’s some kind of animal. So the idea is—or maybe it was guinea pigs? Anyway, some kind of animal.

What they did is, they had a tube where if you pushed a button, food would come out of the tube. So they pushed the button, food pellet comes out, you eat the food pellet. And they tried two experiments. Experiment number one, food pellet came every time. Experiment number two, food pellet came some of the time. And what they found was, if the food comes every time, they grow lackadaisical. “It’s always there. The food is there.” They know it. And so they kind of press the button when they need the food.

But, if the food comes some of the time, they push the button more often. And from a media standpoint, you kind of want your media people pushing the button. You want them checking in. You know. And so one of the fun things about having some variety is it makes people check in.

Okay. Now let’s switch (???), go back to the storytelling. So in storytelling, the reason that you want surprise is, part of going to a movie is “I sit down, I’m in a comfort zone because I’m in a movie. I understand that nothing in the movie is honestly going—I mean it’s emotionally going to affect me, but it is not going to physically affect me.”

So for example, if I go to a horror film, well yes. I—I open myself up to seeing scary things are going to happen. But it’s in a very safe way. Nothing’s really going to happen to me. I mean, I might get scared, but it’s scared in a fun way where there’s no actual threat. You know.

Where if you were—it would be a lot worse to go, “Hey, why don’t you go out in the dark and maybe something will happen?” Like, that’s really scary. Because you don’t understand the comfort. But here, look, I’m in a dark theater, and I’m in my chair. Nothing’s going to come through the screen at me. You know. It’s much safer.

And, once you have the confines of storytelling, that’s also comfortable. “Okay. Something’s going to happen, and it is fun.” The thing about it is once you feel safe, you love—humans love surprise. It is a lot of fun. Surprise is fun.

So in Magic sets, basically what we do is we say “Okay.” We create a layer of comfort for you. Okay. So okay, you know, the color wheel—it has great consistency, and the percentage of creatures, and we do a lot of things and certain types of spells, and there’s just certain things that always happen. That, you know, any Magic set you play has a certain—basics you understand.

But what makes Magic fun is on top of that known quality, it’s Magic, we throw curveballs at you. We do different things. You know. You come to Zendikar and all of a sudden, land has a—land means something that it doesn’t normally mean. Drawing land late game or—sometimes you want to save land. You don’t just want to play land. That’s—“Ooh, don’t be wasteful. Hold onto your land and play it carefully.” You know. That a land drop means something. You know.

And you get to Scars of Mirrodin, and all of a sudden, you know, infect exists, and like, you know, you’re making sacrifices that you wouldn’t normally make. Like a 1/1 creature comes at you—“Does it have infect? I might want to block that thing. I might be at twenty life and I’m still scared of it.” You know.

You get to Innistrad, and Innistrad, you know, there’s tribal components. Or death matters. You know, morbid says “Hey, my opponent’s attacking. Maybe he wants me to block and kill the thing. Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t kill it.” You know. And that—each of these environments, different things happen. You know, Return to Ravnica is all about the guilds and the colors and thinking about in terms of the colors and how you play things.

And each of those environments is different. Magic is Magic, and Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin and Innistrad and Return to Ravnica, that’s all Magic. And there’s still a Giant Growth, and the colors still have—you know, everything is true about the core basis of Magic, yet each one there are things that are different. That you have to think about it in a different way. And that is where the surprise to Magic adds in the value.

Okay, so, now let me walk through sort of good surprise and bad surprise. Okay? Because surprise isn’t necessarily—any surprise isn’t good. I don’t want you to walk away and going, “Well, once they’re comfortable, you can do whatever you want.”

So the important thing about surprise is, there’s two different types of surprise. One surprise is where—well, I guess you can have two bad outcomes, but that’s just—who likes two bad outcomes? So let’s talk about the other one, which is good—good outcome/bad outcome, and good outcome/different good outcome.

Well, in the first good outcome/bad outcome, the idea is sometimes I get something good and sometimes I get something bad. That is a high variance, and there’s a certain style of people that enjoy that. There are definitely Timmies who get a kick out of it who like “Woohoo! I’m rolling the dice!” You know. And there are people that enjoy that kind of risk factor, you know, within the confines of, you know, comfort.

But not a lot of people—that is a—you have to use that kind of surprise much more carefully. Because a lot of people don’t like that. It creates anxiety in them. Because—“I like the good thing—oh, I don’t like the bad thing.” And—and to be honest, the worse the bad thing is, the more anxiety you create.

An example I gave in my article, which is—so let’s say you’re going to flip a coin. And on heads, I give you fifteen dollars. And on tails, I’ll punch you in the face. Well, that’s—I don’t want to get punched in the face! You know. Hey, fifteen dollars sounds like a lot of fun. You know. But then you go “Oh, well is a chance to get fifteen dollars worth a punch in the face?”

Now, at some point I’m giving you enough—let’s say, you know, you get a thousand dollars. Maybe you go “Well, fifty/fifty for a thousand dollars… okay, I guess I’m willing to get punched in the face once or twice for those odds.” You know.

Now. The example of good—now, usually with good, there’s a variance. It could be two equally good things. But different. Or it could be like “Hey, heads you get ten dollars, tails you get five dollars.” Now in that version, I want heads over tails, there is—there’s a little bit of anxiety in that there’s something I want, but if you say to me “Hey, do you want to flip a coin—heads you get ten dollars, tails you get five dollars?” I’m yessirree Bob. Because nothing’s going wrong there. Because the worst case scenario is I get five dollars. Hey, I didn’t have five dollars. That’s good.

You know, hey, best case scenario I get ten, but the anxiety’s low because how bad can it go. You know, the worst case scenario is not that bad. And best case scenario is great. You know, assuming getting ten dollars is great. I’ll say it’s great.

So when you are using your surprise, be careful in how you surprise—so first off, one: the surprise has to do with variance. In general, people do not like having to worry about bad outcome. So you have to be very careful when you use that.

Now, in a game, and games are different than media, in a game people are more willing to take a bad outcome. Because the nature of games is overcoming outcome—overcoming obstacles. You know. That part of what makes a game fun is that there are obstacles in the way. So in a game setting, if you say “Reward or obstacle,” the obstacle is not as much a negative as it would be in media or some other form.

Because in a game, an obstacle is kind of a bonus. In the sense that, you know, I—I want challenges. Like when you play a game, you want the obstacles, because you want to overcome them. So when you have an opportunity to go “Ooh, I could get a reward, but there’s an obstacle,” well, that obstacle is like “Okay, I’ll have to overcome that too.” That—that’s seen as less of a negative than it would be in other places. You know.

So if you have a Magic thing where it’s like positive or negative, people are much more willing to go into that because they’re playing a game. And in a game, you’re much more willing to have some negative outcomes. Because the negative outcomes aren’t as negative because there’s some expectation of them in the first place.

Now in stories, the way surprise tends to work is one of the things that the audience likes is the audience likes a level of comfort to the story. Meaning archetypes are very popular in stories, and the reason for that is, I want a general gist of what is going on. You know. And what people don’t realize is how archetypal most storytelling is. You know.

Like if I see a movie—I use this one all the time, but the romantic comedy. Like if I go see a movie or read a book, whatever, I’ll talk about movies I guess. If I go see a movie, and the movie’s about two people getting together, odds are—I mean, maybe it’s a drama, but odds are it’s a romantic comedy, and there are just certain things that are going to happen.

Now, one of the fun things about telling a story, and this is where surprise comes in, is once you have the basics, once you have the base formula, the base story, you are then allowed to trick—you know, you’re then allowed to surprise the—the audience by saying—like even playing into expectations. One of the fun things to do is go, “Well, this normally happens. Well I’m going to—I’m going to turn that on its ear. I’m going to play with that.”

So one of the fun things to do in storytelling is take the formula and then mess with it a little. You know. That you—you use people’s expectations of what’s going to happen to have some fun with them because, you know, they’re in the little comfort shell, you can now have some fun and play with them.

So the big thing about storytelling and where surprise from storytelling is, is humans like… humans, while they want to have some level of comfort to understand the premise of the story, they do like to not know exactly where things are going. Just because it changes things up and makes it different. You know.

So let me talk about variety, because surprise and variety are very—are related. Which is there is in game-playing in general, there is a—there’s two sides. One is consistency and one is variety. Consistency says, “The same thing will happen every time.” And what some players like about consistency is it rewards—it rewards skill, it rewards knowledge, like if I understand how it works.

So let’s say (???) playing a game when I come up against Thing X, “Oh, well, Thing Y solves Thing X.” Well, that’s good. And I have now learned. And if I come up against Thing X and Thing Y doesn’t always work, well, okay, now I have to figure out what does work. And that—if that doesn’t have a pattern to it, if I can’t figure it out, then it feels random to me, the game player.

Now, some players love that. Some players really enjoy the “Ooh, what’s next?” But some players like to have some sense of control. So this schism is what I’ll all the Spike/Timmy schism. Which is Spike plays games for the experience—sorry, for the—to prove something. Spike wants to be able to use the game to show something about himself. So it’s very important for Spike that he understands and has control.

Timmy is in it for the experience. And so what Timmy wants is fun. Timmy wants something that he can, you know, wants something visceral and something exciting and something to happen. So, for a lot of Timmies—not all Timmies, but a lot of Timmies, the—the variance is exciting to Timmy. “Oh my God, I don’t know what’s going to happen.” You know.

So for example, let’s take coin-flipping. Which is—to Spike, coin-flipping cards are frustrating. “I’m going to lose because I flipped the wrong thing?” You know. That it’s very frustrating, because they’re like “Oh,” like “I don’t—I need something and I can’t depend upon it.” But to Timmy, once again I’m generalizing here, but to Timmy it’s like, “Oh, good, it’s—yay! A coin-flip is an awesome thing! Something neat’s going to happen! I have this great moment of—of suspense. Of drama. What’s going to happen?” You know.

And the idea is that Spike likes a more predictable game. And Timmy likes a more varied game. Now, that’s not to say Spike doesn’t enjoy variance. I talked about this in my randomization podcast. Spike likes adapting to things   and showing that they can—you know, whatever you throw at them.

Which means that for Spike, if you put the variance earlier, it makes them happier. And that you build the variance into the thing they know they’re doing. Meaning Spike doesn’t like the game hinging on variance, but they don’t mind variance setting up the parameters for the challenge.

And so hopefully you’ll see today—I’m kind of hopping around a little bit to show you that there’s a lot of different ways to use surprise. You know. Surprise could just be something you never expected, but surprise could be variance. Surprise could be twisting of expectations, so that what the audience gets isn’t quite what they—you know, what they always know.

Now in games, the idea in games is when I first teach someone a game—this is a general game, not Magic specifically, but it applies to Magic, is when you first sit down somebody with a brand-new game, the first thing you want them to do is you want them to feel comfortable. Okay? So the reason by the way that—that these are the order, I’m saying comfort then surprise then completion is, there is an order to them. You want them to happen in an order.

You do not want to surprise somebody before they are comfortable. Because then they’re on edge. Then it becomes a scary thing, and not a fun thing. And that’s really important. So when you’re teaching someone a game, first thing you want to do as a game designer is make a game that has enough components that they get that it’s comfortable.

Now, how do you do that? One might be your flavor. You know, you’re throwing something that’s so familiar to them that right away it leads to some understanding parts about what the game’s going to be about. It might be using game components from games that people know.

Like a real popular thing that I’ve seen in gaming the last ten years is saying “Oh, here’s something that became famous from some…” Usually a game that’s been around forever, you know. Gin, or chess, or whatever. But anyway, you take a game that’s been around for a long time, maybe hundreds of years, but maybe, you know, fifty years, and you take a component that people have learned, that they have just—it’s become part of the—the zeitgeist, that people kind of understand that game mechanic, and just—people know it.

And then build your game around it but doing new things. But your core, your game mechanic is a known quantity that people can pick up easily. You know. And that—like I said, the very first thing you want when you are making a game is the audience—the first thing you want the audience to go is (contended sigh). That’s what you want to do first. “Okay. I get it.”

Now, the more hardcore gamer that they are, the more willing they are to do the uncomfortable thing to learn what’s going on. And so the more advanced the game player, the more willingness there is to experience discomfort in trying to understand the game. But in general, you want to create some comfort so people understand what’s going on.

Now, once you create comfort, once they’re like “Okay, I got it, I got the basics of the game,” then now you’ve got to add your surprise. So every game—look, you have to do something that other people haven’t done. If you make a game in which every single thing you’ve done has been done by somebody else, then why don’t they go play that game? Why are they playing your game?

Now, let me be clear. It is not important that any one component be new. You can take old components and combine them in ways they have never been combined before. That’s also true with storytelling. I don’t—I don’t have to make up something new, but part of what makes me surprising you is taking components and mixing them in a new way. You know.

Maybe I’m going to tell a romantic comedy, but I’m going to subvert it. I’m going to tell it backwards. I’m going to, you know—you know, it’s—one person’s an alien. I—whatever it is, whatever you’re subverting it with, that, you know, you’re throwing something in the mix that’s like “Well, normally this is not true, but in my story it is true.” But like you’ve set up the confines of “This is the kind of thing I’m doing. This is the kind of story I’m telling, this is the kind of game I’m running.”

So once you’ve set up the comfort, you then get to surprise them. But—and once again, remember that the way you surprise them and how you surprise them—all surprise is not equal. And—I talk about this all the time in my column.

Surprise for the sake of surprise--meaning surprise has to have value beyond the surprise. You don’t surprise them just to surprise them, you surprise them because you want to do something new and have them experience something new, and the surprise is a means to do that.But, for example, if I’m making a game, I don’t want to say “Hey, I’m going to add this component. Just because it’s never been done.” Well, does it make sense in your game? Does it tie in to your game? Is it organic from your game?

So, part of layering down comfort first means that the surprise will come out of the comfort. For example, on the website, we set up “We’re going to do articles. We’re going to have columns. We’re going to have daily stuff.” So when we do a feature article, that’s coming out of what we’re doing. It’s not like “Whoa, whoa, I wasn’t expecting articles out of this website.” No no no, we have articles. We have daily, weekly articles.

And this says “Okay, well these articles are not as planned as the others, but…” And even then, we do actually—there is a planned feature on Mondays. So Monday has—like you know there’s a feature, but don’t know what it is. That’s a little bit of surprise. And then, every once in a while we throw extra features in, but you don’t even know what day they are. Right?

So notice—once again, surprise can be layered. That it’s not like—surprise is not an on/off switch. There’s an amount of surprise. And you want to make sure that you—in fact, what you normally intend to do is, you slowly build in the surprise. So when the website started, the first thing we did is we had Monday feature articles in which you didn’t know what they were until that Monday, so “Ooh, there’s a little surprise today.”

And then eventually we started saying “Okay, now here’s other feature articles that show up at special times, you know, and part of it is sort of building—ramping up the surprise. And in Magic, one of the things there is, you’ll notice that at common, we tend to pick one or two things. Whatever the new thing is, we focus that in common. We do not do lots and lots of different things.

And in fact, even if we do a new mechanic, what normally happens is, we figure out one way we like to do it at common, all the commons do it that way, and then at higher rarities we branch out. We start doing other things. But the idea is, when we present to you this new thing, we—we sort of trickle the surprise slowly.

Because remember, in trading card games, common is your introductory. That you don’t know what order people will see things in, but you know they will experience more commons before they experience higher rarity cards. So if you want to educate them, what you do is you make commons—this is what New World Order is all about.

Make commons the entry-level experience you want, and then allow the higher rarities to be the flavoring. You know. That the—that common is sort of the base experience, and that you—you then use the higher rarities to let people have other experiences, but you do it in such a way that the common experience, ironically, is common. I guess that’s not ironic at all. English language.

So, once again, when you’re using surprise, you want to make sure that you establish comfort first, you want to make sure that you’re slowly ramping into the surprise, and you want to make sure that surprise comes out of the comfort. That it’s not out of nowhere, but that it’s—it’s core to what is going on.

Okay. But what is no surprise, I hope, is that it’s thirty minutes and I’ve got to work. And so I hope today has taught you a little bit more about how surprise works. I also filled you in a little more about comfort. So that means that the last podcast on my—my communications theory will be completion. Because how could I not… complete the series?

Anyway, I’m now at work, and it’s time for me to go, so thank you guys very much for joining me for Part II of my communications theory, and it’s time for me to go make the Magic.