5/23/14 Episode 125: Lenticular Design, Part I

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, there’s a topic that I wanted to talk about on my podcast, but I wanted to wait until I wrote the article about it first. And the article I wrote about it came out today, just to give you a little hint of how far in advance I’m doing these.

And the topic is lenticular design. So today I’m going to talk all about what it is, how we came up with the concept, and sort of how it impacts Magic design. It’s actually a pretty important concept. And it’s something that’s pretty—I have not seen it elsewhere, so I know it’s something that I’m sure other designers think about, but anyway, it’s interesting sometimes that one of the things I try very hard to do is put words to things. To concepts. Because I write about design so much, I’m very conscious about sort of having things that I can form and discuss. And lenticular design is a big one. I’m actually very proud of lenticular design. And today, I’m going to talk about it.

Okay, so to understand lenticular design, let’s go back in the WABAC machine to the beginning of New World Order. So I did a whole podcast on New World Order, but the super short version is, less people were getting into Magic. The number of people that were joining was going down. That’s a bad sign. We were trying to figure out what’s going on, we realized that the game was just getting too complicated because when people enter the game, they’re always at zero comprehension, they don’t know anything, and little by little Magic had just been—the gap had just been widening between knowing nothing and being able to play.

So the big idea of New World Order Was if we take common and hold it to a tighter complexity, beginners, most of their cards are common, we would just make it easier for them—we’d essentially lessen the game’s complexity for the beginner but still allow the more complex things for the advanced players. That was the idea.

So one of the things that I was tasked with, figuring out what made things complex. And what I realized was, there was three types of complexity. What we called “comprehension complexity,” which has to do with reading the card and understanding what the card is saying. And as I explained in my article, there’s actually a couple different types of comprehension complexity.

So number one is, I just use terminology you don’t know. And this is why—I talk about keywords come at a cost. Whenever you read something and it’s a word you don’t know, that’s a barrier. It’s a big barrier. That imagine reading something and just coming across a word that you aren’t familiar with. Okay, once or twice, the vocabulary, you can learn it, but at some point it just becomes daunting. So you have to be very careful.

What we found is, certain vocabulary is very hard for people. The example I use in my article is mentioning the stack. Now, advanced players might feel like, “Oh, I get the stack. Last in, first out, blah blah blah.” But a lot of what the stack does is pretty invisible to most players. Most player understand kind of how their spells interact, but they don’t—if you actually ask them what the stack is and how the stack works, most players don’t know.

A lot of players, in fact, have never heard the term “the stack.” Now, real quickly, the counterargument for us not mentioning the stack is, “Why should mention it more. How are people going to learn what it is if we never talk about it?”

The problem is, it’s a pretty advanced concept. You don’t need to understand the stack to play. That’s another important thing to understand, which is, one of the goals of teaching somebody to play a game, any game but Magic in particular, is you don’t need them to know everything. You need them to know enough to play.

So one of our strategies has been—because Magic is such a hard game to learn is, only teach people what they have to know.  And a lot of things, like how the stack works, we teach the elements of it so they’re playing correctly, but we don’t right away teach them the nitty-gritty. Because it’s just overwhelming.

I mean if you sat down to play Magic and I’m like, “Okay, read this phone book first,” most people would be like “Thank you, I’ll play another game.” And really what we were trying to do is saying, “Okay, here’s the things you have to know.” And as you get into the game you slowly learn more.

And that trying to throw people in the deep end tends to make people not able to deal with the game. And that Magic is a fun game, and the point—at its core it’s not as complex as people think it is. It’s complex in that there’s lots and lots of corner cases. To understand about the corner cases is complex. To understand the basics of how to play actually is not that complex. And part of doing that is making sure that we…

SO anyway, number one is just vocabulary. We have to be careful with vocabulary. Some vocabulary I worth it. Some vocabulary. If done correctly, such as flying, could actually help you. Because the vocabulary comes with outside meaning, and that outside meaning can help you understand what’s going on.

But other vocabulary, in which it doesn’t connect to anything. People ask us all the time about keywording “mill.” And maybe one day we will if we come up with the right word for it. But the biggest problem with keywording mill is, like why don’t we use the word mill?

 

And the reason is, the word mill is a Magic thing that comes from the word Millstone, which is just a card in Magic. Milling is like grinding wheat. I guess there’s the metaphor of we’re grinding your mind, but anyway, mill doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I understand if you play Magic for a while you get the slang, but if you’re a new player and I say, “mill two cards,” you have no idea what that means. And that Magic has enough of that. It just gets hard to grok.

So anyway, number one of comprehension complexity is just vocabulary. Number two is just having things that don’t—like one of the rules I said in the article is, if you read a card and you go, “I’ve got to read that again,” that’s a sign there’s something going on. That it’s complex.

That if I can’t grok what happened—and the one I use in my article is Dead Ringers, which was a card for Apocalypse I think. So basically what happened was, I made a card—the card I made was, “Destroy two target creatures that share a color.” That’s easy. Pretty simple. That’s got white in it, that’s got white in it. Done.

And I think what happened is, in trying—because of the multicolor block, they didn’t want to hose you for being part white, and so they changed it so the idea is, “Okay, so I destroy two cards that are exactly the same combination of colors.” But anyway, the way they ended up wording it, if you’ve ever seen Dead Ringers, literally it’s like “What? What?” You just don’t know what it means. And like, that’s not good.

And the answer, by the way is, if you have a card in which template correctly you can’t understand what it means, one of two things—either the template is wrong, we need to find a simpler template, or you can’t make the card. We learn all the time that we want to do something, but in order to template it correctly so that the rules work, you can’t understand what it is, it means don’t make the card. Okay. That’s number two comprehension complexity.

Number three comprehension complexity is—I think I used suspend as the example, which is  sometimes, when you write it out, that there’s so much going on that just it’s hard to grok it all. And like suspend is a perfect example where on the surface, I thought it would be pretty grokkable. It’s like, “You’re exchanging time for mana. It costs less mana, but it costs time. I have to wait.” And in a very sort of esoteric sense, it’s pretty simple. You trade time for mana.

But then in actual playing, it’s like, “Okay, I take this, I’ve got to put it in this zone, I’ve got to understand the exile zone. And then I’ve got to put counters on it. And then every turn I’ve got to remember to mark down the counters. And when the counters go off, then I have this thing happen, and I’ve got to remember to…” And it’s like, “Aah…” I mean—and once again, it’s another example of a mechanic where the advanced players got it. They got it. They had no problem with it.

But beginners really, really struggled. There was a lot going on. There was multiple zone changes, there was dealing with counters and countdowns and upkeep effects and things happening, and—holy moly, there was a lot going on. It just was overwhelming.

Now the fourth type of comprehension complexity, I used One with Nothing as an example. So One with Nothing is from—what is it, from Scourge, I think? [NLH—Saviors of Kamigawa.] Anyway, it’s a card that says, “Discard your hand.”

So you’re like “How can there be comprehension complexity? There’s three words on it. ‘Discard’ ‘Your’ ‘Hand.’ How tough is that? Take your hand, discard it.” The reason that this has comprehension complexity is it doesn’t make sense. Players read it, they go “Discard your hand—I understand what it’s saying. Take my hand, throw it away. That makes no sense, so what is it really saying?”

So that’s another big part I’m going to talk about today in lenticular design is, people—a lot of confusion comes from people not understanding what it’s doing, and when people don’t understand, they just start making things up to try to make it understand.

And One with Nothing’s a perfect example where the card is crystal, crystal clear what it does. But it’s so non-intuitive that you would ever want to do that, that people like would not understand it. Because they understood the base definition, and said, “Oh, that can’t be right. What am I missing?” And they spent all this time and energy trying to understand what they were missing.

And that’s, by the way in general, I’m not saying we shouldn’t make cards like One with Nothing.  Although a lot of people would prefer we don’t. I think we should make cards that you go, “What?” Now that card’s rare, as it should be. We should occasionally make cards that are confusing. But not at common. And not that that card was at common. But I’m trying to show different kinds of comprehension complexity.

Okay, number two. Is board complexity. So board complexity is, do you  understand how what is in play interacts with the rest of the board. The example in the article I use was Prodigal Pyromancer, which is for old folks, Prodigal Sorcerer. It used to be a blue card, back in the day. And basically the card taps to do one damage to target creature or player. “How complex is that? He taps to do one.”

And the answer is, it’s actually pretty complex. Because with him on the board, what it means is, every combat, I have the potential to have one more damage done. And let’s say I set up a situation where I have a complex blocking situation. Now just adding one card, Prodigal Sorcerer or Prodigal Pyromancer, all of a sudden I have so many more options I have to do.

Now, once again, for the experienced player who can shorthand the math of combat. Because one of the things that happens, and this is a lot of things that people forget is, when you play a game or really do anything in life, your brain starts to shorthand things.

For example, right now I am driving to work. Well, how is it I’m driving to work and doing a podcast? And the answer is, well you know what? I’ve driven a car a long time. I’ve driven to work many, many times. Most of what I’m doing is on autopilot. My brain knows what it’s doing. And so I’m able to actually do a podcast, because well…

Now, if I was a first-time driver, just someone who had never driven before, could I do a podcast while driving? Noooo. No I could not. Or it would be a very short podcast. “Hi, today I’m… (yelps)” That was my imitation of… (laughs) See, you get wonderful dramatic skits like that.

So the thing to remember is, when you play, you start shorthanding things. And what happens is, players who have played a long time forget they’ve shorthanded it. So like, “That’s not so hard.” No. Combat’s not so hard once you’ve done it hundreds of times. And there’s a point at which you learn, “Oh,” like you can glance at the board and understand, “Oh… do I want to trade or don’t I want to trade?” But for beginners, they have to figure out, “Oh, if I do this, that means I will trade.” And then they’ve got to figure out whether they want to trade, which is also complex.

And so the idea of Prodigal Pyromancer is, that’s adding a lot of extra data to a complex situation that maybe you’ve mastered, and once again, most people have not mastered combat, but they understand it, quicker they can understand it.

So anyway, so first board complexity is things that affect other things. The second thing I talked about are things that are affected by other things. (???) the one I did. The one I talked about was a creature whose power and toughness is equal to the other creatures you have in play. And the reason that can get complex is let’s say I get into combat with multiple creatures.

Well, I’ve got to remember if other creatures die, that this creature will be smaller based on the other deaths. So if I get into combat, I have to go, “Oh, well, this creature and that creature could die based on their blocking, so my guy could be this big.” And it gets much more complex. Like if I want him to survive, if I attack, what does he  have, how big is it? Well, he could block other creatures in such a way that he could kill it. Do I want to attack?

So board complexity is talking about “Can I understand the implications of what’s going to happen with all the things on the battlefield in conjunction with one another?” And what happened was, when we first realized complexity was going on, like Time Spiral happened, we were losing people, like “Okay. People aren’t getting what’s going on.”

And then in Lorwyn, we made sure the cards were much easier to read. “I get it. I get what it’s doing.” But the cards had a lot of interconnectivity, and what we had done was we lowered comprehension complexity, but we hadn’t lowered board complexity. And in Lorwyn, especially Lorwyn/Morningtide, it was a very high board complexity. The beginners, what we found, couldn’t even tell what was going on. Like, they would just walk into on-board tricks constantly because they just couldn’t see it.

Okay, the third type of complexity is what we call “strategic complexity.” Now, strategic complexity is about do you understand the strategic ramifications of what’s going on. What we found, and lenticular design is based a lot on understanding strategic complexity.

So strategic complexity is, “Oh, I see.” A good example I think I used of strategic complexity is Fact or Fiction. Which is, “Here’s a card that depending on how you use it, the card could be very weak or very strong depending on how you use it.” Do you understand how to divide cards, how to choose cards? Are you able to look at your opponent and the board state and understand how, in the current board state, your opponent values his cards?

Like, at the beginning of the game, this card might be not valuable, but mid-game it’s very valuable. Depending on what they have or how they’ve acted. That’s another big thing about advanced play is—Mike Turian taught me this. That if you want to optimize your play, it’s not just a matter of what the cards are. It’s a matter of how long did your opponent look at his card before he did something? How long did he wait after you cast a spell?

Like, a lot of advanced play is reading the people and saying, “Oh, well let me think of the kind of… what they’re thinking about. If I could figure what they’re thinking about, that tells me what’s in their hand. Oh, are they trying to decide whether to cast a spell or not? Well, maybe they have a counterspell in their hand.” Stuff like that.

So what we learned was, comprehension complexity is more—for the beginning player, comprehension  complexity is greater than board complexity, which is greater than strategic complexity. Which mean, first and foremost, if you are a newer player, you are trying to understand what cards do. Then you’re trying to understand what’s going on on the board, and finally you’re understanding strategy. But you have to learn the first before you get to the second, you have to learn the second before you get to the third.

Okay. So the idea of lenticular design—I’m halfway to work, and I haven’t got to actually define lenticular design yet. So I was working on New World Order, and I was trying to figure out how to lower complexity. When I made the following discovery: you have to be very careful about comprehension complexity, because if beginners don’t understand the card, you’re doomed. So you have to be extra careful about comprehension complexity.

Board complexity, well you’ve got to be careful because at some point they get to board complexity, and that you’ll make states they don’t understand. So you—there’s certain types of board complexity you can get, but in general you have to be careful with board complexity.

Ahh, but you get to strategic complexity, strategic complexity, up to a certain point, is pretty invisible to the beginning player. And by the time they can see it, they’re no longer beginning players. And the perfect example is a Lightning Bolt or a direct damage spell. Often what you see is when you give a beginner direct damage spells, they love to just do it to the opponent. They know the point of the game is to get 20 down to zero, you give the a spell, and “I hit my opponent, they’re lower, I’m that much closer to winning.”

And only with time do they start to understand that “Oh, well, until the clock on my opponent matters, until I’m close enough that maybe I can beat them, doing the damage to the face isn’t worth it.”           That it’s more valuable to use that to deal with creatures early on than it is to deal it to the opponent. Barring the deck, there are decks that actually want to go to the face.

And so what I realized was that when I was thinking about complexity, I started to realize that not everybody sees the cards the same. And what that meant was that as people look at cards, they gauge them based on the lenses they have of what they can understand. So what that meant was, there were some cards that might be simple to one player but difficult to another.

Now. Obviously, the more advanced player will see things simpler. They’re better players. So I can take a card that for beginners might be somewhat complex, but to an advanced player would be pretty simple. But—this is where lenticular design gets interesting, I figured out something else. Some cards were seen by advanced players as more complex than by beginning players.

And my example there was Black Cat. I don’t think Black Cat was the card actually—because Black Cat was in Dark Ascension. I figured this out before then. But the thing that made me figure out lenticular design was watching someone play—what we do is sometimes we’ll get people in other sections of the company to come up for a playtest.

So we can see—R&D is very, very hardcore, a lot of them came from the Pro Tour, die hard Magic players. And sometimes you want a more casual player, just—I love first impressions, and so sometimes we get people from other sections of the company that know Magic, but aren’t nearly as invested. And get their impressions.

And I was watching them play, and they had a creature with a death trigger. I use Black Cat as my example. The reason, by the way, that I love using Black Cat whenever I talk about lenticular design is, one of the online media people that does our graphics made this awesome Black Cat graphic that is a lenticular-looking card, where you bend and the cat sort of does—looks 3d, and it’s so awesome that I love making them put that graphic on. So whenever I talk about lenticular design, I always talk about Black Cat.        

But anyway, the one that made me learn it was, I was watching a player with a death trigger. And I don’t remember, it might be, in the article I talk about, what’s the goblin? Festering Goblin. Festering Goblin’s a 1/1, B, one black mana, 1/1, when it dies, target creature gets -1/-1. And I watched them—somebody attacked with a 2/2, and they had a 1/1. And they didn’t want their creature to die. And so they didn’t block. And so the person kept doing two damage to them.

And finally, they felt they had to block. And they chumped with the Festering Goblin a 2/2, and then after it died, they used the -1/-1 to kill one of their opponent’s 1/1 creatures. And it dawned on me, it was invisible to them that they had the ability with this 1/1 Festering Goblin to kill a 2/2 creature.

And the reason was, the way they thought about the card was, “I play this creature, I have a 1/1. When it dies, something cool happens. I get a present. I’ll open that present when the creature dies.” They don’t think about it—like where an advanced player, the fact that you get -1/-1, yeah, you’re blocking the 2/2 creature because you can kill the creature. That the ability of the death trigger is connected to the ability. It’s part of the card. And you can use them in conjunction.

That’s not how the player was playing at all. And what I realized was, they liked the card. It was fun. They could play it and it did something. Then it died, and they got a little something. They happened to get something. It killed a creature, they were happy. But the idea that the creature and its effect had any synergy with each other was invisible to them.

And that’s when I realized that to that player, that card was simpler. Because to that player, what do you do with it? You play it when you can, when you have enough mana to cast it, you have black mana, you play it. When the creature dies, it dies. And then something happens and you use it when it happens.

But they never think about how to use it in conjunction, where the idea of the death trigger matters. And that’s when I realized that, “Oh, in their mind, to the beginning player, that was a much simpler card.” Because they didn’t have to think about the interaction between the two. And that’s why I started realizing that when we thought about complexity, we had to stop thinking about—like for a while, I think I was thinking about complexity as a scale. Like a card is just so complex. It’s a 1 to a 10.

And I understood there was adjustment for advanced players, but the thought process was just, “Well, the scale, as you get better, just you see things as being higher up or lower down the scale.” What might be a 4 complexity to a beginning player might only be a 1 complexity to an advanced player. That’s how I was thinking of it. And what I realized is, “Oh, no no no no no, the reason you look at complexity is, what are they thinking about?” And that it’s possible for an advanced player to think more about something than the beginning player did.

And that is a pretty—I mean, let me stress this concept, but this concept is kind of the cornerstone of lenticular design. Which is that when you are addressing complexity in your audience, you have to think of each section of the audience differently. And that your beginning player isn’t—there’s certain things that are invisible to the beginning player. And that is crucial, because essentially what that means is I’m trying—the whole idea of New World Order says, “I want to take complexity out of common so that I’m not making the game more complex for people learning how to play.”

But lenticular design taught me that some things are invisible. And what that means is, it’s not that I need to keep common actually complex-free, I need to keep it complex-free as the beginner sees it. Right? My goal is not—once again, it’s not that I have a scale, and common has to be at a certain complexity overall, common has to be at a certain complexity for the beginning player. Meaning I want them to look at it, and it looked like a 1 or a 2 or a 3. Something on the low end of the spectrum.

The funny thing is, and one of the things that I’ve discovered is, some of the best mechanics are ones in which—to the beginning player they seem really straightforward. And to the advanced player, there’s lots of interesting decisions.

Like one of the examples is, morbid was a good example. And morbid tends to play into this. One of the reasons I like morbid was morbid says, “If a creature’s died, I get a bonus.” Right? It’s from Innistrad.

Now, to the advanced player, the answer is, “How do I manipulate things such that when I need to, things have died to trigger my morbid?” Meaning, they think of it as being completely in their control. Or more in their control. Where the beginning player’s kind of like, “When I cast the spell, let’s look.” But they don’t think of it as being in their control. So just like, “Hey, it’s a cool bonus if it happens.”

And in general, one of the things that sets the beginners from the advanced players is, the beginning players—so real quickly, I’m almost to work, and what I realized is this is a complex enough topic that it’s worthy of two podcasts.

And so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to save tomorrow—I’m going to talk about all the lessons of how do you make things—how do you make things simpler for the beginner and more advanced for the advanced players? That’s going to be tomorrow. Today I’m just wrapping up—I just want to talk about sort of the key essence of what we’ve learned, so that tomorrow I can talk about how to execute. How to make things lenticular.

And really, the lesson is understanding the vantage point. And by the way, one thing about design that’s always cool is one thing leads to another. New World Order made me try to make commons simple, or not complex. Which, and what lenticular design made me realize, is that I’m actually asking the question wrong. But by the way. That this is a big, big part I find of the creative process is that a lot of times the big discoveries come when you realize that you asked a question that had more scope than you needed.

For example, I was asking, “How do you make  common cards complex-free?” And the real question I needed to ask was, “How do I make them complex-free for beginners?”

So, the big question that this had led me to, that each thing opens up—my new discovery new is, lenticular design made me realize that everybody views the game through their own set of lenses. In fact, the very idea of lenses, in fact, Jesse Schell does a book on game design where he talks about looking at your game design through different lenses.

And so I’m applying this in a different context, sort of a psychological context, which is how does your player look at your game? What are the means by which they look at your game? And that when you are—I believe when you’re designing things, you have to be aware of who you’re designing for. And so part of the idea of lenses is understanding in this particular aspect, what are you trying to do? And who are you looking at?

And that what I’ve learned, and lenticular design has taught me this is that different cards can be for different players. It’s not that each card’s only for one player. Each card actually could be for multiple players, as long as each player has a vantage point they understand.

And so I’ll make my final point today, because I’m just about at work, which is a big part of understanding lenticular design is the concept of lenticular. So what lenticular means, I don’t think I’ve defined it today, there’s the cards that they’re printed in such a way that when you turn them, you see different images. And usually they’re done such a way that the way the brain works, it looks like it’s moving. Because it’s looking straight on. And looking to the side. And less to the side. And straight on. Like, it creates motion. Sense of motion.

So lenticular design says, “You have to understand that different people will look at the cards and see different movements of the head.” And that you the designer kind of have to understand all the different vantage points. That what does the beginner see when they look at this card? What does the medium player when they look at the card? What does an advanced player see when they look at this card? What does a Johnny see? What does a Timmy see? What does a Spike see? That’s the next level, by the way. Today’s level, because I’m doing complexity, is about experience level.

But what I’ve learned from this is if you extrapolate out, what you will learn is, you could apply the lenses of how people look at the cards, and you can do that for other things. I’m looking at right now, experience level, but imagine looking at it for a psychographic. Or looking at it for Vorthos vs. Melvin. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways you could look at something.

And that---that’s pretty exciting, because it means that you can—one of the problems we always have when doing design is, you only get so many cards. But as soon as I say, “Imagine this, that you can design two cards but have them fill one space,” that, my friends, is quite exciting.

Anyway, I have just parked my car. So I love, love, love talking about game design and game theory, and I love talking about Magic, but even more, I love talking about making Magic. So this is a very exciting topic, I’m going to continue this next time. For anybody who’s really into game design, this is one of the most exciting things I’ve done. I’m very, very proud of it. It has lots of ramifications. Hopefully today I gave you a little taste of kind of where it leads us. But anyway, thank you very much for joining me, and I’ll talk to you next time.