2/13/15 Episode 201: Ten Things Every Board Game Needs--Interaction

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 is the third part in the series called Ten Things Every Game Needs. So in this mega-series, what I am doing is I’m starting with a speech/article/podcast that I wrote talking about a basic 101 for game design, and now I’m going thing by thing talking in-depth on it for a full podcast.

So the first one I talked about how you need a goal or goals. Second podcast I talked about how you need rules. Today is number three, interaction. So why does a game need interaction?

Okay. There are five reasons that I have. Let me walk through my five reasons. So the first reason is social. So game-playing, most game-playing, outside of solitaire, where you’re playing by yourself, most game-playing involves other people. Especially when you’re talking about board and card games, in which there’s actual face-to-face interaction. I mean, video games also have interaction, and especially now there’s more and more ways to play with people online. Which is its own form of interaction obviously. But a lot of game-playing, I mean one of the things to remember when you’re playing a game is, that there’s different things that you’re trying to get out of the game.

One thing you’re trying to get out of the game is intellectual, you’re trying to test yourself. And there’s a lot of important skills there. We’ll get to that in some of the other things. But another very important thing is that you are trying to be social. That games inherently are social activities. That you are interacting with other people.

And you’re interacting with other people in a way that is a—like one of the things people always ask me, parents talk about how their kids want to play games, and like is that good for them? And like, it’s absolutely good for them. Games teach you a lot of skills that are very valuable in life.

And one of the skills that games teach that I think people don’t give enough credence to are social skills. That part of playing the game is learning how to interact with other people, how to deal with other people, how to think about what other people are doing, how to express what you feel, how to read other people. That there’s a lot of good social interactions that happen in-game that are just general good life skills. That knowing how to deal with people will serve you well in life. And that games very much are a part of that.

So one of the reasons you want interaction in your game is, you want to force humans to interact with humans. I mean, interaction means that multiple things interact with each other. And that interaction, just personally, is very important.

A. Because it adds an element to your game which makes it fun and makes it—the social component, there’s a lot of things to your game that enrich the game. First and foremost, humans need to interact with other humans. It is a basic, basic need. And so there is a need to just sort of be around others and interact with them, and that games help fulfill some of that.

And in a very fun and compelling way, which is some people get very nervous when they interact with other people. And what games does is it gives context that you’re there for. Sometimes you’re standing around, you’re like, “What am I supposed to do?” But in a game it’s like, no, you’re playing the game, and while you’re playing the game you get to socialize and do the social thing, but you have something to focus on.

And interaction is a very—when you are making a game, one of the things to remember is that the social part of your game is a very important part. That having people be able to bond with each other while they play, A. will make your game more fun, B., will make people want to play your game again.

Because once again, when people have an experience during the game, they attribute it to the game. Even if, by the way, the game gets them together, and what they’re really doing is having fun with their friends. If they have fun with their friends during your game, your game reaps the benefits of it because people associate your game with those positive social interactions. So it makes it more fun. It helps bond people during it.

And it also creates… this gets us to the second thing, which is to help create more content. Which is my number two. And what I mean by that is, you as a game designer need to create content. Content is… so when you make games, there are things that are finite. It’s a resource. And that some things in the game are, like your game players are going to eat it up. And then it is gone. And some of it is a little more long-lasting. It’s more repetitive. You can enjoy it multiple times.

What happens though, is, when people play games, you want to make sure that they are—you need content. And a lot of content in games can get chewed up. Meaning once… and there’s two different ways to sort of have… I don't know, disposable? What’s the right word I want here? Content that gets used up.  I’m not sure if disposable’s the correct word.

So the first thing is stuff like (???) Trivial Pursuit. It’s a question. Well, once I ask the question, I mean maybe maybe maybe if I, three years later maybe I can ask the same question. But the point is, I’ve asked the question. You now know the question, you’ve heard the answer, it is no longer a fresh question. It’s a resource you’ve used up.

Another thing that’s also in the same camp but a different kind is, once someone does something enough times, they just go, “Okay. I’ve done that. I’ve done that.” And it’s not that they can’t do it again in the same way you can’t ask the question again, but there’s a point at which the player gets bored if they keep encountering the same things.

And so one of the roles of a game designer is to create enough content that you’re keeping from getting bored. There’s always fresh things to do. And one of the neat things about interaction is, as soon as you bring people in the mix, you have people doing some of your job for you.

Because the idea is that when I make you interact with the other players, they are going to come up with things and do things that you will never think of. You the game designer might never, ever think of. But that’s great. Meaning if you can get your players to self-generate content, then you are using… you want to think of your audience as a resource.

I mean, they’re your audience, for starters, but also they can generate material for you which is valuable. Meaning if you’re trying to make your game interesting, having your audience help do that. Help create the content. Both it makes it interesting, because other people are going to do things you wouldn’t have done, and it keeps it dynamic.

Now what I mean by dynamic is, part of what we’re going to get at, I’m sort of jumping around here, when you play a game, what you want to have happen is, you want your game to always keep the interest of your player. And the way you do that is you want to make sure that they don’t always know what is coming. And part of what makes things sort of disposable is, at some point I go, “I’ve just experienced that, there’s nothing new to it. I’ve experienced it enough times. I want to experience something different.”

But the neat thing about adding humans to this mix is that humans have a natural desire—one of the things you want to do when you make a game… sorry, let me back up a second. So you have a goal. Right? You have a goal because you want your audience to know what they are attempting to do. You want them to have a focus, and it gives them a clear—it tells them what they want to be doing.

And then you have rules to define what they can and can’t do, and start putting some obstacles in their way. Now the neat thing is, by using interaction, you are making the other players one of the obstacles. So like a very common thing you’ll do in games is, you put each other in the way of the goals. Meaning in order for me to get my goal, I have to interact with you, because you and I might want the same goal. Or what we need to do, the resources we need, we have to fight over those resources to get our goal. That one of the things that having other players and interaction is, it allows you the game designer to create additional obstacles. Which is very important.

And remember, like I said, I talked about this in the previous two podcasts. Is the role of a game is not to make things easy for your audience. In fact, remember, that’s not why they’re here. The reason you come for a game is you want a challenge of some kind.

You want to… I mean, like I said. Different audiences want different things. Some of them really want a strong mental test. Some of them want strong social interactions. Some of them want to be creative. When I talk a lot about… in Magic I talked about the psychographics. So there’s Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. And I did a podcast on this, obviously.

When you boil down to it, the three major motivations of Timmy, Johnny, and Spike is, Timmy wants to enjoy himself. Johnny wants to express himself, and Spike wants to prove himself. And so each one of those is seen through how people play games.

Timmy leans a lot more toward the social aspect of it, or just having fun of finding neat things in the game that create the emotional rushes that he wants. Where Johnny’s all about finding elements of the game to show what he’s capable of doing. So some players want the game as a means of expression. Some players want to test themselves and want to prove what they’re capable of doing. And that your game has to have all those components to it. You want to make sure that your game allows you to enjoy yourself, the game allows you to express yourself. The game allows you to sort of test and prove yourself.

And interaction is interesting. It does A. the social thing, so it clearly does this thing which allows you to interact with other people, allows you to sort of—brings the fun quality out of it. It also lets you test yourself because what is more test than pitting yourself against another human?

That there’s a great idea there if I’ve bested somebody else. That if I win the solitaire game then I’m happy, but I was just… when I’ve beaten another person, like, I’ve beat that person. I didn’t beat a game, I beat that person. He and I were together and I beat him or her or them or… I really took down somebody else. And that’s a very important feeling.

Also, the other thing about having the interaction with other people is, a final thing is expression, which is if I want to demonstrate something, I need the audience to see it. If I want to say, “Look what I did,” well if there’s nobody there to look at what I did, then I can take some self-pride, but it’s really much more fun to have somebody else go, “Ooh, that was pretty cool.” And that a lot of wanting to express something is wanting to have an audience observe what you express.

Okay. Number three, reason for interaction, and these kind of blur together, be aware that I’m making different things. But a lot of the points I’m making in one apply to the other. So number three is add variety.

And one of that is, one of the things when you play… so, the way I like to think of games is, a game has so many replays in it. And then at some point it gets used up, and people are like, “Okay, I’ve done it. I’ve done it.” One of the things Magic does really well is it has infinite replayability. And party because we keep putting out more content. That as people use up content, we provide more content. That’s one of Magic’s big advantages I think is that it’s constantly providing more content.

But the point is, when people play your game, that at some point, they go, “Okay, I played it enough. That I experienced what there is to experience.” And every game, there comes a point—I mean, most game aren’t Magic that are constantly putting out new content. But some games do. But most games, assuming there’s not new content constantly being provided, it’s going to get digested at some point. It’s going to get… at some point your audience is going to digest the material.

So one of the other reasons you want interaction is that when you are interacting with other humans, it creates more different experiences. A., because the other players might just come up to do things you never thought before, and B., there is just a whole other level of interacting. That you’re not only interacting with the game now, you’re interacting with the people, and the people can make the variety very different.

And what I’ll say by that is, imagine two different… imagine in your mind two of your friends that are game players, that are just as different as different can be. The most different people you can imagine under the realm of their game players.

Now imagine you’re playing a game with them. We’ll use Magic just because I obviously do Magic. Magic, you’re playing Magic with them and they’re playing the exact same deck. The exact same deck. But you could see how playing against… I’m just going to call them Ted and Alice. Imagine playing against Ted, playing the same deck as Alice, how playing against Ted can be a completely different experience than playing against Alice. Even though they’re playing the exact same deck.

And the reason is, the human element of it just adds something different. It just… maybe Ted trash-talks while he plays, where Alice is very coy, and maybe Alice has a more wry sense of humor. Or Ted is a little more bawdy. Or just the interaction with how you’re dealing with them is just, it’s a different experience. And so obviously, you always play games with people, but the more interaction you build into the game, the more you force people to interact with other people.

Now, be aware. There are games that I’ll call parallel solitaire games. And what that means is, I’m playing my game, and you’re playing your game, and really we are not interacting with each other. Mostly we exist as the clock for the other person. Which is I’m trying to do my thing before you do your thing.

But there’s no real interaction. Nothing I do affects what you do. And there’s games like this. Once again, when I talk about the ten things every game needs, it’s not that every game needs them. As you get better at game design you realize there’s times and places where maybe one of them is dialed down. But the way I always explain this is, if you’re in an art class and I’m teaching you how to draw, I’m not teaching starting with cubism. We’re going to start with…

So things I talk about, there are games that don’t have a lot of interaction, there’s parallel solitaire games, in which really the interaction is my opponents are my clock. And the problem I find with a lot of those games is, or why they’re less compelling is, I want to have that social interaction with other people.

And you can generate it. And even in a parallel solitaire game we can joke around with each other. There’s some interaction. But the game doesn’t force the interaction. When the game forces interaction, it sort of forces the social interaction. And social interaction, like I say, it’s very, very valuable. One of the things you have to ask, when you are making your game is, am I maximizing what I can do with the social quality of the game?

And then a lot of people, when they make games, they think all about the technicality of the game, and they don’t think about the people playing the game. And that’s a really important distinction, which is your games don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re not played by robots. Human beings will play your game.

Does your game maximize humans getting a chance to be human? Does your game have moments where people can laugh? Moments where people can maybe bluff or have to joke with each other? Are you creating moments in your game that make humans have to act with other humans in ways that inherently will be fun?

By the way, when you’re talking about how to create social stuff, most of what you’re trying to do is make sure there’s opportunities for those social things to happen. And that one of the things… we’ll get to flavor later on, but one of the things that flavor does that’s also very important is that flavor can set context for your social interaction.

For example, if your game has a lot of flavor to it, one of the things that’s fun for players to do is get in the mindset of what you’re doing. If you’re playing a Wild West game, you’re getting a lot more of “Okay, draw!” You’re getting that Wild West mentality. If you’re playing a fantasy game then you get people more in a… that whatever you’re playing, the flavor can also dictate some of the social interaction, which is very important.

So anyway, games by their nature have a limited lifespan. Without the caveat of you adding extra content over time. Assuming you’re not adding extra content, your game has a lifespan. Now, that lifespan could be really, really long. Chess gets played by people their whole lives. So it’s not that people can’t play a game for a long time. But one of the things that helps increase that is the more your game has variety to it, that when I play it, that I’m not experiencing the same thing.

One of the things that makes people want to stop playing your game is they play a game, they go, “That was just like another time I played the game!” And if too often they play, and it’s just the same experience, they go, “Oh, well, okay, I’ve done this, maybe I’ll do something else.” And that is a big exit point for games is when your audience grows tired of what you’re doing.

So the reason interaction is super, super important is, if you sit down with Ted and Alice and play your game, Ted is going to do stuff, Alice is going to do stuff, that just that interaction between you and your friends is always going to be different.

Or has a much greater chance of being different. So even if your gameplay has a little bit of similarity, having the interaction—and not just A. because social interaction is different, but also, if you’ve played Ted before, and Ted remembers last time you played that you did something, Ted might play differently because he’s trying to get a different outcome. Maybe he lost last time. And he’s like, “Okay, last time I did this. Now I’m going to try something different.”

And that’s another nice thing about having people is that they’re going to try to not always do the same thing, because it’s not to their advantage to always do the same thing. And so one of the neat things will be that when you play other people, even if you’re playing the same game, the same basic tools at hand, they might try to use some tools differently. Because you have a shared interaction before, they’re going to want to do something different.

And that is a very valuable tool to help you—like I said, one of the things you want to do as a game designer is say, “What can help me? What are my tools available to me?” And part of what I’m trying to say today is, your audience is a tool available to you. That a lot of people want to think of the game as a separate entity, and then like at the end they bring in the player, but good game design is understanding who is using your game and then taking advantage of who your audience is.

And like I said, you can use them to generate content. You can use them to add spice and variety to the game. And that—but, but, and here’s the interesting thing, that you’ll get some of it for free, just people will be different. But there’s things that you can do in your game that will increase the chance of your audience doing what you need them to do. That if you want your audience to have some functionality, that you need to give them the tools to make sure that happens.

So what I mean by that is, let’s say for example you want to have your audience help keep the gameplay different. So one of the very common things to do is one of the reasons when you create games, that you make goals cross each other, is that I have to stop you to get to my goal, if we have to interact, and you getting your goal is anti to my goal.

For example, if you get to your goal before I get to my goal, you win, I might have an incentive to stop you from getting to your goal. Now all of a sudden, instead of the game trying to be an obstacle, your opponent gets to be an obstacle. Actively be an obstacle. They might go out of their way to try and stop you. And now not only is the game trying to stop you, and the rules, whatever else, another player is trying to stop you.  And that’s why it’s very valuable when you set up your game, and set up your interaction, to think about how your interaction will work.

Now, interactions, like when I talk about other aspects later in other podcasts, you have to be careful how you set up your interaction. The most common mistake is the inertia mistake. So coming up, I think it’s number five I think is inertia? [NLH—Yes.] After this, this is number three, then we get to catch-up feature, and then I think we get to inertia.

Inertia is basically “Make sure your game is going to come to an end.” And humans can sometimes stop that. Meaning if I give you the motivation as a player to stop the other player, you might do nothing but stop the other player. And it’s not that you can’t work inertia with that, but you have to be careful. If you don’t structure it correctly, you could have two players keeping each other from winning and the game goes on forever.

Number four. Interaction keeps players invested. So here’s another problem that runs in a lot of games is, games often—not always, but most often—are turn-based. Meaning it is my turn, I get to do something. And the reason that is so is, it’s structure. That if you want to make sure things happen, you have to structure, this is where rules come in, structure is very important. You want it to be clear at all times what the game is trying to do. And one of the things rules do is lay out what needs to be done in what order.

So one of the cleanest and easiest ways to do that is to make a turn order. A turn structure. And the problem with that, one of the downsides—I mean, the upside is it defines what’s going on and makes it very clear. One of the downsides is, if it’s my turn, what is my opponent doing during my turn?

And so there’s a very common problem in games is that there’s downtime. That during the game, there’s moments where I have nothing to do. And that’s not good. That what you don’t want to have happen during the course of your game is that your player gets bored. That you want your player invested during the whole game.

So one of the things the interaction does which is very nice is, if what you do matters to me and what I do matters to you, I have to pay attention. I have to see what you’re doing. Because what you’re doing will impact what I’m doing.

So another nice thing that interaction does is, it keeps players invested most of the game. That if for example, in Magic, we have instants. So you could cast a spell, not just play it on your turn, you could play it on your opponent’s turn. And so why did Richard put instants in the game?

And I think interaction’s a big part of it. That he wanted you to say, “Hey, even during your opponent’s turn, you need to pay attention because maybe you could do something. And during your turn, you’ve got to pay attention to your opponent. Because maybe they could do something. And so simply by adding one little subset of cards, Richard added a whole dynamic where on other players’ turns, that other player has to be aware of their opponent.

And that, by the way, another important thing about being social is making sure your game makes your players care about the other players. So to bring back the parallel solitaire game, in that thing, I care about my opponent only because when they finish the game is going to be over, so I’m monitoring how close they are. But other than that, there’s not a lot of reason to interact. You start criss-crossing your goals or forcing interactions, then all of a sudden I’m always sort of trying to keep in mind what’s going on with my opponent.

And that, like I said. There’s a balance you want in your game, which is you want to have enough things to think about that your mind is occupied, but not so many things to think about that it overwhelms. And so interaction is nice.

So I did a whole podcast on lenticular design [NLH—Part I and Part II.] So let me jump in real quick. So lenticular design is design in which you make something that to the beginning player looks one way, but for the advanced player looks another. Meaning that you have hidden things within the card that the beginner can’t understand the complexity, to them it looks simple, but the better player does understand the complexity, to them it looks complex.

Interaction is a neat thing to do. Which is, when you first start playing a game, you focus on what you’re doing in the game, and you focus last on what the opponents are doing in the game. In Magic, as a good example, it’s not until you start getting pretty good that you start thinking about, what is my opponent doing? How are they doing it? Can I read them? What might they be doing that I need to pay attention to? Do I need to play around something that they’re doing? Are they giving signs that they’re doing something?

And that there is a lenticular quality to human interaction, which is, people will tend to not worry about what other people are up to when they’re first trying to understand the game. And then, as they start to get better, then they start to realize how important it is to pay attention to the other players. So the players—player interaction can also add a nice lenticular quality to it. I think that’s very valuable.

Okay, that segues into  our final, our fifth and final quality is, interaction adds strategic complexity. So this closely ties into what I was talking about. That I almost segued from four into five, then I’m like, “Wait, wait, I shouldn’t mention five.”

So one of the things you want about your game, one of the ways you want replay value, and then strategy is later and it’s one of the ten things every game needs. So when I get to strategy, I’ll talk big-picture about strategy, but the short version of it is that you want replayability of your game. You want people to play your game and to want to play your game again.

And one of the ways you do that is if players feel like there’s growth that comes during the course of the game, that they learn something, and that learned thing is a value that they can bring back, then it helps enhance gameplay, makes gameplay last longer. It keeps interest in the game.

And interaction can do a lot to help with strategic complexity. It adds in an element of player interaction, which usually just learning how to read players, or just learning to understand how people function, that’s a whole other layer. That’s kind of what I’m talking about the lenticular thing. Which is, I don’t think people think about the social interaction when they first start. But they get there. As they get better, they start to realize, “Oh, well the difference between winning or losing might be reading my opponent and understanding what they’re up to.” Being able to understand when I can go, “Okay, I’m pretty sure they have Thing X or Thing Y. I need to play around it because I think they have it.”

What I found is, like I’ve been playing Magic for twenty-something years, one of the things I started sensing that I was getting better was, I found myself reading my opponent, understanding what they were doing, and then able to play around it.

Like one of the things I find very, very interesting is, I was playing a player, who I was a much more experienced player than them. I read them for having something, I played around it the entire game, and I won, and at the end of the game, their response is, “You are so lucky. I had Thing X in my hand the whole time.”

And I was sort of like—that wasn’t luck. Do you understand that I figured out you had it, and the reason you weren’t able to use it was I took into account and played my entire game so that you couldn’t take advantage of that. And he was blown away. And he was like, “I hadn’t thought of that.” And I’m like, “Welcome to the next level of Magic.” That there’s a lot of… the onion has many layers.

And that one of the neat things about a game is you want to make sure that there are layers of discovery. That you want people to find things. And interaction, especially human interaction, is one of those layers that people will get to come to, and adds a very strong (???). The nice thing about it, by the way is, it’s not that people don’t understand interaction from the beginning. They will get the social part very quick. They will get the “I’m having fun with my friend.”

What they won’t realize right away is that the person brings to the game inherent content to itself. “Oh, well in order to understand what my opponent’s going to do, I have to understand who my opponent is, and how they think, and how they play."

So one of the big meta-things to understand as you look through, I mean I kind of (???} I was meaning to, but I’m talking about how interaction has to do with goals, interaction has to do with rules, how it has to do with flavor, how it has to do with inertia. How it has to do with strategy.

That all these components interact. That I mean, I am breaking them apart and talking about them in isolation just to sort of discuss them, but I want you to understand as I walk through why you want these things, you’ll notice that I keep bringing up the other things. That these are all tied together. That the reason you want interaction, partly, is because it helps your goals, it helps your rules, it helps your inertia, it helps your strategy, it helps your flavor. That it does all these things that help the other facets that you need as well.

So I’m almost to work. And let me talk sort of a meta-thing on interaction. So one of the things, the reason when I broke games down into ten qualities, was I was speaking to a fifth-grade class. For those that don’t know the origin of this whole thing. And I really wanted to say, “What…”

One of the things, for example, one of the reasons I came up with this list was, I’ve seen a lot of beginning game designs. I mean, I was talking to fifth graders, but I’ve seen a lot of even older, older than fifth grade game designers.

And there’s some classic mistakes that you make. In fact, a lot of my list came from “What is the most common mistake people make?” And one of the most common mistakes is, not enough interaction. As I called it earlier, parallel solitaire games. Where it’s like, I’m doing something, you’re doing something, I’m glad we’re doing our things near each other, but there’s no… a game is much more dynamic if—interaction really just makes it more of a neat experience.

And that when you see a game with no interaction, like for example, one of the things that happened was, I gave a speech to the fifth-grade class, they made their games, and I came back and had a chance to play them all.

And like there were definitely a bunch of games where sort of like, “It’s your turn. Do your thing.” What I call a “roll and move” game. Where you have a board and dice, and on your turn you roll and then it tells you what happens. And the problem with a lot of those games is, my opponents have nothing to do on my turn. They have no real impact on what I do. And I can make decisions and choices and maybe have an impact on the game, but there’s—it’s much, much less fun when it’s like, “Okay, tell me when it’s my turn,” and then on my turn I’m like, “Okay, I did my thing, okay, it’s your turn.

And that—so for those that know the game Sorry! So Sorry! has added one little rule, it was so important they named the game after it, if I land on your space, you go back. Sorry! And that all of a sudden you take a game that could be very boring, and now, just that little tiny thing, just the little thing of, “Okay, I have a chance to either send my opponent back or have him send me back,” and that makes every die roll ten tense and exciting. Because if my opponent is five away from me, if I roll a five, ooh! Sorry!

And that—like literally having played a lot of the roll and move games, and just seeing the difference between that and Sorry!, all you have to do is add that one little rule. That one little rule, and you can see the excitement.

The other thing that as I talk about Sorry!, it makes me realize is, another neat element of interaction is that there is a sense of achievement when you do something. But there is a different contextual feeling when you do it to somebody else. That when you somehow defeat the game, that’s fun, it’s fun, I’m not saying winning a game’s not fun. Or defeating an element of the game.

But when you defeat another person, like somehow you do something to another person, it adds another layer onto it. That when I play Sorry!, or I play a board game, and I roll and it says, “Go back three spaces,” there’s an interaction. I go, “Ohh, I didn’t want to get that.” But that’s a very different thing than when I send my opponent back. When I choose for them to go back or I make it happen, that there is a—there’s almost a little adrenaline rush that’s there. That humans interacting with humans.

That’s a fine lesson of the day, which is, humans like to interact with other humans. It makes it fun. If the goal of your game is to make it fun, and like I said, usually games primarily are about fun, there are other educational elements sometimes in games. But at the crux, most games are about, “Let’s have fun.”

That if you know people interacting with people is inherently fun, well make use of that. Make use of it. Do you have more than one person playing your game? Then definitely take advantage that your players interacting will make the game more fun, not just because it will help your game, but it’s just fun for players to interact. It is fun for humans to deal with one another.

And that that—I mean my constant theme I guess of today is, your audience is a resource. Make use of that resource. And social interaction is one of the key components of that. Your players will like being interactive with each other, if you give them the means to do so they will. And that just your game should facilitate the human interaction between your players. That is very important.

And you also want to make sure that the game itself involves interaction in the game. Like I said, there’s two big parts of today. One is, make humans interact with humans. They have fun doing that. And the second is, use humans as a resource to increase the inner workings of the game. To add strategic complexity. To add variety to what’s going on. To shake things up. To make players be more on their feet. That there’s all these things you get to do when you force the interaction. That just is gravy.

And that—I mean a lot—it’s funny. Of the ten things the game needs, as I go through them, some of them are things that you structurally need to make sure that the game can function.  And some of them enhance the game. Now, interaction is a little of both. It definitely helps your structure.

If, for example, if you criss-cross goals, then you definitely are using the nature of the structure to enable itself. And that’s valuable. But kind of my lesson I guess, kind of what I’m saying today, interaction is a little more of being added, of just making the game fun. Than it is structural. It adds a structural component. But more so than structural component, I think it adds an important layer that brings a lot of fun to the game.

And fun being another thing that I will get to. So. Anyway. I’m sitting here like waiting—I’m at the last light before I turn to get on the street that goes to my work. So let me see about any final thoughts. So let me recap.

The reason you want interaction in your game. Five things I mentioned today. One, it adds a social component, which is very important. Number two, it makes content for you. Number three, it adds variety and makes replays more different. Four, it keeps players invested. And lessens the boring elements of the game where there’s nothing to do. And five, it adds strategic complexity. It definitely makes the game harder to play, and allows more growth as you play, because dealing with the people into itself is a skill.

_­That is the reason you want interaction. It is funny that one of the things I always do when I look at a new game is I try to figure out where the greatest moment of fun was. Where was the shining thing? And think about this. Think about the last game you played, so what was the most fun part of having the game? Odds are, odds are, not always, but odds are, that moment happened between you and other people. That it wasn’t just a moment of you by yourself, it was a moment of you interacting with at least one other person in some way.

And like I said, the reason for that is that we are social creatures. And that probably your most favorite moment in the game was something you did, where you made a conscious decision and you did something, but then it interacted with another player.

And that that—the fun between what you were doing and how you were interacting with them, that you know—I always talk about how people are mirrors. That one of the things when you study psychology is, a lot of the reason that people need interaction with other people is, that they see themselves in the other person, that the thing they need gets mirrored. And that one of the reasons people crave human interaction is they need to see from the other people the thing that they themselves want. Little psychology for you.

And so I think that definitely interaction helps create that. That if I really want to laugh, seeing other people laugh is really, really—makes me extra happy. Part of seeing other people laugh says, “Oh, I’m getting what I want, they’re laughing, thus I’m laughing.” And I think what you’ll find is that interaction does a lot of that. That’s why it’s so important.

Anyway, let’s see how we did today… wow! We had an extra long… must have had some traffic. So a little extra. But luckily it was a podcast I had plenty of content to talk about. But anyway, I am now parked in my parking space. And you all know what that means. It’s time to end my drive to work. And instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll talk to you guys next time.