11/8/2013 Episode 68: Piggybacking

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 today, I’m going to talk about an article I wrote. From time to time, I like to examine articles that I thought were—were interesting, and expand on  it a little bit, because in a podcast, I can talk for longer.

Okay. So “Piggybacking” was inspired by a visit from somebody outside the building. So one of the cool things about working at Wizards of the Coast, among many cool things, is there are a number of Magic fans who are—I will call them celebrities.

So George Fan is the creator/designer of a game called Plants vs. Zombies. And he was in the office—I gave him a tour, and we played Magic and we had lunch together, and we showed him a good time. And one of the things that was very telling was during lunch, he and I were talking.

And so there was a question I’d always wondered about Plants vs. Zombies, and so I said to him, I go, “George, I’m curious, why plants? And why zombies?” And so what he said was, essentially Plants vs. Zombies is a—what we’d call a mass market tower defense game.

So mass market is just a word to mean something that’s more approachable, not just to gamers but it has more wide appeal. Usually it’s a little simpler. A tower defense game is a game in which you are defending something, traditionally a tower, and there are things that attack you, and you have resources to stop them, and the goal is to hold them off as long as you can. And usually there’s, you know, waves that come and stuff.

So essentially, Plants vs. Zombies was him trying to do a very simplified but fun tower defense game. And so he said, “Oh, well the reason there are plants is in a tower defense game, your units tend not to move. That you tend to put them in a place and they stay there.”

And George always found it weird, the flavor of, for example sometimes you’d send some knights, you know, or an army or something, and then once they cleared their area they just stayed there, because that’s where they’re supposed to be. But like, “Right next door there’s people that need help! Why aren’t you going there?” And it always seemed weird to him. So the reason that he chose plants was plants would stay put. Plants don’t move. “So I needed things that didn’t move, well plants felt like they wouldn’t move. They’re plants.”

So I said, “Okay, why zombies?” And he goes, “Well, in a good tower defense game, you want a slow horde that attacks. You kind of want and endless number of creatures attacking, but you need them to be slow enough that you can build up your defense. Because part of the fun of it is having time to build up the defense.” And he’s like, “Well, what is a slow invading horde? Zombies.” By definition that’s how zombies work. They come in large groups, but they’re slow, and, you know, it fit.

Now, George’s team then went on and, you know, gave some personality to the plants and personality to the zombies and really made it—you know, made it fun, but the core of why plants and why zombies were based on trying to use the audience’s own information to help them in gameplay.

Which is a concept we use in gaming called piggybacking. So today, I’m going to talk about piggybacking and explain—essentially why it’s important and how it is used. But to explain that, I need to explain another concept first.

So I often talk about complexity in game design. And most of the time, I’m talking about complexity as a bad thing. How you have to be careful, because complexity will cause you problems. Today, though, I’m going to tell you why complexity is a good thing. How complexity can help you. So in the article I laid out six different things that complexity can do to help you.

So first, it can add strategic depth. There’s more going on. If you have more going on, there’s more to think about. There’s more that you can do. And—now, be aware, I should add this caveat—complexity alone is not what creates strategic depth. In fact, you can add complexity and not increase strategic depth, and you can increase strategic depth without adding complexity.

But one of the easiest ways to add strategic complexity is to add—sorry, to add strategy is to add—(flustered sound). Okay, let’s try that one again. One of the easiest ways to add strategic depth is through complexity.  But it’s—kind of lazy. I will be honest.

Number two. It allows you to better match the flavor. And what I mean by that is, flavor is messy. Flavor, a lot of times, doesn’t want to fit neatly in mechanical boxes. And you know what? Adding some complexity allows you to sort of, you know, match the flavor and do the extra little things you need to do to match the flavor.

Number three. It creates more variety. Well, if I can do fifty things, the combination of fifty things is more than the combination of twenty things. So it create more variety.

Number four, it opens up design space. Well, if you have more options, there’s more you can do. You’ve opened up design space.

Number five, it helps experienced players feel more invested. One of the things is, the experienced player, they’re not intimidated by the complexity, and so when you layer stuff on, it allows you to add stuff that—more references that they get. And more chance to sort of give—throw bones to the –to the invested player.

And finally, it makes game design easier. Why? Because it’s just easier to find. Complexity’s lying there. It is not hidden. It is not something you have to sort of usually ferret out. It is usually something sitting right in front of your face.

Okay. Well, all those seem like awesome things. Complexity—this must be a pretty cool thing. But the opposite side is this: the con against complexity, I’ll sum up in one con. It is the greatest force capable of killing your game. In fact, when you ask me “What is—what is the thing most likely to kill Magic?” My answer is complexity.

And the reason why is, so I talk about what’s called “barrier to entry.” And what that means is, when you start playing a game, how hard is it for you to go from what we call a zero state—“I have zero information,” to ready to play.

So the way I think of it for today is imagine there’s a scale from 0-100. And that your game is somewhere from 0-100 on how difficult it is to learn. So like a really, really, really complex, really difficult game is 100. And a super, super, super simple game is a 1.

So the question is, how do you get your player base from 0 to 100? And the answer is that there are a bunch of different tools, but one of which today we will talk about is piggybacking. So—so one of the ideas that we often talk about is players starting at a zero state. Right.

I‘m playing a game, I’ve never played the game, I know nothing. What piggybacking says is, “Well, that’s not completely true.” You walk into a game—a player walks into a game with knowledge. Of life. Of things. So one of the things that if you’re trying to reduce complexity, one of the things you can do is say, “The more I draw off information that my player already has, the easier it is to learn.”

So for example, when you talk about the zero state, really, for your game, you might be starting them at higher than zero if you work on stuff that they already know. I—I used my example Plants vs. Zombies, so I’ll start there. So Plants vs. Zombies clearly said, “Okay, look. You know something about plants, like you buy—in the game you buy seeds. And you plant the plants. And then they grow. And, you know, you’re—sunlight makes them grow. That’s what you need for them.

You know, and that there’s just little things that sort of—you already know, so it makes grokking what’s going on a little easier. You know, you know that zompires are—zompires. Zombies. Zompires, that’s—that’s  Buffy Universe. Zombies are a slow invading force. Okay? And so you need—like when you use that, your audience goes, “Okay, I…” That’s the expectation, they get it. They understand what it is.

So for example, let’s talk about Magic now. Because Richard, for example, also used piggybacking. Now, by the way, there’s two different types of piggybacking. I guess—let me talk about this first, before I get to the example with Richard.

Number one is what I will call “flavor piggybacking.” That is in which you use people’s knowledge of information to make your mechanics go easier because they follow what you would expect that flavor to be. I will get to that example in a second.

The second is mechanical piggybacking. That is where you use people’s knowledge of gaming, of games, of previous games to help you understand how to do it. So Magic had a little bit of both. Okay. So let’s talk about  flavor piggybacking.

So Richard didn’t just make a trading card game. Well, first, he made a trading card game. Trading cards are a known quantity. A lot of people have interacted with trading cards. Right off the bat, by calling it a “trading card game,” when someone opens up a booster pack and there are a random assortment of cards, they don’t go, “What’s going on?” They go “Oh, oh, it’s a trading—these are trading cards.” So the very first thing is he piggybacked on the very concept of trading cards and using that as a tool to build a game off of. That’s one.

And that—does that fall under—that’s an interesting question. Is that flavor or is that mechanical? I guess that is more mechanical? In that the mechanics of how a trading card game works, how a booster works is (???) match how yours works, so that’s more mechanical.

But flavor—so Richard didn’t just say “Oh, you guys have cards and you’re using cards.” He said, “No no no. You are wizards. Planeswalkers. In a duel, having a magical duel. And you—these cards represent the spells that you know, as you are fighting this magical duel.” So Richard layered on top of it this concept of magic and spells.

Well, all of a sudden, you make it a little easier. For example, it’s a little easier to understand that there is magical energy required for you to be able to play these spells. That just makes it a little easier to understand, because like “Oh, okay… I want to cast a spell, I need something to cast a spell with. Okay.” The idea of calling the deck “the library,” and the graveyard—sorry, the discard pile “the graveyard”—he used a lot of terminology to add flavor to what was going on. You know.

And with mechanics. You know, for example flying, I always say that I think flying is one of the best mechanics because it is so evocative of what it is that it explains itself. “I have a creature that doesn’t have flying. You have a creature with flying. You attack. What do you think happens?” “Uh… the guy can’t block because I fly over him?” “Exactly.”

And if you look at a lot of the creature keywords, Richard was trying very hard to say, “Oh, well this creature’s trampling. This is striking first. This is…” You know, that it’s doing the things you would expect the concept to do. And that layering over the real-world flavor made it much more accessible. And made it easier to learn.

So now mechanical—for example, A. Richard built around trading card games, B. it’s a card game. Meaning people understand the idea that you have a deck. You have a discard pile. You shuffle your deck. You draw a hand. Depending on what game you play, you might understand the idea of a—an area of play. You know. Gin Rummy for example, you put cards down in front of you.

So by using a card game, Richard also sort of played into the idea that—he used things people knew to help them understand. Because one of the things that I think—when we talk about the challenges  of game design, to me, the biggest challenge of game design is the idea that—let me use a—I’ll use a metaphor here.

When I went to Hollywood, I was a screenwriter. I wrote scripts. So I was in my little house, I’d write my scripts, and you know, before I went out to Hollywood, I really thought that the hardest part about being a scriptwriter was writing the scripts. Writing’s hard. It isn’t easy to write a script.

And what I found was, writing is hard, and writing a good script is hard, no—I’m not saying that it isn’t hard because it is. But I would write a script. I actually wrote some scripts I thought were good scripts. What I discovered was not—the hard part was not writing the script, the hard part was getting somebody who needed to to read the script.

Why? Because everybody wants them to read the scripts. And a lot of the scripts—most of the scripts are bad. So if you’re someone who reads the scripts, you don’t want to read bad scripts. So you’re picky. You’re picky about what you read. And so if somebody comes to you, and they have no track record, they’ve never done anything before, hell, they might not even have an agent yet, well they’re like “Uh, I don’t think I’m going to read you.”

Or even getting an agent. Right?  You need someone to read you. And like people are very hesitant to read in the town because there’s so many people who want you to read their stuff, and so much of it is actually pretty bad.

So the same thing is true in trying to get a player to play a game. There are a lot of games. It takes energy to learn to play a game. And so you have to convince a player that they want to play your game. And once they decide they want to play your game, you have a small window to give them the experience of the game enough to make them want to play it.

Okay, so once again, let me explain this. This is very important. When you sit down with a player for the first time, when you’re trying to teach them the game, the goal of the game—the goal of the first experience is not to learn everything. The goal of the first experience is to learn enough, and one would argue just enough, to experience and enjoy the game.

Let me repeat that because this is so important, maybe this is the most important thing I’m saying today. The goal of a game designer, when you have a game, in the first experience they have with the game, you want them to be able to get the following point. The point by which they can experience and enjoy the game.

Why is that so—why is that so important? Because other than die-hard players, and there are die-hard game players who will put some energy into spending time learning. But most game players will give your game one and only one chance. And they will only give you a certain amount of time to essentially sell them on the game.

Now, usually what happens is somebody who likes the game is the one who says, “Hey, this is an awesome game.” Every once in a while they’ll experience it somewhere else—through something else where they’re trying to demonstrate the game, but usually you learn a game from somebody else. And usually that person who’s teaching you has some affinity for the game.

But in that experience—so that one chance. You as a designer get once chance. And be aware, you don’t control the circumstances completely. Somebody else—I mean, the way I always talk about this is, imagine the game of Telephone, in which you are trying to pass along a message, but you don’t get to tell the person who hears the message the message. You’ve got to tell somebody who’s going to tell them. Maybe even it’s going to be passing through multiple people until it gets to them.

So if you’re playing Telephone, what is the best strategy? I want to say something. What I want to say is something simple and clear and obvious. For example, if I say… you know, “The Chihuahua eats Doritos at midnight.” There is so much chance that they’re going to mess that up. Because for starters, why—why—why is the Chihuahua eating Doritos, and why at midnight? And should you even feed Doritos to a Chihuahua? That seems wrong.

Where if my message is something like “It often gets dark…” What’s a better example? “There was a full moon in the sky.” That—okay, everything there makes sense. There is a full moon in the sky. I get full moon, I get sky, okay, I—the message means something.

Oh, so let me explain this. There is something in psychology that’s called “chunking.” So when you try to learn something, the way your brain learns something is, it can actually only handle so many things at once. I think the number is like somewhere around seven, but there’s only—your brain—your brain cannot handle that many things at once. There’s only so many things, your brain goes, “Aah, okay. I’m going to forget something.”

You know, for example, one of the running jokes with my wife is, I will go to the store to buy something. She will tell me things to get. You know. She’s like “Run in and get me the following things.” And I know if I go over a certain number, like, “I’m writing these down.” You know, if she tells me two or three things, I’m fine. You start talking about four or five, I’m like “I’m writing this down.” Because I know I’m going to forget something.

And that’s how the human brain works. So what the human brain does is—because it’s sneaky. It’s smart. Is it does something called chunking. And what chunking means is, is it takes disparate things and it connects them to mean one thing.

For example, I will use—so in America, for those my foreign viewers, you’ll have to bear with me a little bit. We have a phone number. And the way the phone number works is there’s three digits that’s an area code, and then there’s three digits that is the prefix code, and three digits that’s the suffix code. So you have ten numbers. Okay.

So—and the reason they put them into three sections is, it’s easier to remember three-digit numbers than it is to remember a ten-digit number. But then it connects them together. And so what—what the brain wants to do is it wants to recognize things in easily digestible forms and have things that link them together.

So the reason that a phone number is rememberable is there’s three digit numbers—three three-digit—sorry. Two three-digit numbers and a four-digit number. The suffix is four digits. And by sort of making them smaller, easy to remember, you remember each of them separately, and then they all go together, and now your brain remembers a ten-digit number as one thing broken into three sub-things. The more you can chunk things together, the more you can make the brain be able to accept it as one thing and not multiple things.

Because, for example, the dog eats Chihuahuas—the Chihuahua eats Doritos at midnight, I have to remember Chihuahua, I have to remember Doritos, I have to remember midnight. Now maybe in my head, I can picture a dog eating Doritos at midnight. Maybe I’m okay. But because the other people don’t have that information and it’s odd to them, that when I try to say it to them, they might get confused. Because if Chihuahuas and Doritos and midnight are three different things, then my brain is working three times as hard to remember it. It’s not one thing, it’s three things.

So, when you are trying to get someone to understand your game, you want to chunk things together. Ah, this is where piggybacking comes in. For starters, you’re working on knowledge they already have, and, that now it’s come together in a way that makes sense. For—for example. Let’s take the—the double-faced cards in Innistrad. I used these in my article.

Okay, so we wanted to do a werewolf. Okay. And we made where, you know—so let’s—forget werewolf for a second. Let’s say I have a card, and the card says, “Okay. This card is a—you know, 2/2 creature, whatever, you play it, and then, if you ever don’t play a card, then it becomes a different card. And this new card is a 5/5 and has to attack every turn or something. And then if that 5/5 ever—two spells get played in one turn, it reverts back to a 2/2.”

Now that’s a lot. Like, “Uhh, what’s going on?” You know. You know. But if I say to you, “It’s a werewolf. And it’s a human—when you play it, it’s a human, and he’s kind of small. Oh, but when the moon comes out, he’s a werewolf, and now he attacks and he’s vicious. But eventually the moon goes away, and he turns back into a human.”

Now all of a sudden, the first thing seems really, really complicated, but as soon as I layer some flavor on top of it, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Because like “Oh, okay, it’s a werewolf. I understand the dual states, I understand why you want him to be small, I understand why he wants to attack.” All of a sudden it just makes a lot more (???) makes sense. And that the reason that piggybacking’s an important tool is that you can take information that they have, and they need to process, and make it simpler. Okay.

Now, once again, I talked about this before. There’s two different ways to get to the—to using your flavor. There’s bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up means you start with the mechanics, top-down means you start with flavor. You can start with flavor and go “What mechanics make sense with this flavor?” Other times you’re like “Oh, I want to make a game about such-and-such. Oh, well now I’m going to make mechanics that match the flavor.” Or you’re going to say “I’m going to take mechanics that I think is an interesting game, oh, well what do these mechanics feel like?” And the get a flavor that sort of matches.

And then you—whether or not you start with the flavor or start with the mechanics, you adjust until you find a happy medium, where the flavor and the mechanics sort of match each other. But no matter what direction you go, the key is that you are trying to use this information to make the experience easier. Because remember. Remember. You have one chance for them to learn. And there’s no room for error. So the goal of this game is two things. The goal of this first game. You want them to experience what this—let’s say experience and enjoy. Double E. E².

So what you want them to do is you want them to have a sense of what the game is, because part of getting them to want to play the game is getting them immersed in the game. So you need them to experience your game.

And the second is, they’ve got to enjoy it. Now, there’s different ways to enjoy something. It could be mental, it could be physical, you can have a good time, maybe you love the art. There’s different ways for you to enjoy it. You know.

And Magic definitely—for example, one of the things that Magic does really well is there’s so many different ways to enjoy the game, that if I get you to play—right, you might just enjoy the art. You might enjoy the flavor. You might enjoy the base mechanics. You might enjoy the interaction with the other player. You know. You might enjoy drawing a card every turn.

There’s different things you can enjoy. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they enjoy. In fact, it doesn’t matter what they experience, either, as long as they experience something that’s indicative of what the game is. You know. Be careful that they’re not experiencing something that isn’t the game, because when they come back to it, that’s what they’ll expect.

But so you as a game designer want to make sure that you set up a game that gets them into the experience quickly—so that’s another big thing, by the way. Another huge mistake people make in their games is there’s too much prep. That you don’t get the players into the game fast enough.

Video games tend to understand this, and video games have learned pretty well to, like, “Hey, get them going right away, and as you get them going, you can teach them as they go.” You know. You don’t give them everything up front. You teach them a few things and get them going.

And paper games have a little harder time, because they have to deal with rules and things. You know, rulesheets and stuff. They don’t quite have the luxury that video games do. But the key though is get them going soon. Like, one of the things I say when you’re teaching people to play Magic—just start playing. Just start playing. You know. Teach them the absolute—and when I say the basics, I mean the basics. Like how do you cast a card. What land is. I mean, very, very simple stuff.

Because what is fun about a game is once they experience something, they’re drawn in. And now—and now they—once you experience something, you want to know what happens. You know. Like for example, one of the ways I’ll engage people with Magic is, sometimes I’ll talk about the color pie. Because that’s instantly, easily grokkable. Like “Oh, these are the colors,” and “What color am I?” and “What does this mean? What does that mean? How does this work, and oh what character is this?” You know, like—it gets people very fast.

And that—when playing, I like putting cards in their hands, letting them look at them, and get them playing. Get your creature out. Attack with this creature. You know, attack with this spell. And I don’t care if Turn 1 they Bolt me. I don’t care. Is that good strategy? No. In fact—in fact, another good tip is, don’t worry about strategy. The first time you play, the goal of the game is experience and enjoyment. Experience what the game is, enjoy it.

Anything beyond experience and enjoyment, you are just asking for trouble. Because if the audience—if your player doesn’t—doesn’t get the experience of the game and doesn’t enjoy that experience, they’re not—I mean, barring—barring some real hard work, they’re not coming back. So when you make your game, you have to make sure that they have that.

So, now let’s talk about Magic, because this is a Magic design podcast. One of the things I need to do is—now I have a luxury, which by the way as a game designer is a huge luxury. I have my player base walking in already liking my game. So when you come in with—when I have a new set, well guess what. You are predisposed to enjoying it. A. You know how to play. You already know most of—you don’t know all the rules, I’m going to teach you some new rules, but you know most of the rules. You know the basics. B. I’m not making you come to this. You come of your own volition. You want to come there. You know. So I have the luxury of I’m making games where the main audience already knows and loves the game. Meaning they’ve already experienced and enjoyed the game in general.

Now, what I want to do is have them experience the new thing and enjoy the new thing. So for example, let’s talk Innistrad, because it’s the most current set, I wanted to do Greek mythology. So first thing I want to do is I want to just dip into Greek mythology. I want—when you’re playing the game, you feel like “Oh, wow! This feels like Greek mythology!”

And a lot of the work we put into the set was to allow you to—now luckily, because it’s something that’s very—I’m talking about piggybacking, was very attainable, we made a lot of cards that just hit you with the flavor really fast. So first off, you’re enjoying yourself because you’ve seen the cards and “Oh, I’m doing this, I’m doing that.”

But then you start to play, and you’re like “Oh, okay, I’m a hero, oh I play the ordeal on my hero. Oh, the gods are sending him on a—on a quest. Oh, but that’s good for him, because he’s got heroic, so now he gets a little bigger. And then when he attacks the ordeal makes him bigger, and oh,” you know, and like all of a sudden, like, you’re a hero on a quest, and you’re getting engaged in—in Theros.

And—like I said, that—that—my job is easy on some level. But what I need to do is, I need to from the earliest level, from the commons—like I always talk about, you know, if your—if your theme’s not at common it’s not your theme. I’m doing Greek mythology, that’s got to be at common.

And play experience I want, I’ve got to make sure you’re going to hit that pretty soon. You know, I don’t want—I don’t want to make a play experience where, like, “Well, three out of every times you’ll experience this.” No no no. I need to make a play experience so no matter what you do on your first time playing, in your prerelease, that you’re going to get to feel what Theros (???). That you can get a sense of Theros’ mechanical identity playing once. And that’s the important thing.

Which is—I mean, I have the luxury that if you play a game and the first game doesn’t go well, you love Magic, odds are you’re going to play a second game. But look. You play enough games of something, you will give up. You go to the prerelease and you’re not having a good time, you will not play that. I mean, you’ll play other sets, but you might not play that set.

And so it’s very important that I use the tools available to me to get you to play that. And I mean, today’s topic being piggybacking, I want to make use of the things that are going to invest you quickly and get you to understand what I am doing.

So anyway, I am at work. But today was interesting. Today veered a little bit. I thought I was going to talk just about piggybacking, but actually I talked a bit about first experience and barrier to entry and how you introduce somebody to your game. Which I will talk more about in the future. It’s an important topic.

But let me leave on this idea of why piggybacking is very important, which is—here. To the fourth—the four questions I asked in my article. So I will repeat them to you. When choosing how to represent an element of the game, did you choose the item that best epitomizes what is most important about that element?

So the idea is, you can’t represent everything. I mean, every once in a while you design to a flavor and then maybe you’re representing a lot. But if you have a mechanic and you’re trying to find the flavor for it, the key is making sure that you are playing up—you know, when you’re trying to pick a flavor to match your mechanic, make sure you’re playing up what the mechanic—what’s key to the mechanic, so you’re picking flavor that matches most. Now George Fan felt like the most important thing about his defense is that it couldn’t move. He picked plants. That’s important. You know. Figure out what matters and make sure that you do that.

Number two. If you’re unable to capture everything, did you prioritize the one thing that confuses players? So meaning, if the goal of piggybacking is to make things easier for people and get them over the hump of understanding, that is where you need to apply your piggybacking. Meaning if there’s four things to learn and one’s the confusing thing, piggyback that thing. Use knowledge to help the thing that they’re going to have the hardest time with.

Next. Do the different elements of your game piggyback together? So, not only do things piggyback by themselves, but you can join them together. The example I gave in the article was with Scars, where I was trying to get a feel for the Phyrexians, I used a metaphor of disease.

And by using that, both infect and proliferate played into the same disease metaphor, and they worked together, and they worked together synergistically, that it gave the overall Phyrexian a very strong feel. And that I was piggybacking on the sense of disease. I was choosing words that conveyed the concept. You infect. You proliferate. That I was playing into disease words to try to get across what I wanted.

And finally, have you allowed piggybacking to impact your design? And what that means is, you have a hard work ahead of you. The task as a game designer to get someone to ex—to experience and enjoy your game is a tough one. Piggybacking is a very valuable tool. Use your audience’s knowledge to your advantage. You don’t have to teach them everything. If you take things they already know, you have less teaching to do. Which means they’re closer to the—getting to experience and enjoy.

And that, my little wrap-up is the—today’s talk on piggybacking. So I hope you guys enjoyed it. I like to do technical ones from time to time. So anyway, now it’s time for me to use my—my skills, because it’s time for me to be go making Magic. Talk to you—talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye.