5/16/14 Episode 122: Repetition

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, from time to time I like to do podcasts based on old articles that I’ve done that I liked. And I like to dig through them, and there’s some pretty famous ones that I’ve done. But there’s some ones that I really liked that are a little less—they’re not quite as iconic, but I thought they were good articles, and (???) of a podcast.

So this one is based on an article I did called “Once More with Feeling.” You might also know that I am a Joss Whedon fan, and that is the name of the episode. My favorite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which is the musical episode. Which I’m a big fan of. Ironically, in their worst season. My favorite show was in their worst season. But it was an awesome show.

Okay. So what this article is about is about repetition. And I wrote an article explaining why repetition was important. So I thought, “A fine topic for a podcast. I should talk about repetition in design.”

And then I should follow up with another podcast also about repetition in design. You know, thematic—no, just kidding. I won’t do that to you.

Okay. So the goal of today’s podcast is to sort of walk through why repetition is so important. And the thing I stressed in the article, which I will stress here in the podcast, is that repetition is a tool. It is not a bug, it is a feature. It is important that the game uses a lot of repetition. And so I’m going to talk about why repetition is important. And why it is good to have repe—re—uh…. (flustered sound) Why it’s good to have repetition. And a host that can speak.

Okay. So in the podcast—sorry, not the podcast. In the article, I listed four reasons, so I’m going to use those as my jumping-off points. So number one is talking about human nature. Now obviously, I did a podcast on communications theory, talking about comfort, surprise, and completion. So repetition falls into both the comfort and the completion part of this. It also can play into surprise. Let me walk you through that.

So humans crave repetition. Why? Why do humans crave repetition? Well, number one, it is comfortable.

So one of the things that I did in my article, which I’m going to do today in my podcast, is my examples came from television. And television series. And like I said in the article, that when I first got this job, I really thought my previous job, being a television writer, would have nothing to do with this job.

And what I learned was that art is a lot more intertwined than you think. And a lot of the things that I learned writing very much apply to doing Magic design. Repetition being one of them.

So when you talk about comfort, I’m going to use a TV series to make an example. So a TV series usually has a cast of characters, the same cast of characters. A setting or a couple settings. Usually one major setting. And it has a certain tone and style and there’s kind of stories they tell. And week in, week out, it’s the same characters in the same settings telling the same kind of story.

Now, there’s variation every week. But I’ll use Seinfeld as a classic example of a sitcom. Seinfeld, the whole shtick of Seinfeld was it’s a show about nothing. Which meant that there were never big issues at hand. That the problems they had were just small issues. They were trying to get a seat at a restaurant. They were trying to find their car in a parking lot. Jerry would date somebody, and for some reason he’d have a problem with her because of some small          thing that just bugged him. And that you had your four characters, you had Jerry and Elaine and Kramer and… Jason Alexander is named… see, this is why—I get put on the spot and forget obvious things. George.

So you have Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer. Those are the four characters. Every episode, those are the people you see. They’re pretty much in Jerry’s apartment. They go to other places, but Jerry’s apartment is the main crux of what they do.

And it’s a show about nothing. Little things are going to happen. Big things don’t happen on Seinfeld, little things happen on Seinfeld. If you go to another classic sitcom like Cheers, it took place in a bar. It was the same group of people every week in the bar. And they almost never left the bar. There’s this place where—the place was superever-present.

You can go more modern-day, like say How I Met Your Mother. It’s the same five characters. And once again, they’re in a bar for—it’s either one of their houses or their bar, the vast majority of the show takes place. Although I guess this last season all takes place in a hotel. But anyway, the point though is that there is just a sense of repetition.

And TV series work that way, why? There’s a couple reasons. One is because people like it. It is comfortable. That one of the things that when you set up patterns, you want people to sort of have expectations. And so once you get used to something, it is just comfortable. I talk a lot about, in my podcast on communications theory, how important structure is. That in a magazine, I explained, how like just certain sections are always in the same place at the same time.

And the reason that is, the reason that exists, that repetition exists, is A. to create comfort, that humans crave comfort and having familiarity just makes them more willing and more willing to embrace and want to come back to it. Because it takes mental energy to do something new. And not that humans don’t like to do new things, they do, but a lot of the time when they’re trying to relax, the goal isn’t really to always see something new. It’s also to have some familiarity.

And you want new. The shows have different stories and different things go on. But there’s a general sense. The magazine has new articles and new things, but it’s ordered in the same way. Magic is very similar. Which is you want new things.

The funny thing is, people tend to focus on the new things when a new set comes out. They go, “What’s the new mechanics? What are the new cards? What are the things I haven’t seen before?” But a very, very important part of it is, if we took Magic and we pushed it too far, if we said, “Okay, this time we’re going to go farther away from the norm than we normally do,” that people would actually dislike it. That one of the reasons that Magic is Magic is because so much of what you know is grounded in the game, that you can focus on the new things without feeling disoriented.

For example, I’ve talked about this before. When we make our design skeletons to fill in, like there’s just certain effects that always go in certain colors at certain rarities. There is going to be a Giant Growth at green common. There’s going to be a Naturalize at green common. There’s going to be probably a life-gain spell. There’s going to be land-searching. There’s just things that green does that we want to have a regular familiarity, to go, “Oh, well if I play green, oh, well green’s going to ramp me.” There’s certain things green is going to do. There’s certain things white’s going to do, or black, or blue or red. Whatever you pick. That we have an identity and we want to keep it strong.

Now. I’m not saying that there’s not room for variation. But in order for variation to mean something, and this is the important part, in order for people to notice the new things, everything else has to be the same.

So the example I gave in my article, which I’ll use here, is, “Okay. So you have a sitcom. It’s got a cast of characters you know. It has a setting you know. It has a style of story you know.” Now let’s say they want to change one of those things.

Let’s say they want to introduce a different set of characters for the show. Or let’s say they want to—so for example, I watch a show called Person of Interest, which is a very good show if you haven’t watched it. And they have a cast of characters that do something.

So one show, the show starts, and it’s not the characters you know. It’s a different character. Who’s gone on to become a regular. But at the time you didn’t know this character. And you watch that character do the same kind of things that normal characters do, but it’s a different vantage point.

So what they did is, they said, “Okay. So we’re going to switch up who we’re watching. But we’re going to tell the same kind of story in the same…” it was also set I believe in New York City, but anyway, the point was, it was very disorienting, but they’re like, “Okay. We’re not going to tell a completely different story. We’re not going to have a character you don’t know tell a different story. We’re going to tell the same kind of story but with a different character.”

Or a lot of times on a sitcom, they go somewhere. And now it’s like, “Okay, it’s the cast you know… Modern Development goes to Hawaii!” Well, you don’t know Hawaii. But you know them and you know the kind of stories they’re telling. Sometimes on Cheers they leave the bar! It happens. And if your episode’s about them going somewhere else, then you want to keep your characters the same, you want to keep the type of show it is.

Let’s say you want to do a different show from normal. You want to shake things up. It’s a very special episode of Blossom. Or whatever you’re trying to do. Well, you need your characters and your setting to stay steady, so that you can do that.

For example, Ellen did a big show where she came out on her show. It was a very different show. But the characters and the settings were very familiar because that was a different show! That was going to be the focus. Whatever it is you’re doing on your show, notice that they compensate by making sure the other things are known   qualities.

In Magic that’s very much the same way. We want to change things about Magic. In order to change things about Magic, we need to make sure that all the rest of the things are just as you know them. We could do a set in which green doesn’t get Giant Growth. If there’s a reason to somehow change that up. But there has to be a strong reason for it.

Otherwise, if we’re not doing it with a very concrete purpose, then it just becomes, “Oh, why’d they forget Giant Growth? Where’s Giant Growth?” And it’s very noticeable. I mean, Magic is—it’s funny, because we like to play Magic up as being this ever-changing, evolving thing, which it is, but we focus on the change. Because that’s the sexy part. It’s different. But the part that we don’t play up, but it’s important, is that…

One of the things I get a lot is I get letters from people who say, “I used to play Magic back in…” Name some expansion from long ago. “I left for…” name some amount of time that’s many years. “And when I came back, I was pleasantly surprised. A whole lot of things have changed, but it was still the Magic I remember.” That’s one of the things, the line I hear a lot, that “It’s still the Magic I remember.”

Which is, there’s something key to what the game is. And as much as we swing the pendulum and move things around, it’s still centered in the same place. It’s still—it keeps going back to the center. And that doesn’t change.  And that—so one of the reasons you want repetition is it is comfortable, and that it provides a safe place to allow change to go around it.

The other thing, talk about human nature, is that we want some sense of completion. And one of the ways you get completion is by following patterns. Patterns lead to completion.

So patterns lead to comfort, and patterns lead to completion. Let me explain. So if you get someone used to a pattern, then the use of the pattern itself becomes comforting. But also, it’s the patterns themselves that allows you as a creative individual to complete what you have set up.

Meaning, in order to complete something, I have to create expectation in my audience. In order to create expectation, I have to create some structure where I lead them towards something. That is what patterns do.

So for example, a very common pattern in stories is story structure. Which means there’s a certain kind of story you’re telling. My classic go-to example is the romantic comedy. That when you meet these two characters—I mean, you go into a romantic comedy knowing it’s a romantic comedy, for starters. And there is just telltale signs. Even if you somehow…

Let’s say for example, someone said, “I’m going to take you to see a movie.” Tells you nothing about it. Covers your head and takes you to a darkened room and then rip it off and turn on the lights, and “Here’s the movie.” You’re going to pick up pretty fast it’s a romantic comedy. I mean, the tone will help you. You’ll meet two individuals, one of which, probably the main character’s just broken up. You will sense some tension between two characters. Probably at first it will not be good. A lot of (???), they start being enemies, or you know. They start not being enemies, but there’s some friction between them.

And the point of a romantic comedy is, you’re like, “Oh. I see. I get to watch this story about how these two people start not together, and end up together.” And a lot of the fun of the romantic comedy is not the surprise of whether or not they’re getting together, it is watching how. And that’s really important.

And by the way, this is true of all storytelling. Which is—I mean, I’m not saying people can’t break expectations. But in storytelling there are archetypal stories. And the reason that exists, the reason there really are a set number of stories is, there are certain kinds of stories that humans like to see.

Humans, for example, very much care about coupling and about relationships. And so seeing a movie about how two people get together is something they like to watch. And it’s okay that they know that they’re going to get together. In fact, there’s a lot of stuff that’s built in that you just know. That is expected.

And that’s not a bad thing. I know sometimes people worry that like people knowing the gist is a problem. But no no, actually, it’s really good.

Like I said, I’m not saying you can’t ever break things. But a lot of the reason that you have known quantities is A., when you break them they mean something, and B., your audience—you want your audience—so one of the things that’s really important about any kind of art is you want your audience to make a personal connection with it. You want them aboard.

Now, there’s a bunch of different ways to do this. But one way to do it is to make them understand what it is and connect with it. And one of the reasons that stories use patterns and use them very strongly and effectively is that when you understand what it is you’re watching, you just create some expectations that the story gets to fill that make you happy.

And one of the reasons that archetypal stories work—because sometimes people are like, “Wouldn’t you just get tired of it?” And you’re like, “Yeah, another romantic comedy, once again two people are going to fall in love. I’m bored of that.”

And the reason you’re not bored of that is, there’s something very compelling about human nature to humans. We like watching human nature. Like, “Oh, well I want to see how this person deals with this thing, and what happens.”

And the fun of it is, the nuance, the differences is where a lot of the joy of art comes from. It’s not that you’re doing something completely original, it’s you’re doing something that’s a known quantity, but in a way that is interesting.

Let’s take Magic sets. Okay? So it’s not like when I put together a Magic set, that the core of what I’m doing is all that different. You’re going to get your red direct damage and your blue counterspell and your black discard. I mean, you’re going to get the things that are what they are. Magic is what Magic is. And that’s not a bad thing.

But each year, I get to say, “Oh. Well let me do it through this lens. This year, it’s about Gothic horror.” Or “This year, I’m playing up lands.” Or “This year, we’re playing up two-color combinations.” Whatever it is, we have some lens that we’re looking through, and we’re going to say, “Okay, with this as a priority, how do we change things?”

And the idea is, the change that happens comes through organically trying to twist and do the same old thing but with a new vantage point. And that the details are what matter. But the thing that’s very important to understand is, you have to respect—the repetition is allowing you the freedom to make the changes. That if your audience wasn’t familiar with what you were doing, it becomes a lot harder to be able to make the changes.

And that if there’s too many changes, it’s disorienting. Like one of the things that’s interesting is, I grew up with a lot of theatre, I’ve read a lot of plays. And one of the things that’s fun is to watch people do a deconstruction. Where you take something that’s well, well-known, and you start kind of poking holes in it. And start trying to examine it. It’s a very common thing to do. And it’s kind of fun. And one of the reasons deconstruction works is because the audience understands the thing they’re looking at.

So here’s a classic example of deconstruction. Actually, it’s a comic book, but it’s very famous. So, Watchmen. So for those that don’t know, there’s a guy named Alan Moore, who is an amazing writer. A little on the wacky side, but an amazing writer. And he decided that he was going to write a mini-series, 12-issue mini-series, kind of looking at superheroes with a more serious eye. Saying, “We kind of accept all these conventions as just being…”

Comic book is a medium where one genre dominates the medium. And the genre is superheroes. Over time it’s changed a little bit. You’re starting to see other stories told. Comics actually are a very good means to tell many kinds of stories, but now you’re starting to see some other stories. But nonetheless, comics are the defining genre of comic books.

And Alan Moore said, “Let’s just take what is kind of a given and look through it with a more serious eye. What would happen if you took these same things, and brought it to a more realistic world?” Because a lot of what goes on in superhero world, people just accept, “There’s superheroes and supervillains, fighting again.” And he said, “Well, what would really happen?”

And Watchmen is an amazing—I mean, dark, but an amazing sort of look at the superhero mythos deconstructed. And a lot of the interesting things about deconstruction is, it allows you to question things you don’t normally question.

And like I said, some of that is fun. But the point though is, the reason that deconstruction works, the reason that it’s fun to do a variation on a theme is because of the repetition of the theme. That is super, super important.

And so when you’re designing a game, like Magic for example, especially something like Magic that is constantly evolving, is you need to spend as much attention on what doesn’t change than on what does change.

And we shine the spotlight on what does change, because that’s the novel part. But behind the scenes, kind of one of my jobs as Head Designer is making sure things don’t change. Is making sure…

For example, I am essentially the keeper of the color pie. It’s something that all of R&D is supposed to be responsible for, but I’m kind of the focal point. Only because I believe very, very strongly that the color pie is the secret sauce of Magic. And that one of the things that’s very easy is, there’s this desire to do things that the color pie hasn’t done. The players ask for it. There’s inherent draw. “Ooh, wouldn’t it be neat if red could do this or blue could do that?”

And that one of the things that is—I talk about the moth to the flame. There’s things you get attracted to that really aren’t good for you. And that this is one of them, which is you want some novelty, we want to do new and cool things, but a lot of what my job has been with my designers is not pushing them to go farther, it’s holding them from going too far.

And a lot of people are like, “Why, why not let them go as far as they can?” And the answer is, Magic needs to have the repetition it has in order for it to stay the game it is. And we need a little bit of change, and we do. And it’s not like Magic isn’t ever-changing. But it is easy to make too much change. It is easy to push things too far. It is easy to stretch the color wheel beyond the scope which is healthy for the game.

And a lot of my job is saying, “That’s more than you need. That’s not necessary here. That’s stretching the color pie too much.” And a lot of ways, my role is trying to make my team understand that a little can go a long way. Like, one of the things they teach you—I’ll use cooking as an example. My daughter took a cooking class.

And one of the things they teach you is to try to respect that the goal isn’t to overwhelm the eater if you’re making a meal. That you want just enough so they get a sense of it and enjoy it without it overwhelming them. And that one of the things that they stress in her cooking class, which my daughter’s brought home and talked about, is that the goal is to figure out how much—like it’s not how much can you add, it’s how little can you add and get the effect you need.

And I thought that was a perfect metaphor for design, and I talk about this with my designers, which is I have something new. I have a new mechanic, I have a new idea, I have a new theme. One of the things I always want to ask my designers is, how much is enough? How much is you’ve done enough and you’ve given what you need to give?

And that one of the things that’s a very easy trap to fall into is to overshoot and give too much. And sometimes, if you really err, you give so much that you lessen the thing that it is. And I’ll use a cooking analogy, which is, “Hey. Salt can go a long way. But too much salt makes it worse. A little salt makes it better. Too much salt makes it worse.”

I can sum that up in game design. “A little makes it better. Too much makes it worse.” And that’s very important. That when you are trying to design something, the base of what you’re doing, the stock if you will, to use—apparently I’m in a cooking metaphor now, the broth is the repetition. When you have chicken soup, a lot of it is the chicken broth. Have you had chicken broth before? Yes you have.

And in a chicken-based thing, the chicken broth, you need to have the chicken broth. You need to have the base. On TV shows, they’ve got the premise. “It’s a show about nothing.” That’s what the show is about. It’s about people hanging out in a bar. It’s about an extended family that interacts with each other, but parallels three different families. Whatever it is, whatever you’re trying to show, it’s about a time traveler that goes around with his companion and tries to make things right.

Whatever your shtick is, whatever your thing is, you need to keep it constant with your premise, and a lot of that is repetition. A lot of what makes art art is that it’s not how much new you added, but how little new you added, and how much that newness was enough to take the thing that people are familiar with and comfortable with, with that repetition, and give it just a little tiny edge to it to make it feel new.

And the big lesson of today is, you do not need to have a lot. In fact, this is one of my quotes, I think from my article. “It only takes a little change to change everything.” That you do not need—one of the things that people worry about is, “I want to do something different.” And so they change a whole bunch of things. And what happens is, you lose why it was special.

Like, one of the things that’s very interesting is, what they call the sophomore slump. Which is you make something, and then you try to make more of it. And somehow the more of it doesn’t always have the (???) of the first thing. And the reason is that sometimes, that people don’t have enough faith in what the thing was in the first place. That they try to push it a little bit.

I know movies do this a lot. Like one of the things that superhero movies is very common is, the first movie is the origin movie. Right? And then they introduce a villain. And the second movie’s like, “Oh, second movie. More villains!” Can’t just have one villain. Have to have two villains or three villains. Maybe four villains. And it’s like, “No, the first movie worked with one villain! You don’t necessarily need two villains!” Somehow there’s this need to like, ramp it up and pump it up. And the point is, what made it cool?

One of the things, for example, my favorite superhero movie of all time, and also my favorite sequel, is X-Men 2. And X-Men 2 did this wonderful thing where they had a new story with a new villain, they added a little bit, they added Nightcrawler, which is one of the best X-Men ever, so that’s always good. But they added a little bit in, but really the crux of the movie—I mean the first movie was a Wolverine story the second movie was a Wolverine story. It was a continuation of the first story. And it sort of said, “Okay, we set things up, we’re going to tell you a singular story with a singular villain.” And it was just a beautifully told story that, like, “Let’s just tell this story. And we don’t have to have  8,000 villains.”

And like, one of the reasons that X-Men 3 in my mind had a lot of problems was they were trying to tell two completely different stories in the same movie. It’s like, “Pick one. Which classic X-Men story would you like to tell?”

And I think the problem is, they were trying to tell two different stories rather than pick the one they really wanted to tell. And that I think that is a very common thing that you will see, is that one of the hardest things about doing art is—especially continuing art. Not just a new thing. Not just a brand-new thing, but something in which you’re continuing what you’ve done.

You have to understand what your audience loved the first time, and not be afraid to deliver the exact same thing to them again. You just need a little bit of nuance. That there’s nothing wrong with repetition if the audience loves the thing you’re giving them. You need to have something new, I’m not saying you want to completely do the exact same thing again, but don’t—understand why the audience fell in love with it in the first place, and...

One of the things that we always think about when making Magic is, and people writing letters really reinforce this, which is Magic is an awesome thing. Richard Garfield made an awesome thing. Our goal is not to move away from        Richard’s awesome thing. Our goal is to figure out the ways by which we can change up Magic, but at its core, at its heart, be that thing that Richard made. Be that thing that people fall in love with, and continue to be that thing.

And that the repetition is not a bad thing. It’s not a bug. Repetition is a feature. Because repetition is the thing that people love. Repetition is what makes it special.

And yes, you want a little salt for your thing to spice it up. But once again. A little salt makes it better. Too much salt makes it worse.

Anyway, as much as I love talking about Magic and Magic design, even more, I like making Magic. And so I part, and it’s time to bid you adieu. So thank you very much for joining me, and hopefully this resonates. This was a very important topic and something that if you are someone who does creative stuff, you need to really respect the importance of repetition and see it as your ally and as a tool. Thanks guys, I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.