I’m pulling out of the parking space! We all know what that
means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.
I had to take my son to the orthodontist and then to school
today, so I’m starting from our school. But as long-time listeners know, our
school is right by my house. So you should get a full podcast today.
So I have a fun topic today. I’m going to talk about a very
important tool that needs to get used. Feedback. So Malcolm Gladwell wrote a
book called Outliers where he talked about, how do you get good at
something? You have to do it for 10,000 hours. But most people miss of that
thing is, it’s 10,000 hours with constant feedback.
Feedback is very important to the process. So I talk all the
time about how what we do is iterative. And what that means is, you do
something, you get feedback, often from playtesting and stuff, learn, make
changes, and then playtest again.
And that part of the process, part of an iterative process
is using feedback as a means to improve what you’re doing. And that feedback doesn’t
always have to be playtesting. As we will see today, there are multiple ways to
get feedback.
Okay. So what I’ve done today is I’ve broken the feedback
into four sections. There’s four kinds of feedback I’m going to talk about.
First is self-feedback. How you are giving yourself your feedback. Next is team
feedback. How the design team is giving you feedback. Then it is department
feedback. How other people in R&D are giving feedback. And finally the
audience. How the audience gives feedback. So I’m going to talk a little bit
about how feedback can best be used, and how it affects Magic.
Okay. Number one. Self-feedback. So I don’t think a lot of
people necessarily realize that you are giving yourself feedback. And that one
of the most important things is understanding what the feedback you have from
yourself. What do you think about something?
So when you playtest your game, what I recommend is there’s
three questions you ask yourself. Question number one. Is it fun? The thing I
keep coming back to, I’ve had a whole on this is, at the end, the point of a
game, it’s a form of entertainment. If the person playing the game is not
enjoying themselves, you are fundamentally failing. It’s not working as a game.
Now, I’m not saying there can’t be lots of other things
going on. There can be mental stimulation, there can be all sorts of other
things. But it is important that it is fun. And so when you are playtesting,
one of the things you have to ask yourself as you’re playing is, is there fun
here?
Now note, early on in the playtest process, you are searching
for the fun. It’s not that the whole experience might be fun, but you’re trying
to find moments of fun. And then as you progress, you’re trying to make sure
that you take those moments of fun, and you stretch them out and build your
design around the fun parts.
Okay. Number two, is it accomplishing my goal or goals? What
I mean by that is, one of the major roles of a lead designer for a game is to
make sure that they set the vision for what the game is trying to be. In my
case, an expansion, or whatever. I’m trying to set the vision. What are we
trying to do? What is the goal of what we’re trying to do?
And one of the things when you playtest is, you have to ask
yourself, “Okay, I have a vision, I have a goal, is what I’m delivering meeting
that goal? Is my game doing the thing that I say I want to be doing?” Now,
note, if the answer is no, there’s two answers. Answer number one is, “Okay,
how can I change my game to get the goal I want?” And number two might be, “Oh,
is my goal wrong? Do I have the wrong goal?”
And the reason you might come to that one is you might have
a blast. The game is hilariously fun, you’re enjoying it, you’re like, “Oh,
it’s not doing what I said I wanted it to do, but oh, maybe that what it’s
doing is okay, maybe my goal is wrong." That’s something obviously that
can happen.
Okay, the third question you have to ask yourself is, “Can I
remove anything?” So I talk about this a lot too. A lot of making any creative
process is figuring out what is necessary from what is not. I often talked
about how when you write, you’re always asking yourself, “Do I need this line?
Do I need this scene? Do I need this subplot?”
Game design is similar is, do I need this rule? Do I need
this element of the game? And that if you can chop something out and the game
works well, chop it out. That nothing should be there that doesn’t serve a
purpose. Okay. So one more time, when you’re checking with yourself, ask
yourself, “Is it fun?” Ask if it’s accomplishing your goals. Ask if you can
remove anything. Those are the three main things you want to do when you are
self-evaluating to figure out what is going on from playtesting and looking at
your game.
Okay. Now we go a ring out to your team. So in Magic we have design teams. So these
are the people working with you directly on making your game. Okay. For each
one of these I have three questions. A little structure for you. Okay. So the
first question I have is, “What is your team member seeing that you aren’t
seeing?” And I mean this in two different ways. One is, there’s a lot going on
in a game. Especially like in a Magic
expansion. There’s a lot going on.
The reason you have a whole team playtesting is, there’s
just more people experiencing things. And A. they’re experiencing things just
because they’re… like, you might play blue/red and someone else plays
white/black. Well, they’ve seen the white/black cards and you haven’t because
you played blue/red.
Also, each person has a different vantage point that they’re
coming from. So on our design team, we have a developer. Right? The developer’s
looking at, “Is it balanced? Is this stuff that we can later develop?” The
creative person’s looking at, “Well does it match our story? Are we conveying
the essence of the world?”
A lot of the core designers that are on a design team are
sort of like, “Is the design shining? Does it do what it needs to?” That
different people are looking at your design in different ways, partly because
they have different roles, partly because they’re different people. Different
players might enjoy different things.
One of the things you want to make sure when you have a mix
for your design team, that the different people have different desires. Partly
it’s the role they play, partly it’s just, “Are they different kinds of
players?” There’s different things they enjoy about the game. I talk all the
time about how Magic on some levels
is many games wrapped in one. You have different people that represent the
different kinds of players.
So the first question you’re asking basically is, you can’t
see everything. Partly because of vantage point, partly because of time, partly
because of resources. And that your team is filing out and being an extra set
of eyes to see things. So first thing you want to say is, “What are they
seeing?” There’s things you’re not seeing that they are seeing. What are they
seeing? And one of the roles of having a whole design team is that you are
allowed to get a lot of perspectives and just have more people looking at it.
So number two. What is the group consensus? So another issue
of having a team is to find out what does the team agree on? Where are people…
now, that doesn’t mean, by the way, having the group agree on something, if it
disagrees with you, the leader, doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to
change things. But it is important. And generally what I find is, any one
person can believe whatever they want. But when a group starts believing
something, you have to sort of get to the root of what they’re seeing.
Now, once again, that doesn’t always mean that why they’re
seeing it or what’s going on is correct at the time. It is okay to go, “Oh, my
team sees something, I don’t think that’s the right thing.” But you have to
respect, when your team all sees it, it means something. If nothing else, it
means maybe the thing you’re trying to do is not where the game is at because
people are seeing it differently.
Okay. The third question is, where do they disagree with
you? One of the big challenging things about being the lead of a design is it
is your job in the end to fundamentally make the decisions. So let me explain
this real quickly. I do not believe a good design is a democracy. The role of
having a team is not so all of you together can make every decision… I mean,
early on, when I used to do Magic
design, I used to do more of that. Like, we would want to add cards, and I’d
say, “Okay, let’s vote on the cards.” And I would try to get everybody involved
so that all the decisions were reached by the group.
And what I found was, A., the group does not have as clear…
like, you want the person who has the vision making the final call. That is
you, the person leading the team. That doesn’t mean you don’t want input. That
doesn’t mean your team’s input isn’t valuable. That doesn’t mean that sometimes
your team [isn’t] right and you are wrong. But it does mean that you need to be
the one to make sure that everything is lining up with the vision you want.
And so a design team is not a democracy. I believe. I
believe that a design team is… they are a team made to help you, the lead
designer, capture your vision. And part of your role as being the lead is
making sure the vision is clear to all of them so they can help you with it.
But you will have… one of the things as the person leading
the set is, since you are the keeper of the vision, you will have a vantage
point that is slightly different than the rest of your team. And obviously, if
you’re doing a good job as a team member, you’re trying to get your team to see
what your vision is. So that you get to a similar vantage point.
But, it is not about everybody sort of coming to a group
consensus. You want to know, if there is a consensus, what it is. But that
doesn’t mean that the way you need to do the design is to get everybody to
agree with you.
Okay. The reason the disagreement’s interesting is, you want
to understand where the conflicts within your team lie. Meaning if you’re doing
something, and fellow team members think it’s wrong, you want to understand it.
So once again, one of the themes of today about feedback is, one of the things
that’s most important about feedback is understanding the reasoning and
rationale for why the person giving the feedback is feeling that way.
One of the ongoing themes for today will be that people are
better at understanding problems than they are at solving problems. And what I
mean by that is, when something is wrong, most people can tell you something is
wrong. Now, not a lot of people necessarily can fix it, or the solutions they
give might not be the ideal solutions. But they are good at recognizing
problems. So when someone disagrees with you, understand why they disagree with
you.
Now maybe, when you dig down deep, they’ll say, “Oh. Well, I
believe Thing X.” And you go, “I, the lead, believe it’s not Thing X. I believe
Thing Y. I understand you believe Thing X, but I believe Thing Y.” It’s okay.
Like, once you dig deep and understand their reasons, you might, you’ll get to
the core of what they believe. And maybe there’s a fundamental disagreement.
But a lot of times, what I’ve found disagreements is, they
have an issue with something. And if I dig deep and understand what their issue
is, a lot of time, their issue and my issue don’t have to contradict. The
reason we might disagree is, I or they might want something, and the solution
at hand is not addressing both our issues. But it could.
A lot of times what I find is, you get feedback from your
team, they have a problem, and you’re like, “Oh, the thing they care about, I
haven’t been thinking about. The thing I care about, I need to address, oh, but
there’s a way to address the issue I care about and address their issue.” And a
lot of what I find the feedback from teammates are, is trying to get a sense of
when something is slightly askew. And once again, this comes from the fact that
they have different vantage points. And that is very valuable.
Okay. Let’s get to the next one. The department. Okay. So
department, what I mean is, you’re
working in a team that’s actively working on the project. But a department are
people that are with you, but are not actively working on it. So R&D in
this case.
So one of the things when we do a set, there’s a lot of
people that poke in and take a peek. The development team obviously has to take
a peek to make sure that things are developable. The creative team needs to
take a peek to make sure that we are matching their world and vision. The
organized play has to peek in to see if we’re doing anything that’s going to impact
how organized play works. Digital might take a peek in. To see if we’re doing
anything that’s going to be problematic for them to program. There’s just lots
and lots of… sometimes graphic arts will peek in to see if we’re trying to make
new frames. And there’s all these different people that are poking in to get a
sense of what is going on. And they are going to give you feedback.
Okay. So, first question is, what is their first impression?
One of the things that’s very valuable is, you are constantly evolving your
game. And one of the things that you lose is, you don’t have the ability after
very early on to have any sense of the first impression of your game.
And that’s really important. You want to make sure that when
people play, that it creates a positive first impression. Well, how do you
monitor that when you’re so ingrained in what you’re doing that you don’t have
a fresh set of eyes?
So one of the great things about outside people is, every
person who looks at your set for the first time gets to have an opinion, a
first impression that you can talk to them about and understand. In fact, one
of the things I always do is when new people come to R&D, the first week,
they have to get up to speed. Because they’re behind by a couple years since we
work ahead.
And the question I always ask a new employee is, “I want
your first impressions. What do you think?” Before I ask anything else. Before
I taint them with any other question. Because any other question I ask them
will kind of taint the purity of their first response. And the first thing I
want to know is, “What is your first impression?”
Now note, it’s not important that everything has the most
positive first impression. We do make mechanics that at first blush might not
seem that good but when you play them are. But overall you want your sets to
have good first impressions. A lot of being successful is making people excited
about your product. And that while I want the set to play well, I also want the
set to have a good first impression.
And what that means is, you have to balance the number of
mechanics. That like, you can have some things that don’t look good at first
but turn out to be good, but you can’t have a set full of those. If everything
in your set doesn’t look good, your audience goes, “Ehh, I don’t want to… ehh,
I don't know.” They’re not inclined to want to come play it. And that what you
want to do is make sure the set has some exciting things in it.
Okay. The next question is, what are they saying as an
expert? So when people are poking their head in from outside, they represent
something. They are developer. They are a creative person. They are organized
play. Digital. CAPS. Whatever they are, they are looking from the outside, and
they are… the one thing that’s very interesting when you get outside is, the
person who’s coming from the outside has one distinctive vantage point. And
that you as the designer are looking at a lot of different things. And it’s
very refreshing to get somebody from outside going, “I just care about this one
thing. Or these few things. And I’m going to give you comments on those things.
Because that is what I’m focused on.”
And my parallel here is, back in the day I used to direct
plays. And one of the things I learned by directing plays is that my actors
have a vantage point on the character
that I do not. And the reason is, as the director, I have to care about all the
characters. I have to care about the motivation of everybody. But my actor, who
has a part, they don’t care about anybody but themselves. Because they’re
focused on understanding their character.
So they spend a lot more time than I do focused on that one
thing. And so a lot of times, if I want to understand the character, I’ll sit
down and talk with my actor to see what vantage point do they have. They might
notice things that I would have never noticed because they’re trying to
understand the character. And they’re looking at every line in the play as how
it affects them. How their character interacts with everybody else. And so they
have a unique vantage point.
The same thing is going on here, where Erik Lauer, who’s the
head developer, he’s looking at how to develop the set. He’s looking at what he
needs to do to be able to make a balanced Limited environment and a balanced
Standard environment. He’s looking at what he needs to do to make it a
well-developed set.
And so the feedback he’s giving me is not about the design,
it’s about the development. Same with the creative team. If the creative team’s
talking to me, they’re focused on the story. They want the story to shine. And
that they’re looking at it to go, “Is this making the story shine? Does it make
sense? Are there things that are incongruous with how the story’s working?”
And so having outside people is very valuable because the
insight they are giving you is a very clean and clear insight that is different
than insight you are going to have. And once again, you will notice that one of
the ongoing themes today is, one of the reasons feedback is so important is,
people will give you feedback about things that you do not see or not expert in
or not focusing on. And that one of the things that’s really interesting about
other people is, they will focus on other things, and they will give you
feedback that is a very different style of feedback.
Now, when you’re
talking departmentally, remember, they are the experts. Trust the experts. One
of the things… R&D is very talented, we have top-notch people working. So
when I am dealing with somebody, what I want to say is, “Okay, you’re the
expert. In the area, you’re the expert.”
So for example, one of the things we do in design early on
now, and we didn’t always do this, is we go to the rules manager and to the
templating team when we have mechanics that we think we want to do. We spend
the first early time in design figuring out what we want to do, but at some
point we’re like, “Okay, yeah yeah. We’re going to do this mechanic.”
Once we know that, we then have to go to templating and the
rules to say, “Okay. How does this work? How is it worded?” We want to get a
sense of what this actually looks like on a Magic card. And the thing that’s
important is, I’m not good at templating, I’m not good at rules. I mean,
I have a general sense of it. But when I go to them, they’re going to say, “Oh,
well if you do this, blah. If you do that…” And they’re going to really spell
out things that I might never have thought about.
And that is why feedback is so important is, as the person
leading the set, I do need to understand those things. They have a huge impact
on what I’m doing. If I want people to enjoy my mechanic, I have to care about
how it works in the rules. Is it intuitive? How’s it worded? Do people
understand it when they read it? All that stuff’s very important.
Okay. The last question for the department is, what do they
see that you don’t? It’s a similar question to what I ask for the team, which
is, one of the things that’s very interesting is, when you are working on a project
and you’re so close, I talk about “can’t see the forest for the trees.” Sometimes
what happens is, when you have people that are less close to it, they can see
things that are obvious but you’re blind to.
One of the things that’s very hard is that each person is
blind to their own faults to a certain extent. That you can look at other people
and you can easily see things they are doing wrong. But when you look at
yourself, it’s harder. That you have a vantage point that just makes… when you’re
so close to something, sometimes it’s hard to see things. And it takes somebody
stepping back and going, “Hey, this is happening.”
And in life that’s a good sense of feedback, by the way,
about yourself, which is people will see you and be able to tell things about
you that you do not see or understand. And people want to say, “But hey! Who knows
me better than me?” And the answer is, there’s many things about yourself that
you know, but there’s certain things that because of your closeness to
yourself, because of your vantage point, you can’t see. And there’s value in
having others to help you see those things. That is very much the same in game design.
When you’re so close to your game design it’s easy to not be able to see
things.
Okay. The final feedback. The audience. So you make your
game. It goes out. And your audience has some feedback. So one of the things
that has been my role is… and this is very conscious on my part. One of the
reasons I think I am a very good designer is, I have made it my mission to
create a conduit where I have an open communication between me and my audience.
For example, I
have a blog where I answer questions every day. In the last four years I think
I’ve answered 45,000 questions. I have a Twitter where I post to every day and
I answer questions on my Twitter. I do Google+. I do Instagram. I mean, I try
to be wherever I can be where an audience can have feedback and talk to me. And
that feedback is very important.
Okay. So what do I care for the audience? What are the
questions for the audience? Number one. What problems do they see? So… and this
is another vantage point, but one of the things is, and I said this before, I
will stress it again. People are good at recognizing there’s a problem. They
aren’t always as good at solving the problem. Usually what happens is, people can
tell something’s wrong. They’ll make a suggestion on how to fix it. Most of the
time their suggestion is not the best suggestion how to fix it. Only because if
they’re talking about your thing, you have more insight for how it works.
Like one of the things that’s very interesting is, there are
a lot of moving pieces in making a design work. The audience doesn’t care about
all those moving pieces. All they care about is the end result. Which is fine,
that’s what they’re supposed to do. The audience is like, “Am I enjoying this? Is
this fun?” They don’t care about a lot of the things that you care about. Not
that you shouldn’t care about them, but it’s not their issue. And that what
they’re trying to do is they’ll explain why they have a problem.
Now, their solution often won’t work because they don’t know
all the issues you have to deal with. So they’ll solve their problem and not realize
that it’s causing a different problem. But recognizing what the problem is is
important.
Now, one of the things that’s tricky is, Magic is a game that keeps breaking its
own rules. Every time you break a rule, you will get people who are
uncomfortable. Because people crave structure and rules. I talk about this a
lot just how humans behave, human brain, I talk a lot about aesthetics and sort
of, the human brain loves structure. It very much wants to understand things
and group things, and it wants things to have a pattern to it. Humans also
crave comfort, so they want to understand things. When you change things or
make them uncomfortable, the first reaction usually is, “What?” They get
uncomfortable.
Now, the fun of a game is, it’s in the safe setting where people
can accept change. And obviously Magic
is a game about change. But note that one of the things you will get, and every time I do something where I know I’m
breaking from something we’ve done before, like one of the things I do in my
articles is I lay out the rules. I’ll say, “Here’s our rules.” And then when I
break one of the rules, people write to me, like “What are you doing? You broke
your rule.”
And I’m like, “Well… we are a game that breaks its own
rules. The question is, how and why do we break the rule?” And that one of my
themes is, we don’t break rules just to break the rules, we break the rule for
a purpose. And that we make sure that the rule-breaking is done in a way that
is safe and not hurting the integrity of the game.
But anyway, your audience is very, very good at voicing… I
mean, they’re your audience, right? They tell you what they like and don’t
like. And once again, this is… Magic
is many games to many people. Just because… one of the common feedback I give
back for the feedback is, sometimes people have a problem because the thing
they’re upset for wasn’t meant for them. And they’re like, “I don’t like this
card.”
And you have to understand whether it was meant for them or
not. If it was meant for them and they don’t like it, that’s a huge deal. If it
was not meant for them and they don’t like it, well, you have to take that with
a grain of salt. If you’re trying to make a really fun Timmy card and Spike’s
like, “I don’t like it, that’s horrible, I would never play that in at
tournament,” you’re like, “Well, that wasn’t for you.” Some of my answers when I talk with players is
understanding when something was for you, and when it’s not for you.
But, and this is important, no matter how… sometimes people give
feedback very negatively. Sometimes they can be a bit cruel at times. They can
be a bit harsh. Every bit of feedback, if you dig deep, there’s a grain of
truth in it. Something about it speaks some truth.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean each time that what they’re
saying, you necessarily need to change. It doesn’t mean that you’ve made a
mistake necessarily. But it does mean you’re doing something that’s causing
discomfort. And you want to understand what that is. Why is the audience
unhappy?
Now, the audience will ask for things that they don’t get.
The audience might want things that okay, it’s great that they want it, either
you secretly know that they wouldn’t really like it if they got it, or that it
causes problems if you give it to them. Or maybe you’re planning to give it to
them but in two years and not now. There’s lots of different reasons why they’re
not getting something. And there’s reasons why you’re not giving it to them on
purpose. But sometimes it’s just like, “Oh, I didn’t know you wanted that.”
Okay, we’ll get to that one in a second.
Okay, number two. What is making them happy? It is just as
important to understand what is working as well as what is not working. The
audience tends to want to give feedback on what is not working much more than
they want to give feedback on what is working.
That said, the audience does give a lot of feedback on what
is working. You need to listen carefully. When people have problems, they are
very precise in what the problem is. They give you a lot of very specified
detail. When people are happy, they tend to give broader feedback. And one of
the things that’s important when you have two-way addressability, when you’re communicating
with somebody, when they say, “Oh, it’s awesome,” you want to say, “Why? What
did you like about it?”
That positive feedback you have to draw out detail a little
more. Negative feedback (???) them to give you details, positive feedback often
doesn’t. And so one of the things you have to do with positive feedback is
spend the time to get the information you need. “Oh, I loved it.” Why did you
love it? What about it? What about this is different from other things? What
did we do here… So this goes into my third question, which is, “What is missing
that you could grant later?” Or the better question actually is, “How could you
use the information now to improve what you do later?”
So there’s two parts of it. One is, if something’s missing
that you can learn… like, a lot of times you’ll do something. Players want something,
you didn’t deliver it, but you’re like, oh, okay. I’m learning something. Why
do they want this thing that we didn’t deliver? And is it something we can
deliver later? Is it something that will teach us about things in general they
want?
When something is missing, one of the things that I always
look at feedback is, the point of feedback is the iterative process that I
began with. That I want to do something, get feedback, learn from the feedback,
,make changes based on the feedback, and
improve to continue the iterative process. And I think of Magic design as an ongoing iterative process. I put a set out, that’s
kind of like the equivalent of having a playtest. I’m doing something, people give
me feedback, I iterate on it, I put another thing out. So putting sets out is a
lot like having playtests. Just on a broader scale.
And one of the things, for example, I’ve been at this for
nineteen years now, one of the reasons I think that I’ve gotten pretty good is
that I take that feedback. I listen to the audience, I talk with them, I hear what
they have to say, and I make changes.
Now, once again, one of the important things about feedback
is figuring out where you think it’s valuable feedback, and where it is not.
Not every feedback you address. Sometimes people are asking for things that you
think… people will ask for things that in the end, it’s not good to give them.
But you want to understand why.
And usually, when I get feedback, like my takeaway from any
feedback, whether it’s on any of these levels, myself, my team, my department,
my audience, is there’s something they want to tell me? I have to understand what
that is. And if at first blush I don’t get it, if someone gives me feedback and
I don’t get it, I want to spend more time to understand it.
Like I said. It’s not important that you agree with every
piece of feedback, but it’s important that you understand every piece of
feedback. Why is the person saying the thing they’re saying? What is the essence
of their feedback? And the reason that is so crucial is, the way you get
better, the way your game improves, the way you improve as a game designer, is
that you take that feedback and you learn from it. You want to get your 10,000
hours in with constant feedback.
Okay. So the other thing that you can learn, not only is
what’s missing, but also what was working. Like, one of the big ways that you
change things through feedback is you try things. And what you want to figure
out is, what are your successes, and what are your failures? It is very easy to
focus on your failures and go, “Oh…”
When you make a mistake, it gnaws on you. I talked about
this in one
of my articles about how mistakes are great teachers. Mistakes are awesome
teachers. Success is not as much a teacher. The problem with successes is,
successes teach you to replicate what you’ve done. Where mistakes force you to
reexamine what you’ve done and try to find differences.
So one of the things I always stress to people is, no matter
what the feedback is. Positive or negative. You want to walk away with, “What
can I do in the future that will address the feedback I’ve gotten?” And the
reason I stress that it’s really important to understand what people are saying
when they give you feedback is, you want to be able to turn that into
actionable design.
You want to say, okay, I’ve done something, I’ve listened to
the audience, I got the feedback from the audience, this is what they’re
saying. Okay. Next time I do a design, I’m now going to design differently than
I did before, because I have new data to work with.
And I think if I look at, like for example, I’ve been doing design
for nineteen years. That I look back at a lot of old sets and I made a lot of
mistakes, but in a sense, like, I often think like… Tempest was my very first design. And in some ways, I look at Tempest as kind of being the Model T. It’s this early
car that was like, in its day was really impressive. It was this amazing thing.
But you look back on the history of time, and like okay, we’ve come a lot
farther. There’s a lot of things I did in Tempest,
I’m like, “Wow, if I had that to do again, I would do it differently.”
And it’s not that it was wrong. Like, that’s where we were
at the time we made it. And Tempest was
very advanced for its day. It did a lot of things for the first time that had
never been done before. That it was a stepping stone in us getting to where we
are now, just as where we are now is a stepping stone to where we’re going to
be in the future.
And that that, to me… the value of feedback is understanding
that it is a tool in the arsenal of a designer. The arsenal of any creative
person, really, but I’m talking game design. That you as a game designer,
feedback allows you to help change the design as you’re making it. And helps
you change the design for the next time you do it.
Now, I happen to be in a product where we keep putting out
things, and so Magic has to
constantly sort of innovate what it’s doing. That we get to change and we get
to learn and we get to iterate as we go along. And one of the reasons, by the
way, I think a lot of people talk about how Magic has really hit its stride. And one of the reasons for that
is, we’ve had a lot of time to try things and figure out what works. And we
have a very talented group of individuals, and we have a lot of data. We have done
a lot of sets and learned a lot from them.
And we keep learning. Like, that’s one of the things that to
me is very interesting and why feedback is so important is, there’s no point at
which feedback is not valuable, because there’s no point at which you can’t
improve the product. I honestly believe that all that happens is, as we learn
how to do something better in the game, that we just find other areas that we
can improve upon. Magic is a very, very
complex game. Not just from the game-playing standpoint, but from the
game-building standpoint. From the game-designing standpoint. That there is a
lot of pieces moving.
And that one of the things… it’s kind of funny, when I talk
about the different stages of design, I feel like one of the things we’ve done
over time is we’ve pulled back a lot. That early design was about thinking
about how the cards worked. And then we talked about how the cards worked
together. Then how mechanics worked. Then how the sets worked. Then how the
blocks worked. Then how Standard worked. And larger… you know, that we kept
sort of pulling back and figuring out how to do larger and larger things.
And one of the things, as someone who can look in the future
is, we are getting more and more ingrained in how we do things. That there are
questions I’m asking now as I do design that I never would have asked ten years
ago. Fifteen years ago. That I wouldn’t have even had the mind thought to think
of… that there are advances to be made, as we improve things we get to move our
attention elsewhere, and we get to think in some bigger picture ways, and more
inter-set, inter-block. We get to think long-term. And that to me is really
cool.
So anyway, I am almost to work. So let me recap my lessons
today of feedback. So. Number one, every piece of feedback is valuable, there’s
something in it. Make sure you dig deep and understand what that piece of
information is from. What they’re saying. What is the core they’re saying.
Number two is, you don’t need… feedback does not… you do not
have to act on every piece of feedback. Not every piece of feedback is
necessarily actionable. But you want to understand each piece of feedback. And
then, once you have gotten feedback, you always need to ask yourself, “How
could I use this feedback to improve the quality of what I am doing?”
So hopefully, as we walk away today, you realize that there is
little more valuable to a creative person, a game designer than feedback. And
that notice that today, I talked about feedback from yourself, feedback from your
team, feedback from your department, feedback from your audience. All of that
matters. There’s lots of people from lots of vantage points.
And that remember, the reason feedback is so important is,
everybody else has a different vantage point of view. They are seeing things
that you are not seeing. And that part of being a leader is setting the vision
so everybody else understands what you’re seeing, and listen to everybody else,
so you understand what they are seeing.
And the goal is to try to see what you are seeing and what
they are seeing, and line them up so that you are addressing them correctly.
And I think if you do that, I think if you use the feedback as a productive
tool to improve what you’re doing, that there is no tool probably more powerful
than feedback. And my goal of today is to sort of explain to you how to use it.
And how to listen to it.
And, the final point I’ll make today is, the reason I talk
about not just the audience but your department and your team and yourself is
that the feedback comes at many different layers, and that you need to be
conscious of all of it. Especially, by the way, from yourself. I think
sometimes it’s very easy to see feedback from external sources. And sometimes easy
to dismiss the internal feedback.
And what I’ve found is, in some ways the most important
feedback is the feedback you get from yourself. Is understanding when you’re
happy and when you’re not happy, and listening internally to your own sort of
intuitive sense of whether something is working or not. Because if everybody’s
happy but you, that also… something is still wrong. That you want to make sure
that everybody is happy, you being part of everybody.
Okay. That was quite a… we had some rain today so you get a
little extra time. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this today. I think this is a
very important topic and something that really is applicable probably to more than
just game design, although I’m talking about game design.
But I have now parked in my parking space, so we all know what
that means. It means it’s the end of my Drive to Work. So it’s time for me to
stop talking Magic and start making Magic. So I’ll talk to you guys soon.
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