10/18/13 Episode 62: Completion

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 two weeks ago, I started talking about communications theory. Which is something that I learned in my—when I went to college at Boston University’s College of Communications. I went to communications school and I learned something that I thought was very interesting that has applied not just to how I think of media and how I think of writing, but also how I think of game design. It is definitely something I have applied across the board.

And I spent two weeks ago talking about the first aspect of it, so the idea behind communications theory, real quickly, is it talks about how you—how you make humans want to have the thing you are offering them. Meaning whether it’s media or a story or a game, how you sort of plug in and communicate directly with humans in a way that makes them receptive.

So the number one thing you need is to create a sense of comfort, that was Week One’s topic. The number two thing you need to do is create a sense of surprise, that was Week Two’s topic. And the third thing you need is a sense of completion. That is today’s topic.

So let me explain sense of completion. So what if I came on today and said, “Two weeks ago, I talked about the first of three things. And today—yesterday—last week, I talked about the second of three things. Today, eh, I’m going to move on. New topic.” People are like “What? What do you mean? What do you mean? You’ve got to talk about the third part!”

So humans—I talk about a lot of—a lot of this is based on sort of like how humans function. And humans have certain—I talked about things that are pre-built into your brain, much like something is pre-built into a computer. This—it comes preloaded.

And one of the things that the human brain does is it finds patterns and then it likes to complete them. And for example, one of the reasons that I think Magic is a successful game is that people like to collect things. I actually wrote an article one time, I’m sure I’ll do a podcast on this, where my contention was that all humans collect. Every human is a collector. Just different people collect different things and in different ways.

Some people might collect objects. Some might collect experiences. You know. But different people—and there’s different styles of collecting. Anyway. That’s a—that’s its own podcast. But one of the reasons for that is humans have this sense of wanting to complete things and to—when you see a pattern, that you kind of—literally, I mean, there’s this drive in humans to finish the pattern.

One of the things I’ve learned in Magic is, sometimes we’ll do something. And we’ll create a pattern that we do not see. But the audience sees it, and then they’re like “Where’s the… how did you… why didn’t you do the such-and-such?” You know.

Like one of the classic things was, in Mirage, we had done—there was a black tutor which we did in Mirage... or the—yeah, the black tutor that you went and got whatever—you got whatever you—I’m blanking on the name of the tutor. But you got whatever card you wanted, you paid some life, put it on top of your library.  And then, we made a tutor for enchantments in white and a tutor for—I think it’s instants? In blue. And one for creatures in green. And they’re all, you know, Worldly Tutor and stuff like that.

But we didn’t make a red one. So we made four tutors in four of the five colors, and didn’t make a fifth one. And the public is like “Where’s the red tutor? Where’s the red tutor?” You know. Like—the idea that we had made four, just like of course there has to be the last one. It wasn’t even like “Oh, could you make one?” It was like “How have you not made—where is it? You must have made it.” You know.

That whenever there’s a pattern that we create, that the player base just was like “Well, you must finish this pattern.” You know. And the funny thing for us is sometimes we don’t even see the pattern. And so like, of course we didn’t complete it, we didn’t see it.

Another real good example is in Return to Ravnica block, I guess nine out of ten guilds had an X spell. And they’re like “Where’s the last X spell? How did you not make…” And like, we didn’t make them on purpose. We weren’t paralleling them or cycling them—it just kind of happened. In fact, one of them has two X spells.

But anyway—so one other thing that’s important is understanding that humans very much recognize patterns and complete patterns. Now, like I said, there are a couple different ways to complete patterns. There is an ongoing completion and there is an end completion. This is kind of me talking about collecting, I’ll get there I guess because it matters for this.

So when you collect something, there’s two different ways to collect. And I’ll—I’m sure my collecting podcast will go much deeper. But to understand this concept. One thing is you might go, “I collect every blah.” For example, you might say, “I collect Coke cans. And so what I try to do is I try to collect every single Coke can. So here are all the Coke cans that came out in 2013.” That’s one kind of collector.

The other kind of collector is someone who just collects things in a—“I collect pigs. I have lots of things that are pigs.” Well, I can’t complete it—the first is a completist. They want to get—if they don’t have every single Coke can, they’re like “Well, my job is not done yet.”

Like, I collect something called Mini-Mates, which are these little two-inch figure superheroes, and I collect all of them. So if I don’t have one, I’m like “Well, I’m not done. I don’t have them all yet.” I’m a completist.

But there’s the ongoing collector who just like, “Well, I collect pig things.” Well—I’m never going to get every pig thing in the world. There’s no belief that there’s an end goal there. It’s just that there’s lots of them, I keep collecting them, look, I have a lot of them.

And so when you’re trying to look for how people complete things, both work. The ones that tend to drive people nuttiest is the completist stuff, which is “You’ve done four out of five. Where’s the fifth one?”

But another ongoing thing that happens, where Magic does something and people like “We like this thing. Keep making this thing. We want more of this thing.” You know. “I like angels. I collect angels. Keep making more angels.  Where are my angels? I don’t see an angel.” You know. And that… so some people, what they want is a continual thing where they keep collecting, and so they want us to keep making that thing. Where others have a—a completist pattern and they want you to finish that.

Okay, so let me explain. How does this have to do with media? Why is this important to media? Well, part of what makes media click—or the entire media theory, communications theory, is that it’s saying “Well, look. Let’s play…” So one of my themes of this three-parter has been you want human nature working for you and not against you.

That if human nature’s working for you, then you are—okay, so one of the big things in general that I’ve talked about in game design is there are a lot of forces at play. There are a lot of things in the world. There are a lot of things going on, and that when you’re a game designer, you could just do all the work yourself. Or, something I call piggybacking, which is you can take something that’s a known thing and apply it so that you’re using known material.

So the classic example, in my article on piggybacking, was the game Plants vs. Zombies. So the creator of Plants vs. Zombies, a guy named George Fan, came to Wizards. He happens to be a giant Magic fan. He was—he came to Wizards, we gave him a tour, we—we played some Magic. And George and I had a chance to talk, you know, designer to designer, and one of the things that was very fascinating is him explaining why plants and why zombies.

And what he said was, he was trying to make a very basic tower defense game. So for those that aren’t aware what that means, a tower defense game is a kind of video game in which you’re protecting something, and things come at you, and then you have the resources to try to stop the things coming at you. And it’s known as a tower defense game.

So Plants vs. Zombies was George making a very, very simple—what I’ll almost call a mass-market tower defense game. Most tower defense games are a little more for the more serious gamer, but he was trying to make—so what he wanted to do was simplify it, so like it’s just on a simple screen, you know, you’re trying—they’re coming from the right, you’re trying to get them to go to the left. There are lanes, so he made a much cleaner, simpler version.

He also, obviously, made it more user-friendly by having, you know, cartoony characters and made it lighthearted. But I said to him, “Why plants?” And he goes, “Well, I needed to have things that couldn’t move. I needed to place them and they stayed there.” And it always bugged him in tower defense games that you’ll take an army and you’ll put an army somewhere, but it’s like “Once the army’s cleared out its section, why wouldn’t it move and go clear out another section?” Because the flavor always bugged him a little bit.

Because in a tower defense game, once you allocate to an area, usually—I mean, depends on the game, but it will stay in that area. So he said—well, he liked the idea of plants, because when you plant a plant, you have no expectation that it’s going anywhere. You have planted it. That’s where the plant is.

And then I said, “Well, why zombies?” And he said, well, he needed something that was very slow, but that there’s lots of. And zombies fit really well, because you expect a horde of zombies, that’s what zombies are, and zombies are naturally slow. And so it just made sense.

And so plants vs. zombies, you know, he—he piggybacked people’s understanding of plants and people’s understanding of zombies to take things that were endemic to the game and make them just obvious. “Well, of course this can’t move. It’s a plant.” “Well, of course it attacks in hordes and it’s slow. It’s zombies.” You know.

And I try to do that all the time, and generally in game design, you want to sort of take the known of people and work for it. So one of my big themes of this—of this three-parter is you want human nature working for you, and you don’t want to work against it. And there’s all sorts of ways to get—to—you want to—essentially, as a game designer, or a storyteller, or a… someone making media, whatever, you want to sort of figure out how humans function. And you want to take advantage of that and use it so that your product works with them and not against them.

Okay. So, let’s talk about completion. Okay. So we know that humans enjoy completion. It is almost compulsive how much humans love completion. So, one of the ways you can do that is—okay, so now I’ve talked about there’s two types of completion. There’s—you know, there is “I want to get a locked series of things and I’m done,” and there’s the ongoing thing.

So let me talk about the ongoing thing first because that’s the easiest one, which is—so let me talk about the website. Okay. So, one of the reasons you make columns is that one of the things, for example, that’s very common like with my column is, people will read my column. And then I have archives. So once you read my column, you go “Ooh, I like this column. I’m going to read more of this column.” And at one point you hit the tipping point, where you’re like, “I’m going to read all of this column. I’m going to read every column…” You know.

And I—like, by the way. To people who—I have been writing for twelve years now on my column, you know, Making Magic. So, like, that is a real commitment. Like, people say “I’m going to read your column,” I’m like “Okay. You have, you know, six hundred columns to read.”

Now, for some people that’s exciting, because like okay, you know, I’m going—it’s like “I’ve got some books to read.” And there are some people it’s not that “I read—I’m going to read all of Mark’s columns,” and so like I said. That’s the completionist. “I’m going to have read everything he wrote. So I—there’s an archive? Everything’s there? I’m going to read every single thing he wrote.”

The ongoing is like “Well, I’m not going to go back and read things, but from now on, I will always read it, so I—ever since, you know, the time I’ve started, I’ve read it every week.” And both those things help support and say—it gives people a need to go “I need to have some sense of completion.”

Okay, now let’s move to stories. Now I said Act I is about comfort. Act I of the story is, make your audience aware of and relate to your protagonist. “Oh, he’s a lot like me.” Act II is “Something happens.” “Oh, this is a surprise. This is not at all what I would experience! When I go on a first date it never goes that badly.” You know.

And so something happens in Act II which gets the whole story going. Usually it’s the premise of the movie or the premise of the TV—well, TV show’s a little different. But I use a movie just because movie’s a nice simple story in two hours. Or—and it’s true of a book or whatever. So the second act is surprise. It’s about sort of surprising the audience, and throwing things that they don’t know.

So the third act, the final act of the thing, is a sense of completion, which says that you’ve set things up, well now you have to bring the thing to completion. For example. We’ll take the romantic comedy. One of my favorites.

So Act I, “Meet our protagonist.” They have most likely just had a bad breakup. Why? Because we need to start the story at the opposite end of where we want to end the story. Well, the ending of a romantic comedy’s going to be happiness when they get together. So in the beginning, they have to be not happy.

Now Act I, sometimes they’re in a relationship and they break up. So sometimes the breakup is the beginning of Act II, or the breakup can just be the prologue to what’s going on, and that Act I’s about meeting the person that you know eventually they’re going to get together.

So Act I is about “Meet—meet the main character.” Sometimes it’s meet both main characters, in a romantic comedy probably you meet both of them. It depends how much of the vantage point is from one person. But—and a lot of romantic comedies, what happens is you’ll meet each person, each one of them is having some kind of romantic problems. Usually the protagonist is the one that is just broken up in a relationship. And the love interest is the one that might still be in a relationship.

Because the main character, real quickly a little story thing, the protagonist has a problem they have to get solved. And something has to be in their way, that has to be blocking their way. So if the main character was in a relationship, well then they’re not searching out another person. So someone being in a relationship means they’re the—they’re the conflict. They’re what’s in the way.

So one of the things about storytelling in general is—the idea is, you have a main character, the main character wants something. Throw things in the way of the main character so they have trouble getting it, but eventually give the character what they want. Or, they learn they don’t need it, or whatever. There’s some resolution which either they get it or they don’t get it, but you get resolution about the (???). Usually, they get the thing they want. That’s traditionally how the story works.

So a romantic comedy, you start off, somebody probably had a bad relationship or it’s ending, somebody else is in a relationship that they’re not happy with, or maybe they too had a bad relationship.

And then usually the—the first plot point in a romantic comedy is our two characters meet. And now, the audience goes, “Oh, I can see how these two are perfect for each other.” Now, one of a couple things will happen. Pretty much they can’t get together. Now, either that’s one of them—one of them is interested in the other one, one isn’t. One of them is interested but the other one happens to be with somebody. Or a very common thing that happens is, there’s some giant—I mean, something has to be in the way of these two people getting together.

A very common trope of the romantic comedy is they hate each other. Oh my God, they totally dislike each other. Now, I guess there’s different kinds of romantic comedies. There’s also the romantic comedy where, like—usually what happens is, different kinds of obstacles, right? So one obstacle might be that the person that they’re—one person knows who they’re in love with and it’s “How do they make that person realize they’re in love with them?”

Another romantic comedy is in which both people meet, they don’t like each other, and it’s like “Well, how is this going to happen? How are these people going to come to realize that they’re right for each other?” Those are the two most common kind of romantic comedies.

But anyway, so in Act II, there has to be obstacles, all sorts of things have to happen. They have to overcome things. And usually what happens in a romantic comedy is that they get together near the end of Act II. And in Act III, something breaks them apart. That—you know.

Now, once again, there are romantic comedies in which they don’t get together until the end of Act III. So those exist as well, where it’s obstacle, obstacle, obstacle. And that—the plot point two in that kind of story is, something that seems unovercomeable, meaning they’ve lost. That they’re not going to get the person. But then they realize that no, they misunderstood something, and, you know.

But a very common thing with romantic comedies is they get together, and—during Act II, and then they get broken up at the beginning of Act II. And then Act III is about them coming to realize they made a mistake, that they belong together.

But anyway, regardless of whether or not the end of Act III is them getting together for the first time or they’re coming back together, depending on the kind of story you’re telling, at the end of Act III, you want them together.

So for example, I know for sure that I have gone to a movie—a romantic comedy, or what I believe to be a romantic comedy, and at the end of the movie they don’t get together. And I know the filmmaker is trying to say, “Oh, you know, in life sometimes, things just don’t work out.” But I’m always so mad, because I’m like “I did not sit through two hours of romantic comedy to learn that sometimes relationships don’t work out. I’ve got life for that, I don’t need…” Like, “I want my… I want my fictional things to work out!”

And like, you know, it’s—to me, I think that one of the reasons that a lot of storytelling has something of a formula to it is that there’s a lot of catharticness to storytelling. And that when you see two people in a romantic comedy, you the audience want them to get together! Because you know what it says? It says, “Love can happen.”

It reaffirms that, you know, that there’s a chance out there to meet somebody. Not if you’re with somebody, but if you’re not with somebody, that is a very important thing. I mean, if you’re with somebody, you’re with somebody. But if you’re not with somebody, like, just knowing—like one of the things when I was lonely, before I was—you know, in a relationship, that I would like to go and see romantic comedies because they’d give me hope. They’d go “Oh, okay, they found each other, I could find somebody.”

And I think that in storytelling, it is very important that you sort of complete the story you were telling. And it’s not just romantic comedies. I’m using that as an example. You know. If it’s a spy movie, well there’s some thing that the spy wants and he has to accomplish that thing. If it’s an action-adventure movie—there’s something. No matter what it is, protagonist wants something, and by the end of the movie, you have to sort of come to completion.

Now sometimes, the main character might realize that they don’t want the thing anymore. You know. Like that’s a very common thing. Like, “The Sure Thing,” that movie’s too old for some of you, but you know, The Sure Thing was a movie by Rob Reiner about a boy who learns that—from his best friend, that there’s a girl who’s—he can sleep with, and he travels cross-country, and she’s a sure thing, and the whole movie’s about him traveling cross-country with this other girl, you know, and at the end of the movie he realizes “Oh,” he actually loves the girl he’s traveling…

I mean, I hope I didn’t ruin the movie for anybody, although if you didn’t see that coming eight miles away, you don’t understand formulaic comedies. But like—so a lot of the thing is the idea of—that you the audience sort of understand where things are going in the story, and then you want the completion to the story.

Okay, now let’s talk Magic sets. So in a Magic set, there’s a similar sense of where we’re going that sort of—we’re building towards something. So sometimes our completion, like in Ravnica block, is very, very clear. “We’ve done four of ten guilds. We’ve done three more of ten guilds. Gee, what do we do for the last set?” Sometimes, as with Scars of Mirrodin, so we set up a conflict. Like, “Okay, the Phyrexians invaded Mirrodin, there’s a war. What happens?” Well, you need to give some completion.

And one of the things that Magic—we’re trying to get better at is, one of the tricky parts about Magic is that we tell our stories not just through the card sets. And so sometimes we try to tell the story outside the card sets so the card sets—as not to trump the other thing we’re trying to tell story in, we don’t sort of finish the story.

But that makes people feel unsatisfied, and you know, Ravnica, Return to Ravnica definitely, like, “Who won, well there’s this competition, who won?” But the book tells you, but we didn’t want to ruin it for the book, and anyway… it’s something we’re trying to figure out because I understand that when you don’t complete things, it makes people upset.

But like I said. One of the things communication theory says is, “Look. People want to be completists in different ways. And you need to give them the tools to do that.” Part of that is giving them regular things on intervals that they can collect, if you will. So by the way, when I said “collect,” I used my fingers to make a quote around them. Which is really, really potent in podcasting.

You know, or you also can do stuff—like, the other thing that I will do, for example, is I often do multi-part columns. Why do I do that? Well, one—I have a topic bigger than one article. But also, you know, if I write part one of an article, do you know the chances of you coming back next week for part two? Very high. I mean, maybe you don’t like the article.

But if I write any individual—if I write just a single article—now, hopefully I have you coming back because you want to read my article every week. But some people sort of graze. They might read my article, you know, but if I write an article and I sort of, you know, get them excited, and it—“join me next week for part two,” well you know what? You kind of want to come back for part two. So one of the reasons I write multi-parters is exactly that. To make little tiny bits of completion.

And that I feel that the key to using communications theory, like I’m teaching you these principles. Right? I’m teaching you what it means to be comfortable. What it means for surprise. What it means for completion. That part of—of communications theory says “Look, these are true—truisms.”

So let me take in games for example. So I said the first week, I said “Well okay, what is—what does comfort mean for games?” Well, make your game grokkable. Use intuition. Use flavor. You know. Make your game such that the audience gets comfortable and it does what they expect it to do.

Surprise means you gotta do something—now, once you make them comfortable, you’ve got to do something they don’t expect. You gotta do something that’s gonna go “Ooh, I didn’t see that coming.” Because that’s kind of fun once you have them in a comfortable state.

Now, once again, you have to first make them comfortable before you surprise them. So surprising them with the very first rules you have in the game, not a great idea. But once they get the basic rules, then it’s in the context of the rules you can surprise them.

Okay, so now, how do we use completion? When we’re designing a game. Well, first off, games—games have a nice completion built into them, which is—much like a protagonist has a goal at the beginning of the story, a game has a goal at the start of the game. In fact, I talk about the ten things every game needs. A goal is one of the things. “Hey game player, here’s what you’re trying to do. You win when you do Thing X.”

Well, Thing X allows awesome completion because they have to do Thing X or somebody has to do Thing X. You know, the game ends when someone does Thing X. And so games have built into it a nice narrative in that you have multiple people, they each have a goal, and somebody’s going to complete the goal first and they’re going to win the game. And you are competing, usually, there’s cooperative games, but most games are competitive.  You’re competing against the other people, or sometimes you’re competing with the other people, to accomplish the goal.

And so one of the things that’s nice about games is the—the need to complete is built into the—the formula of games in general, which is, you know, the start of the game says to the player, “Here’s what you need to do to complete it.” Okay. Now that’s one, and it’s the obvious thing, and it’s kind of a freebie for games as long as you put your goal in. You kind of get that for free.

So how else do you use completion as a game designer? Well, one of the things that’s important to remember is that no matter what you are doing, you need to be able to break down your thing into component pieces. So for example, I think I refer to this as granularity, which is no matter what you are making, the same rules you apply to the large thing need to get applied to the little things that make up the large thing.

So for example, in a story, all the tricks that you need—so let’s talk—let’s talk about a scene. Not the whole movie, just a scene. Well, guess what? Your scene needs comfort. Your scene needs surprise. Your scene needs completion. So every single rule I’m talking about at the macro level is true at the micro level.

For example. When I have a scene, the very first thing I need to do in the scene is make people understand the context of the scene. That’s comfort. “What’s going on here?” “Oh, they’re at work.” “Oh, this is the first date.” “Oh, this is…” you know, that whatever—like, you have to set the scene. Within the scene, “Well, okay, where are we?” And usually the very beginning of the scene is just setting the context for the scene. You know.

Somehow my theme today is romantic comedies. Let’s say there’s a first date. Right? And first date’s at a restaurant. Well, the first thing you have to do is establish it’s a first date. So they’re saying a few things about it being awkward, about being a first date, or, you know, “Oh,” whatever. Doing small talk that says “Hey, it’s a first date.”

Now. You also in your scene want something to happen. So something in the scene is supposed to surprise the audience. Because—“Okay, it’s a first date, I got a first date.” But then, you know, you discover they have lie detectors on! You know—I don’t know. I did a—in college I did a sketch comedy in which—it was called “What If, How Come, Why Not,” and my What Ifs were “What if every first date came with lie detectors?”  Anyway. That’s where the idea came from. It was a funny scene.

So the scene has some surprise to it, and then the scene has to have some completion to it. That whatever you set up, you have to complete. Now the same is true for a website. Not only does the website need this, every article needs it. You know. So—for example, in the article, well my article needs to have some comfort. If you notice, every article I write starts with a thesis paragraph. Where I say “Hey, how you doing? This is what we’re doing today.” I—you know, the very first thing I do is I set the parameters, so they understand what’s going to happen. Right?

And then there’s some surprise. “I’m going to talk about something I’ve never talked about before.” “Ooh, this is new material. I’ve never heard the material before.” But then there’s completion. I wrap it up. And it’s no mistake that I always end every single article with my little, you know, “Join me next week when,” and “Until then…” You know. It’s the same reason that I start my podcast with the same intro and I—like, I always start with “I’m pulling out of my driveway. It’s time for drive to work.” And I always end with “And it’s to be making Magic.”

Like, because I want to start in a way to make  you comfortable, I want to end in a way that completes it. And all this stuff is done very much on purpose. So the lesson I’m trying to get here is, what is true of the macro is true of the micro.

Now let’s apply that to game design. Okay? So every game is really made up of lots of tiny games. And that—I mean, unless your game is super, super small, like—like sometimes you make a game, like Mood Swings, a game I made, is a five-minute game. There’s not a lot of components to it, it’s a very short game. But most games are longer than that. And what that means is, the game is usually made up of different pieces of the game. That there’s different things happening.

Magic for example has an early game, a middle game, and a late game. And each one of them functions a little bit differently. And what you want to do is make sure that each chunk of your game has these components to it. You know. That you want a sense of comfort, you want a sense of surprise, you want a sense of completion.

So for example, let’s take a Magic turn. Okay? So Magic turn, what’s the comfort? Well, the same things happen. The very first thing I do every turn is I untap. Same action happens every turn. Every single turn, I have upkeep, I have draw. Like, there’s a pattern to every turn. That I get the turn. Every turn has a comfort level because it works the same.

Now, how about surprise? Well, I draw a card each turn. I don’t know what this card is going to be. And that card is going to radically change what I can do that turn. So there always is a sense of “Okay, I’m comfortable, I have my structure. Ooh, I get a surprise! I get to draw a card.” And then I—I have to act out and do my thing, and then I complete my turn. I have so many resources, I use up my resources, I can’t do anything more, my turn is complete.

And the fact that every Magic turn has comfort and surprise and completion makes each turn unto itself exciting. Completing. You know. Human nature—it satisfies human nature. Because even at its micro, it’s doing all the pieces. And that is true.

So when I talk about things in the macro, they are true in the micro, and so when you are examining your article, your scene, your component of your game, every tiny piece has to follow all the rules that they whole thing has to follow. That these rules aren’t true just for the giant component—it’s not just true for the larger meta, or macro, it’s true or the micro. I’ve now said the words macro and micro more times than I’ll probably ever say again in this podcast.

But anyway, the big lesson that hopefully, I’m getting to work here so I’m winding—winding up my three-parter, is that these are valuable basic lessons. And the reason that I’ve taken them to heart and I’ve applied them—like the funny thing is, I took them. I learned them for communication. And then, I started becoming a writer and I applied them. And then I started becoming a game designer and I applied them. And then I started doing the website and I applied them.

And that what I’ve discovered is, any time I’m dealing with the public—like even this podcast, like I’ve said. This podcast—I—there’s a comfortable structure. I am driving to work. I will introduce it the same way every time.

And there’s just—means by which I present this, that if you listen to Drive to Work, there’s a comfort—it’s going to be so long. It’s going to be a certain style. You know. I’m going to have a topic and such. So there’s a comfort to every single podcast I do.

And there is a surprise. (???) topic. What am I going to talk about today? You know. Why do you turn in today—“Ooh, what am I going to talk about today?” And once you know the topic, “Ooh, what’s he going to say about it?” You know, there’s surprise to that. And then I always wrap up. Or I make it a multi-parter. ”Hey, come back.” And then I complete it the next day. But I always create some sense of completion so that, you know, you know what’s happening.

And that is kind of how it works. That is why media does what it needs. You have to provide the comfort. You have to provide the known structure. That people can be comfortable with. You have to adapt to their habits. You have to make it—them want to make it part of their life. Surprise. You have to show the audience that they don’t always know what’s coming.

You’ve got to sort of, you know, zig and zag once in a while so that the audience is—is—has a little bit of wanting to see what’s going to come because they don’t know all the answers, and so there’s some anticipation. And completion. Whatever you set up, you have to finish. You have to give them the thing they ask for. So I tell you I’m going to do a podcast about communications theory, well I’m going to do that, and I’m going to finish it. And when I’m done, I’m going to say “And that’s everything I have to tell you about communications theory.”

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this three-parter. I actually had a—I had a lot of fun doing it, so I love talking theory. And I’m sure I will talk more theory in the future.

But anyway, I have to go now. Because as we just learned, I do in fact have to complete this podcast. So instead of talking to you, it’s time for me to go be making Magic. See you next week, guys.