11/14/14 Episode 174: Meeting Expectations

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. Today, today’s topic was spawned by questions on my blog over the last couple months. So one of the things that I talk a lot about—anyway, so the topic today is meeting expectations. So one of the things—here’s where this conversation came from.

So on my blog, I talk a lot in my column and in my podcast and my blog about how what we call resonance, and how that you want to do what the audience expects up to a certain point, there’s a sense of comfort.

And so what happens is, we will do something, and then players will assume that we’re doing the lowest-hanging fruit. Sometimes we do do the lowest-hanging fruit, because low-hanging fruit is tasty. But we don’t always do it.

So recent examples would be Theros. So in Theros, I mentioned there was an enchantment component. And so a lot of people said, “Oh, they’re finally doing an enchantment set,” and they imagined like Mirrodin for enchantments. I did a whole podcast on this.

And so what happens is, when we do something that isn’t what they think, then like, “Wait a minute, you are failing to meet our expectations.” So I want to talk a little bit today about expectations, because it is important to meet expectations, but in the same sense, one of your roles is to—well, you’ll see. I’ll explain today.

Okay. So I talked about I did a whole bunch of podcasts on communication theory. So a refresher, because it’s important to today’s conversation. So in communications theory, I explained that there were three main things you need to do. That you need a sense of comfort, you need a sense of surprise, and you need a sense of completion. That those are the three things in communications you make sure to hit.

So, today, it talks a lot about those things because… expectations. So, part of expectations is comfort. “Oh…” Theros, for example, the comfort level, interestingly, was not meant to be the enchantments. The enchantments were meant as an added flavor element. The comfort of Theros was supposed to be “We’re doing Greek mythology.”

What would you expect Greek mythology to be? Well, I would expect gods. Well, we got gods. I expect heroes and monsters. Well, we have heroes and monsters. That every set needs to have certain comfort. But I think people are extrapolating some of the stuff I’m saying to assume things that are not true. So part of today is to clarify this.

Which is, you do want your audience to feel comfortable. Which means you need to do a number of thing so your audience has some expectations, that you can meet those expectations. But remember one of the three things is surprise. The goal is not to have everything be what you know.

So let me move over to movies as an example here. When people come to the theater, they want to know what kind of movie to expect. So I’ll use my standard, romantic comedy. So let’s say you see a poster and clearly it’s a romantic comedy. Well, I have expectations. If I come and there’s not two people, and they’re not sort of—if I’m not getting a romantic comedy, in which two people are… “Are they right for each other or wrong for each other? Or do they hate each other?” Or whatever, something where I  go, “Ooh, I’m going to watch these two people get together. Probably see some comedy.”

There’s a certain amount of comfort in that the format requires something. It requires, “Okay, this is a story about two people coming together…” Maybe not coming together, but usually coming together. In which there’s a humorous sort of tone to it.

And there’s a bunch of different ways the story can play out. I want to have some general sense of, “Okay, I’m seeing a romantic comedy.” But the goal of a movie is not necessarily to give people what they expect constantly. Like, you have to meet some low expectations. Romantic comedy.

But maybe the romantic comedy plays out in a way that’s different than you’ve ever seen before. That it’s important, whenever you create something, that you don’t want to just hit every note beat for beat  that the audience understands. That you need to surprise them.

And that’s true in game design as well, which is, I want some sense of comfort. Meaning when I do something, I want you to get a general sense of what we’re doing. And Theros was a good example, where the comfort level really was about the flavor of what we were doing. We were doing Greek world.

Now, the interesting thing was, we had done something that we had not done ever. Or, I mean, one card in Urza's Saga did, but people really wanted an enchantment-heavy block. And so a component of the block was enchantments.

Now, maybe part of this was on me, that I needed to explain better set expectations, I mean there’s some of that. But one of the things that’s important is, you want to make sure with your audience that you would do—I mean, like I said, you want to set your expectations correctly. So your audience has some sense of what to expect.

Khans of Tarkir’s a real good example, which is, we were not making a wedge block. I knew the audience, once they heard the first set was a wedge set, would assume we were making a wedge block. There’s been a lot of desire for us to make a wedge block. So it was really important to set expectations up-front in saying, “Guys, this set is a wedge set, this block, not a wedge block, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing something a little different.”

That—so number one I guess what I’m saying today is, you want to make sure that you build into your design something where the audience can have some expectation, and you meet those expectations. That is important.

So for example, take Khans of Tarkir. There were just some cycles, charms, the tri tapped lands, there were some things that we knew we were going to do. The legendary creatures for Commander. There’s some things that like, “Oh, you’re doing a wedge set? Well, I expect you would do A, B, and C.” Well, we want to make sure some of that is true.

But, and here’s the key, you don’t need to hit all of it. You need to hit some of it. The key to comfort is not that everything is known, the key to comfort is that some is known. And so when we say we’re doing wedge, we are on the hook to do some things people expect with wedge.

Not necessarily everything, and for example, let me talk about the ultimatums because this was a big issue. Was people like, “Oh, well last time you guys did tri-color, you did the ultimatums. One of which was huge tournament card.” So one of the things, and we looked, we actually considered doing the ultimatums, but what we found was, we didn’t have tons of space. Remember, the as-fan of multicolor is lower in this set than it was in both Return to Ravnica and Shards of Alara. So like, we don’t have tons of rare spells. Let’s use them wisely.

And what we said is, “You know what? Let’s try to make rare spells that can actually make it in Constructed. Because spells that are 2CCDDEE, whoo!” I mean, yeah, Cruel Ultimatum made it because it was so good. And also remember, the mana at the time allowed all sorts of shenanigans that mana now will not allow. We really a little bit overcommitted on the mana, and it became a little too easy to get lots of different colors.

And so we made this—we knew there’s expectations. Once again, remember. Anything we did before, people will anticipate maybe we’ll do again. That since we did a shard set, when we do a wedge set, people are going, “I want every single thing you did in shards in wedge.”

Some of that we have to deliver on, and that’s important, but what I’m saying is, you actually fail as a designer if all you do is meet pre-known expectations. If we had literally just taken Shards of Alara, just taken the same template, and just redid it on a wedge, I’m not saying that nobody wouldn’t like that, there are people that would like that. But we have an obligation over and above that. That part of what the expectations are is a sense of comfort in giving you things you would expect to be there.

But another part of it is making sure there’s some things that you don’t expect. And part of making things you don’t expect is not doing everything you expect. We need to leave ourselves some room. I mean, Khans of Tarkir especially, so remember, Khans of Tarkir has an issue where we were doing a lower as-fan, which meant we just had less gold cards. So the set that people wanted to compare this to, Shards of Alara, had more gold. So we couldn’t do everything they did, we just had less gold cards.

In addition, there’s other things we wanted to do. Like, in Khans of Tarkir, for example, there’s a large component that had to do with the time travel, where morph plays a component of that. And there’s things we were doing where there’s other stuff going on, beyond just the multicolor.

One of the things when I talk about sort of a shift from Fourth Age to Fifth Age of Design is, one of the things that we used to do in design was, the design was all about X. That was a very common thing. What’s this set? It’s all about X. And we would explore every—you know, we would dig down deep on X. Was X artifacts? Was X tribal? Was X multicolor? What was it? We were just going deep on whatever the thing was.

And one of the things we’ve started to do now is that we’ve started—we’re really, really trying to make the story and the environment something where—back in the day, it was like, “It’s Artifact World!” And that was kind of like the center. We’d shape a world to make sense of Artifact World.

But now, we’re doing more of tone and feel, and like, “It’s a horror world.” Well, in order to capture this world, we have to be a little more fine-tuned in how we’re doing our mechanics. And the idea is, where once upon a time our mechanics were the canvas, if you will, they are now the paint, to use a metaphor.

That once upon a time it’s like, “This is the artifact block! Everything’s about artifacts!” or “This is the graveyard block!” Where in—if you look at something like Innistrad, graveyard was a component, it was a paint to paint on, but it was not the canvas. It’s not like, “Graveyard set, things about graveyard, everything’s graveyard.” It was more like “Things about horror, we’re trying to capture a mood and a tone, and then we use our mechanical space to help sort of shade that and give it feel and texture and depth.”

But what that means is, because we are not doing mechanics as canvas anymore, we have to pick and choose what we are exploring. And that’s the important thing. I mean, one of the things is, and this is in general—as you shift, getting your audience used to the thing that you’re shifting towards.

Like, one of the things about Magic is, Magic is over twenty years old. We are constantly evolving. The way we design Magic today is not the way we designed Magic five years ago. And that one of the things the audience—that we want enough similarity that you get that it’s Magic. We don’t want you to come and go, “What game is this?”

Like, for example, I could take the rules of Magic and make a game that technically you would know how to play, because I’m using the rules of Magic, but I’m not using enough things that are common that it would seem really disorienting. Really, really disorienting.

And one of the things we have to be careful of is, the goal of design—for example, I’ll use a little segue. One of the things you can do in design is you can take the tools of a color to do things it’s not supposed to do. For example, I could make a sorcery that makes a 1/1 token with deathtouch, that when it comes into play, fights target creature. All those are green. Green can make tokens, green can have deathtouch, green can fight.

Okay. Now, let me walk through what that does. If I do this, I’m going to play it. Barring a zero-power creature, I’m going to kill whatever creature the thing fights, and my 1/1 is going to die. So essentially I have a spell that kills a creature.

Now, some people are like, “Okay, green can do A, green can do B, green can do C, good to go.” And I’m like, “No, no, we’re not good to go.” The goal of a designer is not to outwit his tools. It is not to make something… remember. Design, the end goal of design is to make something for the audience. Not to show how clever you are as a designer.

That when you start showing off what you can do as a designer, I think you tend to do a disservice to the audience. Because what the audience wants is a great play experience. When your priority is showing what you can do, you do things for the sake of doing it. What we call showboating. Which is, you demonstrate, “Ooh, look what I can do.” That is not beneficial for good design.

Now, that doesn’t mean good design can’t impress. It doesn’t mean you can’t—like, for example, during Innistrad, in solving the problem of dark transformation, we got to double-faced cards. Well, that’s pretty impressive. That’s pretty out-there. That’s pretty innovative, and I’m not saying that you don’t want to have innovation or not do things that might have an impact on your audience. But you should get there honestly. You should get there because it’s solving the problem you’re trying to solve, not because you’re trying to show off.

And so one of the things you have to understand about design that’s about meeting the expectations of your audience is, they expect something. You need to make sure you have enough of what they expect. Now, you do want to surprise them. But that surprise has to come from not, “Aha, they won’t expect this,” but rather, “I need to accomplish something, oh, here’s a way to accomplish it that I haven’t done before.”

And another thing to remember is, in order to have the surprise, it has to come couched in the comfort. And that’s an important thing to remember. Once again, I’ll jump to my movie example is, if the movie is going to do something weird, before it gets weird, it has to ground you in the characters. Sometimes in the setting.

For example, I’ll take Wizard of Oz. Dorothy’s going to go on a crazy journey. Right? She’s going to Oz. But before she does that, we first have to meet the characters. And remember, by the way, because of the setup, we need all the characters. We even meet Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, the Cowardly Lion. We get to meet them. We get to meet the characters that they’re based on first. And we get to meet Dorothy first, and we get to meet her home, and we see where Dorothy’s at and what Dorothy’s going through.

And Dorothy, she’s just a teenager! And someone’s trying—the mean lady wants to take her dog away. And she just, she’s really upset. And we, the person watching, can relate to it. Can we relate to getting caught in a tornado and having our house land on a witch? And waking up in the Land of Oz? No. Can we relate to like somebody being mean and somebody trying to take away something that is ours, and us feeling sort of helpless? Yeah, yeah, we can.

And so Dorothy—the Wizard of Oz doesn’t start with Dorothy waking up and like, her house has crashed. Like, the first shot of the movie is not she’s in Munchkinland going, “What happened?” Why? Because you need to set up the comfort first. And in game design it’s the same thing. Which is, you need to make sure that your audience understands the context. Now, I want to make sure you get this is Magic.

But, once I’ve done that. So with any new design, and this is important is, I have to understand what my comfort’s going to be. For example, when I’m doing Theros, I knew my comfort was—same with Innistrad. Innistrad and Theros were top-down. Okay, in a top-down set, my comfort is, I’m hitting material I know you know.

When I—I mean, I’m showing you my version of zombies and vampires and werewolves. But they should have enough connection to your version that you go, “Ohh, they’re vampires and werewolves and zombies.” In Theros, the same thing. We’re doing our take on Greek mythology, but we want enough tropes and enough Greek mythology to go, “I got it. I got it. They did Greek mythology.”

Now, something like Khans is interesting because we’re going slightly different. Khans has a little bit—I mean, it’s got a little bit of top-down, it definitely has some real-world influences. But it plays a lot more on color pie association of, “Okay, you know what these colors are, what happens when it’s this combination of colors?”

So that’s something where we were playing into something that people really understand, which is the color wheel, and then doing a new version on it. But once again, every design, you have to ask yourself, “What am I doing that the audience expects me to do, and will be comforting for them?” And then, “What is my surprise? Where is my surprise?”

And one of the things I get, I think this is coming from my blog is, people sort of listen to me talk about resonance and low-hanging fruit, and assume that what I’m saying is, everything should be comfort. And like, no no no no no. No. Some things should be. I don’t want to do something in which nothing—you can grab on to anything. But there has to be some elements of surprise.

So when Theros  for example, is doing Greek mythology, you know what? I had some carte blanche to do some enchantments a little different. Plus, the other point was, the enchantments—if the main drive of Theros block had been, “We’re making an enchantment block,” we would have done it very differently. We would have figured out how to make enchantments do the different things we wanted enchantments to do.

But that wasn’t what we were doing. What we were doing was making a Greek mythology block, inspired, and we were trying to figure out how to use tools to do that. Enchantments, we needed something to represent the gods. Enchantments seemed like they might be a good place to do that. We made gods. Like, what are gods? Well, enchantment creatures really feel like, okay, I’m this thing that I have this impact on the game. And if a certain definition is met, I take corporeal form, I come down. I’m a god walking on earth.

And enchantments did a really good job of representing the touch of the gods and the feel of the gods. And you really got a sense of these are the creatures of the gods, these are the creations of the gods. And I believe that enchantments did a lot of work to cover what they needed to do. But one of the things that’s interesting is, I start explaining sort of the thought process, people go, “Oh. Well you’re telling me you’re supposed to be meeting my expectations. Well, I thought this was true.”

Now, one of the things—I mean, the lesson for me is, and this is why with Khans I’ve been very careful is, I need to have a better understanding on my end, as someone who communicates to my audience, what we are up to. And if I see something where I think they might go astray, where I go, “Oh, they might make the assumptions that probably aren’t going to be true,” I try where I can to sort of explain that.

I mean, like I said. I wish for Theros I had been a little more on how the enchantment theme was going to work. Or made a little more clear what it wasn’t going to be. Because obviously there’s some expectations. But one of the things, sort of my lesson today, or talking about today, is that the idea that the audience has to have every expectation met is false. Every expectation does not need to be met.

Part of what you’re doing as a designer is, some of it is, but like, remember, some of it is surprise. Some of it is, “I thought you were going to do A, ooh, its’ B.” Like a big thing in movies they do all the time is where a writer and a director will take a trope. Something that people expect. And then turn it on its ear.

What makes it interesting is, you assume something because you were used to the way that stories are made. So for example, this is a TV show, but I’m going to use a Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, there was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where there was a talent show. And… I’m going to ruin a Buffy the Vampire Slayer from ten years ago, so anyway, I apologize. So… put your fingers in your ears if you’ve never watched Buffy and plan to.

Anyway, there’s a talent show, and people, I’m not sure, are getting killed, or getting injured. And we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile, at some point during the show, you realize there’s a ventriloquist, in which the dummy is alive. And immediately you assume that the bad guy is the dummy. Why? Because everything you’ve ever seen where a dummy comes to life, he’s the bad guy. He’s evil. Right?

So the idea that Joss Whedon played with is, in this thing, he’s a good guy, not a bad guy. But that was a big reveal because everything you’ve ever seen, the living dummies, they were bad. And so seeing a living dummy that wasn’t bad, it played against your expectations.

So he took something familiar and then was able to use it in a way to do something interesting with it. And that’s my point is, you are not obligated as a designer to make sure that everything you do matches expectations a hundred percent. You do need to match some expectations. Meaning there’s a certain amount of things that you need to match.

So for Magic, what is that with Magic? Let’s talk about expectations. Number one is, we need to be pretty true to the color pie and the color philosophy. Now, we will stretch a little bit. Innistrad will do red vampires and blue zombies. We had never before done red vampires or blue zombies.

So we get to do a little bit of stretching, and there’s some surprise there. But number one, the colors need to act the way the colors act. That’s really important. I don’t want “All of a sudden, in this set, green’s all about direct damage. And red’s all about counterspelling.” No no no. The colors do what they do. We try to be consistent.

We’ll bleed a little based on the need of the set—oh, we have a set that cares about the graveyard? Okay, there’s some abilities that certain colors don’t do most of the time, but they do do in a graveyard-oriented set.

Second thing we want to do is make sure the card types read correctly. Meaning once again, we can stretch a little bit, Theros can take auras and bend them a little bit, or enchantments and bend them a little bit. But we want cards to work kind of the way you normally expect cards to work. That the card types work the way you expect them to work.

And the third thing is, and one could argue this just ties into color pie, but there is a certain style of play that each color has. There’s a certain—like, the color pie dictates what it can and can’t do. And then on top of that, there is a certain style of play. So one of the things we do is, we will shake up and change things.

But there’s defaults. Meaning red and white are going to get together to have more of an aggro strategy. Maybe we’ll make a set one time where in that set, red and white are doing something a little bit different. But we want to make sure that we fall back where—if you don’t know, one of the things about a Magic set is, let’s say you know nothing.

You walk in, you’ve never seen the cards before. And then you sit down, and you read the cards, and you start to play. You build your deck. You’re playing Sealed. We want to make sure that there’s some things you’ve already learned about Magic that you can apply every time. Now, those don’t have to be the same things. But every time, we want to make sure that if you know Magic, if you’ve played Magic, you have some skills you’ve learned that will apply and you can play.

Now, sometimes what will happen is, one aspect won’t play the same. Every single set, kind of what we want to do is take some part of Magic that you think you understand, and shake it up a bit. And that’s a surprise. But the reason the surprise works is because there’s a layer of comfort.

But once again, the key is that you want to have a nice balance between enough comfort that it is what you expect, that it’s the game of Magic, and enough surprise that it’s like, okay, Khans of Tarkir isn’t Theros. Theros isn’t Return to Ravnica. Return to Ravnica isn’t Innistrad. That every year, our goal is to sort of twist and push things in a new direction.

So, by the way, because I don’t want to leave completion out, so you need your comfort and you need your surprise. Well, completion set is, once you’ve set up what you are doing, then you create more expectations. So you meet expectations in two ways. You meet them up front by having some sense of comfort and doing some things the audience expects, and then you have a sense of completion.

So where completion comes in Magic is, for example, cycles are a good thing. Where once we do a cycle, once you see that we’ve done two cards, and you get we’re doing a cycle, now you have expectations. So for example, Ravnica is a good example. Where we will do something in the first set, and we only have some of the guilds. In Ravnica we had four of the guilds. In Return to Ravnica we had five of the guilds. But you know, okay, some of what I’m seeing will be duplicated.

In Khans of Tarkir, okay, we’re setting up this faction structure. But once you see what we do in one faction, you start getting a sense of what factions are doing. Now, not every faction does what every other faction does. But there’s enough overlap that you’re like, okay, I get it. Factions are going to have their charm, and certain land mixes, and their legend. And their rare enchantment, and there’ll be things that we set up that you go, okay, I see the balance, I see how it’s being structured.

And that part of making sure the audience has the sense of satisfaction, it’s twofold. It comes partly from the comfort, but partly from the completion. But remember, the completion is, once I’ve set something up and they experience it, then they follow through on what to expect.

So they walk in with expectation. And once they walk in and learn about things, then they have new expectation. You do have to meet both those expectations. But I think the key, and this is where a lot of discussions happen on my blog, is having to meet some expectation is not having to meet every expectation.

In fact, I believe that art is not at its best if every expectation is met. That if I go see a romantic comedy, I want to see something tweak on the romantic comedy. I want to go see something where somebody’s doing something that, “Oh, I haven’t seen that before,” or “That’s an interesting take on that,” or “Ooh, it took an expectation and twisted it a little bit.”

Part of the fun of seeing a movie is that you know the basic outline. You know the archetype you’re playing around with. But if the person that’s doing it doesn’t mess at all, doesn’t have anything that’s new they bring to the table, well, it’s like, well, I don’t want to see a movie I’ve seen exactly before. I want to see a movie that’s like movies I’ve seen before, where I have some expectation. And then I want to be surprised a little bit.

And once the movie or the story sets up what it is doing, I then have an expectation for how it’s going to end. And unless I’m really trying to do something specific, mostly you want to meet that expectation. They talk about stories as being cathartic, where—so one of the things about movies, I had a good teacher explain this to me, is why is it important? Why is the happy ending so important? Why is having sort of…

And the reason is something they call catharsis. Which is that movies and entertainment in general is escapism. Which is, I have problems in my life. Why would I want to go see a movie? Because I want to escape from my problems. And one of the things that’s nice is, life doesn’t always tie things up in a neat little bow. Not that there aren’t happy endings in life, but they’re not as easy and concrete. They’re not as simple. Life is just a lot more complex.

And so it is nice to go see something where you find somebody, you can empathize with them, and that through that person, you get to see them find a happy ending. You get to see things work out for them. And that says to you, it’s a sense of comfort. That when you’re able to see that…

So let’s apply that same sense to games, if we’re talking about games. Is games is a sense of challenge. A sense of you want to test yourself. Well, the one important thing is, you want to make sure that your audience will be able to win. Not all the time, that part of what makes a game fun is not that they—if you always win every time you play, Tic-Tac-Toe loses the thrill, where you’re like, “I’m never going to lose. I know what to do.”

But in the same sense, if you can never win—one of the problems that a lot of people have with chess is that when they start playing, they lose every time they play against a better player. Unless they can find someone else that’s equally bad, that means they’re just going to keep losing. And there’s only so many times you can lose at a game before you’re like, “Okay, I’m not playing this to feel like I’m dumb.”

That part of playing a game, cathartically, is to go, ha ha, life has many challenges, I’ve overcome these challenges, look what I can do. And that part of playing a game is you want to have—you want your game-player to have a catharsis through what they’re doing. And part of playing games is feeling of having a sense of accomplishment in a life where you don’t always have accomplishments. Or not as easy.

The same reason watching the hero get the girl in a romantic comedy, or the girl get the hero, or the guy get the girl, or the girl get the guy, either could be the hero obviously. Watching that happen makes you feel good, even if you don’t have a relationship, because you’re like, I feel like relationships are possible by watching this. I too, one day will get a relationship. Because I see—it can happen.

And in a game, it’s like, “I can overcome things. I can…” And like I’ve talked about in the psychographics, kind of what experience you’re trying to get out of it varies from person to person. But I do believe that, like, every psychographic wants to win. Because like every psychographic wants to have—winning is the goal of the game.

And so different people care how much they win. Johnny’s definitely someone who like, “I’m doing something crazy, and I don’t expect to win a lot. But I want to win some.” And the very moment of joy for Johnny a lot of times is, “I did it.”

Like, I’ve told this story. But I don't know if I’ve ever told it on my podcast. But like, I used to build crazy decks. Back before I worked for Wizards. I was an über-Johnny. And like I built a deck where the goal of the deck was, I would win by casting the card Tunnel. I would kill you with Tunnel. I wanted to say, “I cast Tunnel, I win. You lose.”

Well, how do you do that? And I built a whole deck in which I make this crazy wall that I make super-big, and then I give it to you, and I put something on it so it says, “When it’s destroyed it does damage to its controller.” And I build it up and give it to my opponent, and then I destroy it and they lose! Because I tunneled! Tunnel destroys target wall. For those that don’t know what Tunnel does. Destroy target wall. I wanted to play a card that says, “Destroy target wall,” and win the game. Hard to do.

And you know what? I didn’t win a lot of times. But whatever! Do you know how hard it is to win with the card Tunnel? It’s pretty hard. And so the fact that I won sometimes, just a few times, was a giant victory.

That’s a big part of it. You the game designer are trying to make sure that the audience has the sense of catharsis. That gets to have their victories, and gets to do the thing that’s important to them. And in order to do that, you need to do the presentation stuff I’m talking about today, but that it is important that when meeting expectations, what I’m trying to stress today is, they A. want to expect some stuff that they walk in expecting, and B. they want to expect some stuff that once you’ve shown what you’re doing, they want to follow along and figure out where you’re going.

But also, they want you to throw some curveballs at them. They want you to do some stuff that they didn’t see coming. That if you do a design, and when the design is over, they go, “Wow, there’s nothing here that I didn’t expect,” that’s also you are not meeting expectations.

So that’s my point of today is, there are three different expectations you have to meet. Which ties in neatly to communication theory. And that is, you have to comfort them. If they expect it, you have to do it. You have to surprise them. They expect them and you have to do it. And you have to complete what you’re doing. They expect it and you have to do it. Those, my friends, are what you need to do. Those are the expectations you have to meet.

Anyway, I have just parked my car. So guys, I very much—thank you for listening to me, but this is the end of my drive to work. I’ll talk to you guys next time.