3/20/15 Episode 211: Mistakes

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 a podcast all about mistakes! So I’ve talked about wanting to do the podcast, and I felt it was finally time to do it. So I’m going to explain today why mistakes aren’t as bad you think they are. I’m going to talk a little bit about mistakes as part of the creative process.

Okay. So first and foremost, let’s begin with the most important lesson here, which is, the fear of making a mistake is far greater than mistakes. That I think a lot of people are so worried about making a mistake that what they do is far more dangerous than the mistakes themselves.

And what that is is, when you are being creative, if you limit yourself because you want to make sure that you never make a mistake, you end up being so cautious that you never push any boundaries. That you never try to stretch yourself, because part of making sure that you are within your boundaries of never making a mistake is staying away from the edges.

And the edges, my friend, are where a lot of the awesome things happen. So part of what I wanted today, is I want to walk you through what mistakes are, what they can do for you, and why you as a creative person need not be quite as afraid of them as maybe you are.

Okay. So here’s the first thing. Mistakes are the best teachers. Success does not teach well. What success does is success says, “Do it again.” Success breeds repetition. That when something succeeds, you go, “Oh, that worked. I better do that again.” And in fact, one of the most common mistakes that is made is people will do something, it’s successful, and because they don’t know what made it successful, they just do everything again.

And what they don’t realize is, the success was not all the individual choices, but the combination of the choices. And that—sometimes they’ll call this a Seymour… a sophomore—Seymour. A sophomore slump. See, I make mistakes during my mistakes podcast. A sophomore slump. Which is, you do something, and you kind of keep doing that thing, and you  get trapped inside what you think the thing is.

So what happens is, people will do something creative, people like it, and then they continue doing the same thing because they want to not deviate too much from what they think people liked. But usually what they like in the first place was that it was doing something different.

For example. Richard made Magic. We could have just said, “Okay, well that’s what it is. Let’s not deviate too much from what Richard’s vision was.” And we said, “No no no! Richard’s vision was, it’s a game that keeps reinventing itself.” So we did things along the way that the game did not do originally. We’ve done things where people are like, you can’t do that! You can’t print on the back of a Magic card. You can’t make it so you can cast a spell if you don’t have any mana open! You can’t have two cards printed on one card! Like, we’ll do things where people are like, “You just can’t do that! That breaks a fundamental rule of how the game works.”

And the answer is that Magic is a game all about taking risks. And that if we had stopped taking risks—I guess one of my favorite quotes is, “The greatest risk to Magic is not taking risks.” And you can actually—instead of Magic, you could put in “creative works.” The greatest risk to any creative work is not taking risks.

And the reason for that is, risks are where the discoveries are found. And like I said, mistakes are the best teacher. Because when you do something correct, you just go, “Okay, how do I do this thing again?” But when you do something wrong, when you taste failure, that is a good teacher. That when something doesn’t work, when something fails, when people don’t like what you’ve done, it makes you have to look at yourself and figure out, “What did I do? What did I do wrong?”

And one of the things is, after every creative endeavor, whenever it comes out, something that we do at R&D is, you should always creatively look at whatever you’ve done and explain what are your successes and what are your failures. On everything.

The problem is, when you’re successful, you just have less impetus to do so. You’re like, “Well, people like it. Good.” And the reality is, what you need to do every time is you need to figure out what was good and what was bad about everything you do.

And I’ll give you a secret here, everything you do has good things and bad things. Take the best Magic set we’ve ever done, it had bad things. Take the worst Magic set we’ve ever done, it had good things. There’s no such thing as something that’s totally all bad or all good.

The difference is, when you make a mistake, you kind of are forced to look at it. You can’t sort of turn away from it. Because a mistake sort of says, “Uh-oh, something went wrong.” And then you look inward to figure out what happened.

And a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes lead to—like, for example, just using Magic’s history, a lot of I think the biggest jumps we’ve made in Magic evolution have come as a result of doing something wrong.

For example, as a personal—as a designer myself, Odyssey was one of the early sets I led. And I tried something really different with it, which is I decided to take the idea of card advantage and turn it on its ear. That usually in Magic, you want to be up on cards. The idea of throwing away card advantage, you would never do that. That’s not how it worked.

And I said, you know what? I want to shake things up. What if we had a block where card advantage was turned on its ear? That you would throw away card advantage for a reason, and that you would do this thing that you would never normally do.

And what I learned from that was, I learned that you have to make people do things because they’re interested in doing them. That if you try to sort of against their will force them to do something they don’t want to do, it just leads to a lot of frustration. And a lot of my growth as a designer came from doing something, committing to it, and then realizing, oh, I had done something that was a mistake.

But had I not made that mistake, had I not sort of went against the grain, I would not have learned the lesson, and I think it was a very important lesson of design, is understanding how you’re not trying to fight your players. The goal is not to force them to do something they inherently don’t want to do. That’s where I learned my big lesson about “Don’ fight human nature.” That’s really where I learned that lesson from.

Or another example is, during Time Spiral we got really into just going to town, and we burrowed deep. But we burrowed so deep that we confused people, and we made a schism in Magic we’d never seen before. Where normally we could track people playing in tournaments and how well the sales were doing. They went one for one. And all of a sudden, we made a set where tournaments were doing really well, but sales were not, and we’re like, “Oh, what is going on?”

And we realized that there was a whole segment of the audience that we were just unaware of. Because we had just been following the thing. And because they had been tracking together, we’re like, “Oh, I guess that’s how it works.” And all of a sudden we’re like, “Wait a minute, this data is showing us something we do not understand.” And it forced us to understand it.

And Time Spiral plus the mistakes we made in Lorwyn led us to New World Order. Led us to go, “Oh, we have to make sure we make an entry point for new players.” That we can’t make the—if we make the game too difficult, if the barrier to entry is too high, well then people stop learning how to play, and then Magic long-term is in trouble. And so it’s the existence of the mistakes that are the great discoveries.

So lesson number one is, don’t be afraid of mistakes. That doesn’t mean your goal is to make mistakes, but don’t be afraid of them. Be able to take risks knowing that mistakes might happen. Because it’s in the risks that a lot of amazing things will happen. And if you’re not willing to take the risks, you will miss—like, the opportunity lost of not taking risks is way more dangerous than any mistake could be.

That playing it safe is not the way to awesome creative endeavors. That what makes creative things work is that you push boundaries. And Magic in particular, we’re a game all about breaking our own rules, that if we were never willing to break a rule, we’re never willing to do something we haven’t done before.

And one of the things I do all the time in design is, I make things that I don’t know if they’ll work. For example, in Innistrad, we were trying to figure out how to do werewolves. And Tom had suggested something that Duel Masters had done with double-faced cards. And if you had asked me at the end of the day whether I thought it would work, I probably wouldn’t have thought it would work. I was dubious.

But you know what I said? “Let’s try it. Let’s push the boundary and try it.” I wasn’t willing—I didn’t want to write it off right away, go, “Ohh, we can’t do that.” I’m like, “Well, let’s see if it’s fun.” If it’s fun—that’s one of my biggest things in design is I’ll say, during exploratory design and normal                 design, I say to my team, let’s see if something is fun. Let’s not worry about if we can do it yet. Let’s not worry about if we can do it until after we know it’s fun. Because if we know it’s fun, we’ll try to figure out how to make it happen. And if it’s not fun, then we don’t have to worry about it.

But the first thing I try to do is find cool and fun things. I don’t worry about the logistics right off the bat. I mean, eventually I do. I have to worry about it eventually. Once I like something I have to see if we can make it work. And sometimes you can’t make it work. But before I even get there, I’m like, “Let’s try to see if we can find the fun in it.” Because the fun is what you’re trying—I mean in games, it’s what you’re trying to get. You’re trying to make awesome moments and cool things.

Okay. Now. The other important thing about mistakes is mistakes will take you to places that you might not normally have gotten to. And like I said in my examples here, that I don't know, without Odyssey, that I would get to my sort of—like I said, don’t fight human nature has become my mantra as a designer. Of understand what your players want to do, and make your game to play into what they want to do, not fight what they want to do. And I would not have got there had it not been for the mistake.

And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you make a mistake, and the mistake you make won’t work, but it teaches you something and gives you a peek into some other area. You know, mistakes are often stepping stones for great ideas. And so another reason not to fear mistakes is sometimes mistakes take you to places that you wouldn’t have gotten to had you not had a mistake in the first place.

That one of the things that’s really important about willing to push boundaries in design or in any sort of creative area is that you want to discover the areas that you haven’t been to yet. You want to find new patches, new veins of design. And part of that is you’ve got to look at places you haven’t looked before. And that the safe and narrow path is to do what you’ve always done.

That is the safe and narrow path. Because only by doing things you’ve already done do you assure yourself that you won’t have a mistake. But, if you’re willing to brave the mistakes, you tend to go out in new areas. And the other thing is, mistakes are not always mistakes. Mistakes can lead you new places.

For example. The chocolate chip cookie. The Post-It Note. penicillin. The discovery of America. None of those were planned! None of those were on purpose. The chocolate chip cookie, they were trying to make a chocolate cookie. And the pieces didn’t melt. Post-It Notes, they were making some kind of glue and it ended up being too weak to work. Penicillin, I’m not sure what he was doing. He was trying to do something different. And accidentally made penicillin. America, they were trying to find India. They were trying to find a route to the Far East. They weren’t trying to find new land.

In each case, though, these are amazing things that happened, because sometimes when you’re exploring, when you make a mistake, you get to stand back and go, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that is not bad. This isn’t that bad a mistake.”

So another reason not to fear mistakes is sometimes mistakes aren’t always mistakes. Sometimes mistakes turn out to be—can lead you to paths that you just don’t go. That mistakes sometimes—because one of the things in general about the creative process, I talk about this all the time. Your brain wants to follow your normal neural pathway. So your brain will keep doing what it’s done before. And I talk about the way to not do that, to not have your brain go down the same path, is to shake it up a little bit. To make it do something it’s not used to doing.

Well you know what? If you’re doing things you’ve never done before, you are more prone to mistakes.  And so the reason, when I say to you, “Hey, do different neural pathways” or “try different things,” why don’t people do that all the time? Because that is the way to mistakes.

Doing something new, and let’s be clear. Mistakes come out of, most of the time, doing something you haven’t done before. Now, you can make mistakes with things you’ve done before. They’re not mistake-free. But you’re more prone to make mistakes when you’re dealing with areas you’re not familiar with.

But the funny thing is, dealing with areas you’re not familiar with is a very important part of the creative process. And that you need to go there. You need to direct there. And you need to be willing to accept that mistakes will happen.

Now, here’s an important thing to understand about mistakes. Is your audience is much more forgiving of mistakes than you, the artist, tend to be. That I think going in, that your thought process is, “No mistake will be tolerated. If I make any mistake, it will be horrible.”

And the answer is, the first time you make a mistake, your audience will learn with you. When I make a mistake in Magic, when I do something, it’s not as if the audience gets mad at me. They go, “Ooh, what’s this new thing? Oh, that didn’t quite work out the way we thought!” But they like the fact that you’re exploring. The audience in general is willing to put up with mistakes because they enjoy the act of discovery from the artist.

Now, what they tend to get upset with is not mistakes but repeats of mistakes. When I say they don’t get mad at mistakes, I’m not saying nobody gets mad. In general your audience is much more forgiving of mistakes than you think.

What they are less forgiving of is you making the same mistake. If you do something wrong and then do it wrong again, like, come on! You just did that. Didn’t you learn from that? They want you to learn from your mistakes.

So one of my big examples is, in college, I started an improvisational comedy group called “Uncontrolled Substance.” So for those that don’t know, what improve is, is you get up on stage, and you say to the audience, “Okay, give me whatever. Give me a relationship. Give me a place.” You get input from the audience. And then you make a scene there on the spot.

One of the things that’s scary about doing improvisation is, you have no script. You’re just making everything up. And when I first started it, I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be really hard to do. Because once you make a mistake, the audience will be on you.” And what I found was, the audience actually enjoys mistakes.

Because they made you feel more human to the audience. They knew what you were doing was really hard to do, and that when (???) mistake (???), instead of it being something that was negative to them, it kind of—they liked it. Once they don’ want you keeping the same mistake, but making a few mistakes, the audience was not only tolerant of the mistakes, but there was an expectation that mistakes would happen.

And that I think that—the same I find true in Magic, which is when I go to a new area and do a new thing, the audience doesn’t get mad at me for trying something new. Even if that something new ends up being a mistake. In general, they’ll go, “Ooh, I’m excited that you tried new things.” And that at the end of it people say, like, “Okay, well, we learned something from that.” And they’re not nearly as mad as I would assume.

Because I think going into it, you think like the audience is like—no mistakes are allowed. If I make any mistakes, they will be tragedy. And the answer is that your audience is a lot more forgiving than I think you think they will be.

And another reason to be less risk-averse is, it’s okay to make a mistake. That making a mistake is not the end of the world. I mean, obviously you learn from it, but also, it makes you human. I mean, you don’t want to make tons of mistakes all the time, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful about what you do. But there is difference in the type of mistake.

So the type of mistake that I think is much more accepted is, you pushing boundaries to try something new. Because people appreciate you doing that. The mistake that’s not tolerated is, you make the same mistake you’ve made before. Which is you didn’t learn. That upsets people. “Come on, haven’t you learned? Didn’t you learn your lesson?”

That’s a very common thing. If we make a mistake and it’s something that we’ve done before, that’s when the audience is like, “Come on! Didn’t you learn your lesson?” But when we make a mistake the first time, the audience is like, “Oh, okay, didn’t see that coming.” And I think the mindset when you deal with mistakes is understanding that they’re valuable, they can teach you things, and the audience isn’t as (???) as you think.

Okay. The next important thing to understand about mistakes is mistakes are a tool. Mistakes are a tool that you can use. And the key to using correctly is to understand how best to use mistakes.

Okay. So to explain this, I will use a story. So there was a man named Warren Wyman who used to run security for Wizards back in the day. And Warren is an awesome guy. I mean, he left Wizards long ago, but I saw him at Richard Garfield’s fiftieth birthday party. And Warren was doing real well.

So Warren was in the army. And he tells a story about they were firing some artillery of some kind. Where there was like a tank setup. A fake tank. But they were practicing. And the idea was, they had to shoot it, and they had to hit this tank.

The problem was, it’s hard to hit something. That when you have this big giant artillery gun thing, it’s not easy to hit something. And so what the instructor taught them is, if the first time you shoot, you shoot short, the next time you better shoot long.

And let me explain what that means because it’s a very important point. What he meant was, you’re going to fire, and you’re going to miss. You’re not going to hit the target the first time. That’s rare that you do. But you want to use your mistake as a tool to help you get better faster.

So what he’s saying was, the best information you can get if you are firing at this tank—if you shoot short again, you don’t learn nearly as much as if you shoot long. If you miss the tank, now you have two points at which you know, “This is short and this is long, and I know the tank’s in between it.” If I shoot short and then shoot short again, I haven’t learned as much. I just know that I still have more to go.

And so I say this to my design team, which is, when you’re committing to something, figure out where you’re at. And most times what happens is, usually when people try to do something, they underdo it. That’s the most common mistake is they’re trying something new and they don’t do it enough.

And so one of the things I always push my teams on is, err—there’s nothing wrong with erring in excess when you’re trying to figure things out. That doing something too much, in a lot of ways is a better teacher sometimes than not doing enough. Not doing enough says, “Oh, I have to do more.” But doing too much usually says, “What increment do I need to do to get there?” And by overshooting, you also tend to learn more because you experience it.

Like one of the problems with undershooting—let’s say I’m doing a mechanic and I undershoot it. I might not even experience that new thing. If I overshoot it, okay, it dominates the game, it’s too much, it has too much impact on the game. But at least I get a chance to see it. And so one of the things—mistakes are a valuable tool that you can use. And you want to think about them as a tool.

Like one of my big lessons of today is stop thinking about mistakes—I think too many people think of mistakes as a negative outcome. Which is, of the bad things that could happen, what is the worst? Oh, I could make a mistake. As if, like, it’s a bad outcome. That’s what a mistake is.

And what I’m saying is, mistakes are a natural part of the creative process. I mean, there’s a… I’m paraphrasing a little bit here, but there’s a famous quote that says, “Never made a mistake? Well then you’ve never taken a risk.” That the act of trying something, of creating something, is the act of taking risks.

And the act of taking risks is the act of making mistakes. Nothing amazing that’s ever happened came without mistakes along the way. And like I said earlier, sometimes the mistake ends up being the discovery. But even when it’s not, the mistakes can be tools on the road to discovery.

When I look at different things I’ve done, and I look at designs I’ve done, and I’ve said—a lot of what happens is, it’s the act of trying the things that teaches me things and gets me where I need to be. And that some of the—for example. When I talk about a playtest, what’s a good playtest?  The best playtest for me is where I get lots of data.

That data doesn’t have to be positive. In fact, a lot of negative data is a very good playtest. I learn a lot from negative data. That’s not to say I don’t learn from positive data, but the reality is, if I had a playtest and it could either go, “ehh,” or go “ugh,” I’ll talk “ugh.” Because I’ll learn so much more from that.

Having a playtest where things just didn’t work will teach me a lot. Having things where everything ehh, kind of worked, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing, it’s like, oh, that’s the worst. It’s just like, “Well, something’s there.” It’s not bad enough that I feel I need to just throw it away but it’s not good enough that it’s quite there yet, it just, it’s middling.

Like in some ways, one of the worst things for a creative endeavor is to have something be good. But not great. Because if something is good, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to throw this away.” But the goal is not to just be good. The goal of any artistic endeavor is to be great. It’s not just to be good.

One of my quotes is, if everybody likes your game but nobody loves it, you will fail. And once again, you can apply that to creative endeavors. That one of the goals is you are trying to make people love what you are doing.

Now, not everybody has to love every aspect. Part of designing Magic is, I have a lot of different style players, and I want to make sure every set, there’s something for everybody to love. For every style of player to love.

But they don’t all need to love the same thing. A lot of the point of the psychographics and a lot of the stuff we do is saying, I want to make sure I understand who’s playing, and that we give each person something they can love.

And part of playing it safe is, the way you find things people love is by pushing boundaries. That people tend to love the outlier more than they love the average. So what I mean by that is, if you’re used to seeing something all the time, it’s not particularly special. If you come play a game of Magic, there’s certain things you expect. And we have to deliver on those expectations because you expect it, but the things that you always have usually is not going to be the thing that stands out.

Like one of the things I talk a lot about in design is, for example, the importance of novelty. In that your audience is drawn to novelty. Now, you want to be careful not to get too novel, you don’t want novelty for the sake of novelty, but you definitely want to have something your audience goes, “Wow. What is that? I’ve never seen that before.”

You want to make sure that your audience has something that’s out of the ordinary they get to look at. Now, that can be novel, that can be just pushing in some area you haven’t pushed before, that can be trying something you haven’t done before. But part of sort of drawing attention is in the doing what you haven’t done. And being conservative, being safe, doing what you’ve done before, leads to familiar. And being risky and trying things you haven’t leads to more standing out.

Now, by the way, I’m not trying to say, by the way, my message of today isn’t, “Ehh, mistakes, whatever.” I want you to understand that mistakes are a tool that need to be used carefully. And ideally, what we try to do is, we try to get as many mistakes in possible in the design. I want to make as many of my mistakes during design, so that I can then figure out what the right way to do it is and fix them.

It’s never my intent to put out mistakes in the product. I don’t want to. My point of today is not, “embrace mistakes as an awesome thing,” my point today is “don’t be afraid of mistakes.” That mistakes are valuable teaching tools and can help you as a means to become a better designer, creator. Mistakes—my lesson of today is, understand what mistakes can do for you, don’t be afraid of them, and use them effectively. Not “put mistakes.” The goal is not to put mistakes in what you do. I’m not saying that you want mistakes. I’m saying that the act of trying to avoid them causes a lot more problems.

Okay. So let’s talk a little about my mistakes in Magic. I want to talk a little bit—like sort of, things I have done and lessons I have learned, and kind of demonstrate where I was able to learn some things. So, one of the classic ones. Champions of Kamigawa.

So I was not on the design team for Champions. I was on the development team. And during development, I said to the team—I felt that design was a little unfocused. Obviously it was a top-down Japanese theme. That came through in design. But the set didn’t know what it wanted to do.

And so I kept asking the development team, “What’s the set about? What’s the set about?” And so finally they said, “Uhh, its about legendary things. That’s one of our major themes.” And so I said, “Okay, well if there’s a legendary theme, then we have to really hit that hard.” So we made every rare creature in that set legendary.

And from this I learned a couple important lessons. Number one, I learned—one of my quotes, and this comes from this experience is, “If your theme’s not at common, it’s not your theme.” I learned the lesson of, you can’t do something such that it’s such a low as-fan if you will, that your audience can’t see it.

And what that meant is, hey, we had a theme, that someone could open up ten packs and still have no idea what the theme was. Well, that’s not your theme. So I learned the lesson that something has to exist where the audience can see it. That having a theme is not the same thing as the audience being able to identify the theme. If your theme can’t be identified, it isn’t your theme. And that that was an important lesson.

The other thing I learned was the legendary creatures were supposed to be a special thing. And that when you take a special thing and do too much of it, you make it less special. And the fact that every single rare creature was legendary meant that we had to make a lot of bad legendary creatures. Because in every set, there’s only so many good things. Some of the cards, they can’t all be good. Especially for Constructed.

And so what we did is we took something that people had a lot of positive feelings for, and made a lot of bad examples of it. And that another lesson there was, be careful how you use things that are valuable to you. That how much of something—I mean, a lot of the lessons of Champions was understanding how much of something matters.

And like, you want your theme to be at enough volume that people get it, and you want your special stuff to be—you want your things that are supposed to be special done at a volume that you can make them special. And that if you do too much of a special thing, some of it by nature can’t be special. And so you have to be careful how much of a special thing you do. Because do too much of it, and you start to take away its specialness.

Okay. In Odyssey, I talked before about card disadvantage. I talked about how I’m trying to take a theme, and I was trying to do something that had never been done before. And what I learned there was, the lesson of—probably the intellect vs. emotion thing I thing I talk a lot about, which is that you can think about how your audience will think about your product, but you have to understand how they’ll feel about your project.

And what I did is, I took something that was intellectually interesting. I made an interesting set, but I didn’t necessarily make a fun set. That interesting is not the same thing as fun. And that being mental and making you think about things is good, but you also emotionally—people have to want to do the thing you’re making them do. “Hey, the correct play is to throw your whole hand away to give your creature first strike, and it doesn’t even want first strike!”

Well, not enough people wanted to do that. Yeah, there were some Spikes, and it was a super-Spikey set, and there’s people who did love it. Like, every time I talk about making a mistake, Time Spiral for example was a mistake. A lot of people love Time Spiral. Odyssey was a mistake. A lot of people loved Odyssey. Just because it was a mistake doesn’t mean everybody disliked it.

But if enough disliked it, it means you made a mistake because—just because somebody likes something doesn’t mean it’s not a mistake. If not enough people like something, you are failing some part of your audience. You have to understand what that is.

Shadowmoor, for example, I was trying to do this thing where we shifted between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. And that Lorwyn was the bright side of the world and Shadowmoor was the dark side of the world. And so in order to make the sets play together, we had this crossover in tribal.

But I was trying so hard to show the shift that I shifted all the tribes. And so the tribes overlapped in one color, but they went to a different color. And what I learned there was, that I didn’t make enough branching between the two sides. That it wanted you to make X in Lorwyn, and then it wanted you to play with Shadowmoor cards, but I’d moved the theme too much. I’d moved the theme such that it was hard for you to play what you wanted to play with the new set. The goal of Shadowmoor/Lorwyn (???) them to play together, and so the mistake I made there was, I just shifted something too much.

The funny thing about Lorwyn and Shadowmoor is, by the way, the reason that it was two mini-blocks was we were trying to solve the summer set problem. And ironically, in trying to solve that problem, we ended up—I mean, the two-block structure, the two-block paradigm we’re moving toward, the test case—I mean, we didn’t know it was a test case at the time, was Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. It demonstrated that we could do that.

And that here’s this thing that we took this risk and tried to do something, and like our goal was not to change how Magic sets got made. We were not trying to make the chocolate chip cookie or find penicillin or discover America. But we did. And that that’s the kind of risk-taking—like, when I presented it, it was different. Magic had never done large/small and then large/small within the context of a year. We had never done blocks like that.

But we tried it. And by trying it, we ended up finding something that was much richer than we could have found had we not tried it. And that’s another good example of, pushing boundaries ends up being something that can be very good.

Another big mistake I made, in Unhinged I did what’s called the “gotcha” mechanic. So the gotcha mechanic was, if this card was in your graveyard, and you could get your opponent to do whatever the gotcha was, often it was saying a particular word, there was a cycle at common where there were two words on it, and if you said—and they were in the title. And if you said one of the two words, so like, black had a kill spell called “Kill Destroy.” So if your opponent said the word “kill” or the word “destroy,” then you said “gotcha” and you got it back to your hand.

There was a whole bunch. There was one that if you laughed you could get it back. The one you flicked cards. And so the problem with the gotcha mistake is, the gotcha mistake was saying, “Okay, well if your opponent does something then you can gotcha them. And you can get it back.” But the thing I didn’t figure out was, how were people going to play this mechanic?

Because when we were playing it, we were trying to have fun. We weren’t trying to—we were just like, “This is fun, we’re having a good time,” and we weren’t trying to break it, if you will. And some—by the way, we had a playtest in which somebody played it, a guy named Rob, and Rob said, “This isn’t fun!” The correct answer is just shut down and do nothing. Don’t talk, don’t… I detach from you, I won’t be talking, I won’t be laughing, so if I sort of shut myself in a bubble and don’t interact with you, I increase my ability to never be caught by a gotcha.

Okay, that’s true. Is that what we wanted for an Un-set? Did we want to make a mechanic that says the correct way to play this is to shut down? And the answer was no! That’s one of the big lessons that I learned, and I learned this from Unhinged is, your players will figure out what they need to do to maximize the mechanics you give them. If the behavior that comes from maximizing them isn’t behavior you like, don’t do it.

Because it is your job to anticipate how your audience will try to maximize what you’re doing, and you should give them a mechanic that if they do the thing that’s going to make them win, they will have a good time doing it.

And the gotcha mechanic was the complete opposite of that. That if you did the gotcha mechanic and did it correctly, the game was supposed to be the super, super fun set, and we made a mechanic that if you played it optimally, made it less fun for you. That is horrible.

In fact, I don’t get to do Un-sets very often. So I look back at Unhinged and like, it’s a tragedy to me. Like, oh my goodness. How did I not catch it? And worse, I compounded my mistake. Because not only did I make the mistake, but somebody told me my mistake during design and I dismissed them. Rob said to my face, “This is a problem, the correct answer is to shut down,” and my response at the time was, “No no no, just have fun, don’t shut down!” I just didn’t listen to him. And he gave me awesome advice and I didn’t listen.

And that is very—so I made two mistakes. A. I made the gotcha mechanic, second is I had this window where I could have caught that I made the mistake, I was given the feedback, and I didn’t listen to it. And that’s one of the things—that really has changed how I now deal with playtesting. That when a playtester says something, I don’t dismiss it.

It is very, very easy, by the way, when you’re playtesting, and somebody gives you information that contradicts what you want to be true for you to get in denial mode and go, “Oh, no no no.” You know. “Oh no, I don’t need to do that,” or “Oh no, it’s okay,” or “That’s just one person’s opinion.”

Now that doesn’t mean it needs to be changed. It might be one person’s opinion. But you do need to look at it and explain. As I talked about in the podcast I had done on dealing with feedback, your audience doesn’t necessarily always know the answer to the feedback. But they’re pretty good at knowing when something’s wrong. And you want to listen when they say that something’s wrong. Because even if their solution to the problem isn’t the right solution, usually their problem is a real problem you need to address.

So anyway, I’m almost at work today. So the thing I want to stress today, I mean the message of today is, don’t be afraid of mistakes. I’m not saying you want to make mistakes, but I’m saying mistakes will naturally happen, they are a valuable tool, they can help you, and that if you work hard to avoid them, that itself, the act of avoiding mistakes is more dangerous than doing what you need to do where mistakes will happen. That the fear of mistakes is a far greater problem than mistakes themselves. And so my lesson of today is, don’t fear mistakes. Don’t act in a way that will avoid mistakes from happening because you feel that that’s going to serve your product better. It’s not. That if you aren’t willing to make a mistake, you are not going to make as good a product as if you are.

So remember. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, let them teach you, let them get you to places you might not normally go. Sometimes they unto themselves won’t even be mistakes, and remember your audience is more forgiving of them than you might realize at first blush.

So anyway, I have now parked my car, so we all know what that means, it’s time to end my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you next time.