2/7/14 Episode 95: Emotional Connection

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. Today will be a little different. So sometimes I always wonder—so these things called TED Talks, where they invite people from around the world and different specialties to come and just talk about their passion, every year there’s a thing called the Game Developer’s Conference, the GDC, where they have people come and they talk about their beliefs in games and such. And I always thought one day I’d do a TED Talk or a GDC talk, something, and I had a speech all ready. A topic all ready. And I decided, “You know, I don’t know if I’m ever doing a TED Talk, or doing a GDC talk. But I am doing podcasts.”

So I thought maybe I would spend today’s podcast sharing with you my talk. So I call this… okay, I call this “Mark talks…” okay, there’s a little… one second. Policemen? I have to slow down so the policeman does not stop me. See, that’s what you get with Drive to Work. Actual, real-life interaction. Okay. Past the policemen.

Okay. So I’m going to talk about my topic of passion. Okay. So here is what—let me start back in my writing days. So, when I was in college, I had a writing professor that I adored. That was my one of my favorite teachers I had in college. And she was awesome because she did a really good job of sort of challenging assumptions and just explaining things in ways that you hadn’t thought about as a student.

So, okay. One day, she says to us, “You know, if you take the work of any writer, and you just look at their body of work, take Hemingway, take Fitzgerald, take some classic writer, and look at all of their work, what you will find is, there is some central theme that comes out in their work. That there is some message that they wanted to give, and that their stories tend to be filtered through that message.” And she said, “That’s not just famous writers, all writers do that. Now, if all writers do that, that means you do that. Now, if there’s a theme that you have as a writer, maybe it makes sense for you to figure out what it is.”

And so, I looked at my writing, and I spent some time. It is hard to see your own writing and see the themes. So I spent some time trying to figure out what it could be. And in the end, I came up with the following. This what I believe the theme is, is that we live in a world where people want to believe that people view the world through their intellect. And they inherently want to believe that it is the intellect that drives their lives.

But, my hypothesis is that in fact people are more run by their emotions. While they think they’re run by their intellect, they are more run by their emotions. And  as I look at my work, that’s a reoccurring theme. For some reason, if you study my stuff, I’m fascinated by emotions. Emotions fascinate me. And I think what it is, is that how people function is very interesting. And I’ve always been very interested in psychology, if you look at the psychographics I’ve made for Magic, that it’s all about “Why do people play? What satisfaction do they get? What does it emotionally bring to them?”

So anyway, if you take this idea that people are run more by emotion than intellect—let’s apply it. So what I found was, not only was that a theme in my writing, but as I studied writing, more and more I came to the conclusion of “Being a good writer is understanding how to evoke the proper emotions out of your audience.” That when you talk about a story, that the thing that really resonates in the story—I mean, it is fine that there’s something intellectually to chew on, that’s great, but I think where people really connect with stories is when they emotionally bond with stories. That something about the story speaks to something that is integral to who they are and their life experience.

And in fact, when you study story, Joseph Campbell’s one of my favorites. Joseph Campbell, he’s an anthropologist and sort of studied stories and talked about the impact of stories on people. And kind of one of (???) said is, “You know what? There’s just certain stories that resonate with people, and we tell them again and again and again and again.”

And I think what he said, and what I’ve always interpreted it as, is that there are just certain emotional bonds that work. And stories have learned that over time, and those are the stories you kind of tell. And by the way, if you take this further, take music. I believe music, as much as people want to intellectually sort of think about music, I believe music gets you emotionally. That just there’s a song that has a theme, it just, oh, you can relate to. You know what? Breaking up is hard to do. Or whatever. Pick your song. But like, I know when I listen to music, that it resonates most when the message the person is giving and my life experience overlap. That there’s an emotional bonding that happens. That the music that most speaks to you is music that speaks to you emotionally.

Okay. I’m a game designer, so I have to take this same application and put it to game design, which is “What makes good game design?” And I think the exact same thing comes through. I think that people want to intellectually think about games, but in the end, whether they enjoy it or not is more emotional than intellectual. So this has huge ramifications for game design. So I’m going to talk about that today, and explain for game designers, why this thought process is very important. Okay. Now I’ve explained before, the difference between interesting and fun. But I will explain it again because it’s very important to this concept.

So one of the things that game designers do, it’s a trap that game designers fall into, is they make something that is stimulating intellectually, but it is not rewarding emotionally. And in R&D we refer to it as interesting vs. fun. What that means is, you do something that on the surface, like seems interesting. It’s like “Wow, that’s very interesting.” And the reality is, it is an intellectual process.

Like, one of the things for example in making Magic cards, is there’s different experiences you can create for. One of the experiences you can create for is the reading of the file. “Wow, when I read the file, am I stimulated? Is it interesting? Are there new things to think about?” But, that’s a trap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want people to like your set the first time they see it, and yes, the first time they see it, they tend to read it as a card file.

But you know what? That’s now how people really experience games or experience Magic. They experience it by playing with it. And so, you have to make sure that your game, the cards, play fun. That they’re fun to play. Not interesting to read, not interesting to think about, but fun to play. And there’s a dangerous, dangerous trap that you fall into—and I’ve explained this, but once again, you’ll see all my theories starting to crystallize in this talk.

So one of the things I’ve talked a lot about is how game designers are game players. For example, it is very hard to create something that you yourself do not understand. If you want to make music, you have to appreciate music. If you want to write stories, you have to appreciate stories.

I remember for example, they interviewed Ang Lee when he was making The Hulk movie. The first Hulk movie. And he bragged about how he he’d never read a Hulk comic. And I was like “Oh, we’re doomed. We’re doomed. Why are you bragging that you’ve never read the source material?” Like, for example, “What are you directing?” “Well, I’m directing Pride and Prejudice. Luckily, I’ve never read the book.” Like, you want someone who understands the material. How can you get us to emotionally bond when you don’t understand why we care?

And I feel like if you’re going to be a game designer, you’d better be a game player. Because you have to understand what is fun about games. Now, the key is understanding that not every single player is going to play with the same appreciation. The whole point of the psychographics, of Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, is trying to explain that different players play for different reasons. And part of being a game designer is understanding that.

But nonetheless, in each case, when I talk about what Timmy and what Johnny and what Spike want, it’s an emotional thing. Timmy wants to experience something. He wants to feel something. That that feel—it drives him and gives him excitement. And gives him an emotional rush. Johnny wants to express something. He wants to show you what he’s capable of. He wants to open up his heart and let you see what he’s capable of. That’s very emotional. And even Spike, he wants to prove something! He wants to demonstrate something. He wants to show you what he’s capable of. That’s also very emotional. All three of those, very, very emotional.

And so, what I say is “When you’re designing a game, when you are making a game, the key is ‘How does your audience bond with what you’re making? What’s the emotional connection?” And that’s not to say that you can’t have an intellectual component. I’m not saying things can’t also be interesting. But they cannot be interesting in the sake of being fun. That it can’t be something that’s interesting… “Mmm, that’s interesting to think about. Oh, well what would happen?” You know what I’m saying?

Now, it is possible that certain players enjoy—like, part of what you do when you make games is you try to take your audience—so in general, once again I’ve talked about that the idea of a game is the audience is putting into you the game designer some trust. “I want to have a good time. I enjoy challenges, I enjoy mental challenges.” You know. “Entertain me,” if you will. “You are going to send me on a quest. Give me a fun quest.” And they’re very, very trusting. Meaning “Whatever you have me do, that’s what I’m going to do. Whatever the game says to do, that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to trust that the thing you’re telling me to do is fun.”

And a big mistake that a lot of game designers make is, they make something that creates an experience that does something, that it is not necessarily fun. And I believe that game designers as a whole—not all of them—lean a little bit too much on the intellectual stimulation. And here’s why.

Games, at their core, are about solving problems. I’ve talked about this in my “Ten Things Every Game Needs.” Right?  You need a goal. You need rules. You need—there’s obstacles in the way, there’s things you have to overcome. There’s catchup features to help you and there’s flavor to give you an essence of what’s going on. But when you boil it down, essentially, you have a task that you are giving the player to do. You’re throwing obstacles in their way, and they’re trying to overcome the obstacles to complete the task.

But, inherent in that is the belief that what they’re going to have to do to overcome the obstacles will be something that will be fun. Now, as in anything, the key of the game and the reason I think people play games is it’s a safe way to do something that’s important in life. Which is you need to learn in life how to solve problems. How to have challenges. How to lose, how to have things not go your way. That game playing is a very safe way to learn just valuable life skills that are crucial to what you need to do.

Now, the key to that as a game designer is you want to create the right amount of tension, you want to make challenge for your audience, for your game player, because if it’s too easy then it’s not providing them with what they want. But if it’s too hard, well then it’s frustrating and that unto itself causes problems. That you’re trying to find the sweet spot of giving them enough obstacles that it’s challenging but not so much that it can’t be done. And sort of the message of today’s thing is you are trying to emotionally fulfill them through the thing. That you are trying to give them something that will give them an emotional connection.

Now, I know when you’re writing stories, my background obviously is writing, when you’re writing a story or even making music or something, it’s much more clear that you are trying to emotionally bond with your audience. I think writers and songwriters, they kind of get that. But I don’t know if game designers quite understand in the same way that a game is just as emotional as a story or as a song. That the games that resonate, the games that people tell stories about, the games that connect people in their heart, are games in which there’s something integral going on that they can bond over.

So for example, I’ll use Magic because that’s my game. What drives people to Magic? What about Magic is emotionally fulfilling? And I think at the core of it, it’s the idea of “I have resources at my disposal, and I’m going to pit myself against somebody else.” There’s something very primal about the idea of pitting yourself against somebody else. Because if you go back in history, and you look, man—or women—people—have invented so many ways to duel with one another, to fight with one another, in a way that’s not life or death.

I mean obviously, there’s war and there’s actual combat, but what I’m talking about is, just look at what people have done for entertainment, of their own free will, in which one person pits himself against another person. Why? Why is that? And the answer is that I think one of the things that people need is they need to have connection to other people, and that one of the most primal things about it is, “How do I stack up against other people?” That you have to compare yourself to other people. That people don’t live in a vacuum. It’s not like “I live in my own little bubble, and everybody else coexists.” It is just human nature to want to measure yourself against other people.

And there’s no cleaner, clearer, crisper way to do that than one-on-one conflict of some kind. Some competition. It could be a cooking competition. It could be as swimming competition. There’s a million different ways to do that, but the essence of “I’m pitting myself against you” is primal.

Now, Magic says, “Okay. Our pitting, our thing is a battle of wits.” That it is a mental challenge. Yeah, yeah, we have the fun dressing, but the game, when you boil it down, is a mental challenge. “I am going to challenge you.”

Now, I think that Magic does something special in that I think the very act of magic itself is something that humans—it’s funny, because I think magic resonates with humans because it represents something they do not understand. Where did magic come from? The stories of magic? It came from people didn’t understand. They didn’t know why things are the way they are, and people have a need. A desperate need to understand why things function the way they do. Humans  do not do well with “Why are things the way they are? Eh, they are.” No. They need an explanation.

Early on, it was mythology. Eventually that got replaced by science. Although faith still plays a huge role. But you need to have some belief and understanding of why things are. And magic just—it fits the bill. Anything you can’t explain, “Well maybe there’s this force. That I don’t understand. But that can do wondrous and magical things.” So the idea of the game is, “I’m testing myself,” super primal, “with magic,” also primal. As a battle of wits. It’s just very exciting.

Now, one of the things that’s interesting is, when you play and you’re pitting yourself against somebody else, what you want, what you’re pitting against them may not be—like one of the things about the psychographics is, when Johnny is playing somebody else, they are trying to express what they’re capable of. Whether they win or lose is not as important as how they win or lose. Where Spike is much more concentrating in, “The way to demonstrate what I’m capable of is by showing you what I need to do, and so if my goal is showing you that I can win, well then, I want to win.”

Now Spikes, the key thing about how they play is their goal might not be winning. They might prove their superiority in a different way. Like, one of the things that’s very common when I talk to people about Spikes is that handicaps are real good for Spikes, because it’s like, “Okay, I understand that I’m the better player, well I’m going to win even with this handicap. That’ll demonstrate what I’m capable of.”

But anyway, so when designing a game, you want to make sure you’re hitting on an emotional level. I think that Richard Garfield did that really well. That Magic on a very primal level hits a bunch of things that people want to do.

And then, one of the things that we’ve followed up on is—one of the things I’ve been talking about, how I’ve been doing design the last couple years is that I’ve been making sure that when I make a design, that I have an emotion that I am getting out of you. That I, the game player, am going, “What experience am I trying to create?” And I want to make sure that I’m making gameplay that has that emotional response.

So this is my challenge to all game designers listening to this podcast, which is the next time you make a game, stop thinking about how the audience will perceive it intellectually, and think about how your audience will perceive it emotionally. What are you providing for them? What is your game doing? Is your game cathartic? Is your game something that—like you have to find something about the human experience and say, “This is what I’m doing,” and understand what it is you’re doing.

Now, be aware. There are tons of things that humans are attracted to, and the things that they’re attracted to, you just have to understand why they’re attracted to it. And like I said, a lot of me coming up with the psychographics was trying to understand what emotionally people got out of Magic. What was the things that really connected them and bonded them to the game?

And a lot of what I’ve explained before is, I think a lot of my time at Magic, the way I explained it is, I’ve shifted R&D from a mathematical mindset to a psychological mindset. And a lot of that is, I’ve shifted us from thinking about the game intellectually to thinking about it emotionally.

Because one of the things we think very much about is, how are you going to experience things? When I make a new mechanic, I’m very interested in first impressions. Why are first impressions important? Because one of the things about emotions is, emotions react fast. Very fast. In fact, one of the things if you read books on instinct—basically what instinct is, you doing the same thing enough that your mind shortcuts kind of the emotional response to it. That you’ve sort of—I equate it to muscle memory. That muscle memory’s like “If I just do something enough, my muscles remember what I’m doing, and then in the future I can think less about it, my muscles have kind of learned the task at hand. So it’s easier.

And instinct to me is just mental muscle memory. That your mind is just processing things it needs to process, and so it gets them quicker and it can shortcut itself. But what that means is, when you are doing a new game, the audience is going to play, and they’re going to make decisions really fast when they think about your game. And the reason they’re going to make them really fast is because they just do. One of the things I talk about is when you meet somebody, or you see somebody for the first time, you make a decision about it almost instantaneously.

Now, that doesn’t mean your decision can’t change. It doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to like something that initially you didn’t. But people make very strong decisions very early on. And one of the things that’s important for a game designer is, maybe you’re lucky enough they stick with it. Maybe they have someone guiding them that really loves the game, that gets them through that first experience.

But the key is, whatever it is about your game, whatever it is that makes it special, whatever it is that’s going to bond the audience to the game, you’ve got to get that front and center and get them to experience it right away. And you, the game designer, have to understand how does your audience bond with your game? What emotional connection is it going to make? And that emotional connection has to happen fast.

Now. I often talk about the importance of flavor, and here’s why flavor’s super important, is that—and I talk about resonance. So one of the things in Magic we talk a lot about is, what resonance means is that you are piggybacking on known stuff for your audience. Meaning you take things your audience already knows, it already has an emotional investment in, and use them.

For example, when we did Innistrad, it was a horror set, gothic horror, the second I show you a werewolf, well, guess what? You have already built up an emotional stockpile about werewolves. You have watched films with werewolves and seen stories and read books and TV shows and whatever. Werewolves mean something to you. They have an emotional connection. So the second I show you werewolves, you go “Ooh, werewolves!” And that means something. Good or bad, it means something. But I, the game designer, get to piggyback on that emotion that you already have for werewolves.

And Innistrad, for example, was all about gothic horror. Where there’s werewolves and vampires and ghosts and zombies and humans all in peril. Well, these things all mean something to you. And so it’s resonant. And what that meant was, we got to get you to attach super fast because we kind of hooked into pre-existing emotions if you will. And that’s why flavor’s very important, why resonance is very important, is one of the ways to get your audience to bond quickly is to give them a subject matter that they come predisposed to, that they already have an emotional attachment to.

I think one of the things that Richard did in Alpha is it wasn’t just Magic. If you look at it, the color wheel, which is the core of Magic, is about relatable human things you understand. When I explain the color wheel to people, they nod their head. Ooh, they get what the colors mean. Those are normal human things that you understand. When I explain the conflicts in the color wheel, or the allies in the color wheel, those are things you understand.  They’re basic human natures.

You know, Richard then took tropes of fantasy. That Magic, you know, had a white knight and had a basilisk and had a pegasus and had a minotaur. And they were just things that meant something to people. That they weren’t all made-up creatures you had never heard of before. Richard presented it as, “It’s magic. You know what magic is. And these are creatures you understand and magical spells that you get. There’s a lightning bolt and a fireball.” And that when you started, Magic had all this resonant stuff built in, it had this pitting of yourself against the other, the mental challenges, the concept of Magic.

Like, you walked in with all this resonance dripping over you, and you the player could emotionally connect to it very fast. You're like “Ohh, a pegasus! Oh, a minotaur! A fireball! A lightning bolt! All that stuff you can connect to quickly. And one of the things that we do now is we want to make sure that every set we make, there’s some emotional bonding.

And the way we do that is sometimes we do top-down now. It’s the Greek set. It’s the gothic horror set. It’s a set inspired by whatever. Sometimes, we’re  revisiting things we’ve already built up equity in. “Oh, we’re going back to Ravnica! Oh, yay. Oh, we’re going back to Mirrodin!” That we took things that you knew, and the audience had some emotional response to it.

And like I said, the thing that I do, and sort of my talk today, is to encourage all game designers to do, is to say “How am I bonding with my audience? In the first minute of them playing my game, how are they going to have an emotional response? How is something I’m going to do going to make them bond immediately?”

And I think if you think of games like people think of stories or music, in that the way to connect to the audience is to be universal and make something about it something that every person’s going to connect to. Not in the same way. Like for example,  I used “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” before. Well, you know what, most people have had a relationship end. And you know what, it pretty much didn’t end well, odds are. So when you hear the song “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” you kind of nod your head. You go, “Yeah, yeah, breaking up is hard to do.” That it means something to you.

And with it—I mean, it’s a brilliant song, because within the first two seconds you’re like, “Oh man, I know what he’s talking about.” You know? And instantly there’s this connection. That’s the same for games. That when I pick up the cards and I look at the pictures and I see the flavor, and I get the essence of what I’m doing, I want to be connected right away. And that as a game designer, it is my job to figure out how to emotionally bond with my audience.

And there are a lot of tools available to do that. Flavor helps a lot. Having different resonance helps a lot. Trying to just do things in games that your audience will want to do. I mean, one of the best things about games is I talk about having a hook. Something about the game goes, “I want to do that.” When I hear it, I go, “That sounds awesome.” That’s really important. Because it invests the audience in going, “Ooh, there’s this cool thing that I want to be involved in.”

But anyway, I am now at Wizards. So I don’t know, today was a very different podcast. I more was just talking about what I want to talk about, spilling my heart, and like I said, the more I do game design, I’ve been a game designer now for eighteen years, or professional, I guess I was an amateur before that, and one of the things I’ve learned in my eighteen years is the more I design games, the more I realize that doing any creative work, games especially in my mind, is about understanding people. And that what you are trying to do is understand how people function, and take the thing you’re making and adapt it to people.

 As I said, the thing I learned about my writing is my message is, people like to think they’re intellectual, but in the end I think people are run by their emotions. And as a creative person making things for people, if they’re run by their emotions, you’ve got to appeal to their emotions. And your game has to create very quickly an emotional response.

Anyway, thank you very much for listening to me chat today. I always have fun talking about what’s all in my head, and today was a personal passionate topic of mine, so hopefully this means something to people. If not, if you’re just a Magic player, maybe this gives a little better understanding of how I make Magic and what I do, how to make Magic the best I can. Speaking of which, while I love talking about how games are made and passion and creativity and all that, one of the things I also love is making Magic.