5/15/15 Episode 226: Ten Things Every Board Game Needs--Inertia

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. So today is another in my series, “Ten Things Every Game Needs.” So this is the fifth one. So so far I’ve talked about needing a goal or goals, needing rules, needing interaction, and needing a catch-up feature. So today I’m going to talk all about needing inertia.

So first off, one of the things—I’ve seen a lot of beginning game designers’ games. And people often say, “What is the number one mistake that a new game designer will make?” And the number one mistake I think that most people make is game length. That they make the game last longer than it should.

And the quote I always—I used my quote in the article on the topic, which was, I had a writing teacher. And the writing teacher said, “Okay. The key to having a story at the right length is to make your story as short as you possibly can, and then cut 10%.”

Games have a very similar quality, which is you want to make sure that your game ends before your players want it to end. This is crucial. That if the game ends and your player still wants to play more, they walk away going, “That was a fun game. I want to play that game again.” If the game ends and it’s past the point where they want it to end, they go, “Eh, eh, it wasn’t that great of a game.” And they might never play it again. So it is much, much better to have your game and to have them really want to play more than for you to completely satisfy everything and go beyond that, and them going, “Ehh.”

So first and foremost, I mean inertia has a lot of elements to it. What inertia is is it says, something about your game, or multiple elements of your game, must make it end. Must propel it toward the end. That when I say inertia, it means you can’t depend upon the players to make things happen in your game. Because if you leave it up to the whim of the players, well if the players make the wrong decisions, the game might never end. Or it could take way longer. You as the game designer have to set the pacing of your game. You have to determine how long you want it to take.

So one of the things you cannot put in the hands of the players is dictating the length of the game to a certain… I mean, obviously they have some ability of whether it goes faster or slower. But you must make the game propel itself.

So first and foremost, the number one thing you want with inertia is you need to make sure the game ends. And what that means is, something about the game, it can’t be in a rest state. There can’t be a point in the game in which if the players do nothing, there’s no advancing toward the end. Every step, there should be advancing towards the end.

And the key to that is, making sure that the players know the goals, know the rules, and there’s incentive within the game structure to want to advance those. A real common mistake people will make is that they will have a goal, but the correct strategy for example to win the game is not to follow that goal. Is not to push toward that thing.

I’ve definitely seen games where it’s like, well, the point of the game is to do Thing A. But doing Thing A makes you lose the game. So people don’t do Thing A. They do Thing B. But if Thing B wasn’t what the game designer wanted, then they’re not playing the game the game designer meant for them to play.

And it’s important, if you make a game, you want your players playing the game you mean for them to play. So figure out where the fun is, figure out what the cool part of the game is, and make sure that what the goal and the rules and everything forces them in that direction. And let inertia carry them through. The game has to not want to be in a resting state. It wants to be constantly moving.

So first and foremost, you want to have inertia. It will make the game end. It needs to make the game end. If you the game designer aren’t making it end, it might not end. And I guarantee you, if your game goes too long, there’s nothing that’s going to keep you from playing again than it overstaying its welcome. And them growing tired of it.

Okay. Number two. You want inertia to help keep pacing. You want the game to keep evolving. So that’s something else to keep in mind, which is your game should not stay the same throughout the course of the game. That your game should have stages to it in some regard, meaning that there should be an early game, a midgame, a late game. That you don’t want your game to be the same game throughout the sequence of the game. That you want things to change.

When I say the game needs to change, maybe it’s the strategy that changes. Maybe there’s a component about how you’re thinking about it. Magic is a good example. The mana system does a really good job of making things change over time. Why? Because what you have access to changes over time. In the early game you could only play small spells. Well, small spells are small. They do small things. And as the game progresses, you get access to bigger and bigger things, and bigger and bigger things can have a larger impact on how the game functions.

So the early game in Magic is a really different game from the midgame from the lategame. And you want to make sure your game has these different components. That the game itself is evolving. And inertia is one of the things… well, I mean, it’s kind of, each helps the other. Having different components helps build inertia, and having inertia helps propel you through the components. They work together.

But one of the things to remember is, inertia’s going to help you make the game—like, think of it this way. I talk a lot about scripts. Your script needs pacing. That when you write a story, that you want certain things to go faster and slower and you build moments, and when you tell a good story, pacing is very important. How quickly or how slowly you do things is crucial.

It’s no different in game-making. It’s completely no different. That there’s pacing involved as well. And that the pacing shouldn’t always stay identical. That you want things to speed and slow down and then make sense with the context of your game. And you want to make sure that your game has a sense of pacing to it.

That is what inertia is for, is to help make sure it moves along, and that it has—you want your game to evolve. Meaning you want your game—one of the ways to think about this is, if your player is going to tell a story of the game, if at the end of the game they write a little story about their game, is there a story? Does that story have pacing? Do exciting things happen, is there a buildup, is there moments of rest? Is there something in which you’re building toward this dramatic story?

Because remember, game playing is about experience. You are building an experience for your players. And you control some of it, you don’t control all of it, but you want to make sure the experience you’re creating itself is a dynamic experience. That it is exciting for the player. That you want the player to walk away from it and feel like the game itself had a life to it.

That there was thing that happened and that there was—there’s a lot of parallel between good storytelling and good game-making. Much like I talk about how you want to have a goal, in a story, your character has to actually need something. And your audience has to understand what that thing is.

And when I say there are rules, there’s restrictions in your story. There’s things that keep your character from getting what they want. It’s the same in a game, there’s things that keep your player from getting what they want.

I talk about wanting to interact, and in the story, the characters have to interact with other characters. You want to see your character as they interact with different places and people and things.

Last time I talked about a catch-up feature, which is you always want to believe that your character in the story, no matter how daunting it seems. No matter how bad it seems. That it can seem really bad. That there’s a belief, there’s always a hope that somehow they can pull it out.

Now, stories have the benefit of structure, of kind of knowing that the author doesn’t intend to kill off the main character all that often. But anyway, as you can see as you go through it, the act of telling a good story and the act of making a good game are very parallel.  And inertia’s the same thing. You want your story to advance, you want your game to advance. And you want your game to be compelling and change as it goes along.

Okay. Also, you want your inertia to do what we call creating a clock. And what that means is, it’s very important that your audience the players can see the end of the game and have a sense of where they are in relation to the end of the game.  In Magic when we talk about having a clock, it usually means I know how much damage I can do a turn. Assuming nothing changes, how many turns before they’re dead?

Let’s say I have a flier that can do two damage, and my opponent’s at eight life. Well, they’re on a clock of four turns. Meaning if my opponent doesn’t change the status quo, in four turns they are dead. They have four turns to solve the problem before they are dead.

And that inertia, the idea of a clock is important, which means is, you want your audience to see the lights at the end of the tunnel. They have to see the end of the game. That you want to make sure at all times that they go, “Oh, I’m this far away from the end.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have things happen and that amount change. And even when I talk even Magic, okay, there’s a four-turn clock. Things can change, they can destroy the flier. They can get a blocker.  They can start hitting you for damage. Like, there’s other ways to change that dynamic. But the important thing is, you want your player to understand where they stand in relation to the game.

One of the ways to make a game feel frustrating is the player doesn’t know where they are and feel lost. You want the player to feel like they know where they’re going and what their goal is. You want your player to have—to feel as if they know the role they’re playing and where they’re at. Because otherwise they feel powerless. If your player’s trapped in your game, and they have no idea how to end or where to end or when it will end, it’s a very hopeless feeling. It’s not a happy feeling.

But if the player can see the end, if they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, even if that light’s far away at times, then they go, “Okay, I got it. I gotta get there. That’s where I gotta get.” And it gives them drive and motivation.

Like one of the things they talk about, just to give a parallel is, if you’re trying to motivate yourself, if you’re trying to make sure that you can accomplish a task, one of the things they teach you is, you need to make sure you understand where you stand in your task.

Like a very common technique to accomplish things is to break them down into small chunks. Mostly it’s so you can check them off and you have a sense of progression. Same in games. You need a sense of progression. Your audience needs to feel as if they know where they stand in the context of the game. They know what they need to do, they know where they need to go.  That doesn’t mean they know everything. That doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises. There need to be, obviously. But it does mean that they aren’t feeling helpless in not understanding where they’re at.

Okay, next. You want a sense of urgency in your game. Meaning you want the players to feel like, “Oh, I better take action now.” Because one of the things that makes a game slow down is players going, oh, there’s no rush. Ahh, you know what, I don’t want to do the wrong thing. So I’ll just sit back and do nothing.

So be aware. One of the things as you play with players is that what the average player will do is they will veer toward not doing something. Because if they’re unsure what to do… in life, one of the lessons that people learn is, doing the wrong thing is worse than not doing anything. And so if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s often better to do nothing and wait to figure out what’s going on before doing that.

And in real life that makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of ramifications to doing the wrong thing. Not saying that philosophy’s the best philosophy. But a lot of people function that way. And so if your game doesn’t propel action, if it doesn’t create a sense of urgency, the player has an inclination, or most players, to sit back and just sort of wait until they have more information. But that doesn’t lead to good gameplay. Nobody doing anything does not lead to a good game. So you want to make sure that your players feel like they need to do something.

Now, video games it’s interesting, because video games have a leg up in this area, because video game, like literally, it’s scrolling sometimes. Like one of the real popular games right now in handheld is what they call the running game. Where your guy is running to the right, and then obstacles happen. And it’s like, that game has, talk about inertia. Your guy is running. He’s not going to stop. Well, you better deal with things that are coming your way.

And in some ways, think of your game like the little running man game, which is, you want your game to keep going. You don’t want your player to go—like, imagine the running game lets the player go, “Oh, I can just push a button and he stops for a while. Let him rest for a little bit.” They (???) all the time, because like, it’s hard going fast, but it’s that inertia, there’s a lot of excitement to having a sense of urgency and being propelled and going, “Oh, I’ve got to deal with this, I’ve got to deal with this.” And that it makes the game have more of a dynamic quality. It makes it more exciting.

It makes it—one of the things about game playing is, in general, stress is something that people avoid. But in a controlled setting like a game, it’s like, okay, give it to me. I want—I’ll put myself in a situation where I’m creating problem for myself on purpose. And there’s a rush that comes with that. There’s an adrenaline rush where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got to deal with this right now, things are coming, I have to deal with those.” And you want your game to have that sense.

Now. I’m not saying that your game at every moment has to be breakneck speed. But you do want to create a sense of everything is moving, everything is going forward, and you do want mostly the sense of urgency, like I really need to take the next action. You do not want your players—whenever the player feels like the best move is to do nothing, that is a danger for your game.

And that if that happens at any great volume, it just causes things to come to a halt. You don’t want your game to ever come to a halt. You want your player constantly striving. You want them to see the end, to know what they need to do to get there, and then constantly be striving to get there.

Okay. Another thing that it does is it tends to force conflict. That if your inertia says things have to happen and everyone has to do something, you’re more often getting them in conflict with each other. Which is good. You want your player, I mean for most games at least, you want your players in conflict. We talk about interaction, that’s another goal, that’s the third thing that you want in your game.

And that your inertia can help propel you toward creating interaction. Which is very important. Because if players have to do something, if players feel like there’s a step they have to take, that increases the change that they do something in contrast to somebody else. Or they do something that makes another player go, “Oh no, they’re doing something, they’re going to get something that I want,” and it propels the other player.

So one of the things to keep in mind is, one of the tools of inertia is the other players in your game. Meaning if you make it clear to your players what they need to do to advance toward the end, and usually the idea of, I talked about this in the interaction podcast, is one of the ways you make interaction is, everybody wants a similar goal.

Meaning they can’t all win, only one of them can win. Having one advance toward the goal propels the others. So that’s another way to make inertia, is use the players to force the inertia, that have players see other players advancing.

And so, by the way, not only is it important that you see where you are in the game, you want to see where everybody’s in the game. Because if another player is farther ahead of you, is closer to completion, that will propel you as a player to do something about it. Especially if built into your game, you have means to interact. Which is important.

So like if I realize that someone’s close to winning, maybe I take steps to stop them, to do something to get myself closer to them. It makes me take action. And that’s the big takeaway from today’s lesson is, inertia is, make your players take action.  Make them do something. Doing is better than not doing. That you want your players constantly feeling like they need to be participating in the game. The game is advancing, the game is changing, the game is evolving, people are advancing toward the end, they need to do something.

Now, once again, it could be very positive toward themselves. They could be building up something to help themselves. It could be negative towards another player. They could be knocking down another player. There’s different ways they can do that. But you definitely want to keep the player—you want to use the inertia and make sure the interaction happens between players. That inertia and interaction go very closely together.

Okay. So one of the things you’ll notice, by the way, is I already talked about how inertia helps keep things fun. That it can keep things going, and keep things dynamic and exciting. I talked about how it can aid in interaction. It can make players have to play together.

So the next one is it can aid in surprise. That’s another goal I’ll talk about in a future podcast. But you want things to happen the player doesn’t anticipate. That it’s fun to have moments where they didn’t see it coming. And inertia helps you get there, because when players are propelled toward action, things happen. And the players won’t always know what happens. Sometimes a surprise is other players’ actions. But sometimes a surprise is, the game has built-in means to surprise, but you need to make sure the player’s propelled forward to allow that to happen.

And the other thing, so one of the things, there’s this term called “fiero,” which talks about in gaming how when you’re kind of in the moment, my fiero moment I always talk about is, so the game called Asteroids. Way back when. So Asteroids was a video game from my youth where you’re a little tiny ship and you can rotate the ship, and then you can fire at oncoming asteroids. And there are big asteroids, when you hit them they broke into two medium-sized. When you hit the medium they break into two smaller ones. And you break the small ones and they go away. And pretty much you’re sitting in the asteroid field trying not to get hit by asteroids.

Now, the trick of the game is, most of the time you rotate and fire. But every once in a while, if you need to, you can push the gas and you can move. Now, strategy-wise, you don’t want to move all that often because every time you move you have to reorient to where you’re at. So it’s hard to move and shoot. It’s doable, but it’s harder.

So usually you start by staying in the middle. But at some point you realize, “Oh, I’m in trouble. I’m going to die if I stay in the middle.” And you hit the gas. And you move. But moving is a scary thing, because you no longer have a sense of center of where you’re at. And there’s this feeling, and this is where my fiero moment, where the sense of mastery, when you’re floating in the middle, and like you’re flying by the strap of your boots, like you know that you’re courting with danger, but you’re just managing to stay alive. There’s this real—the fiero comes from the sense of mastery of, just the adrenaline rush of you know you’re sort of testing yourself and pushing yourself to the extreme, but you’re succeeding.

And I remember playing Asteroids, that feeling where I have to hit the gas and I have to move, and then I’m swirling around and I’m moving, and I know I’m in trouble, because this is really hard to do, but I’m staying alive, and I’m surviving, and there’s just this rush.

I do believe that inertia helps get to the fiero a lot of the time. That the constant rush to make things happen forces the player’s hand. That sometimes it’ll make the players do things that they might not do normally. But, because the players understand that they have to do it, like for example, the reason I’m hitting the gas in Asteroids is I’m going to get hit by a bunch of asteroids. I can’t shoot them all. If I don’t move I’m going to die. So like, okay, it’s the right play, it’s the right thing to do. The game propels me in that direction. But then, wow, I’m in dangerous territory.

It forces you out of your comfort zone into your less comfort area. But it’s in that non-comfortable area that you get to reach a lot of the fiero moments. You get to reach the adrenaline, the excitement, where like, I don’t quite know what’s going to happen, I kind of know that I’m in dangerous territory, but I’m surviving. And it’s really thrilling. And inertia helps get people out of their shells and pushes toward those moments.

Another thing that inertia does is help break stalemates. One of the things that’s a big problem in games is, getting to a state by which nobody can advance. Now, Magic, clearly it’s like, I have a whole bunch of creatures, and you have a bunch of creatures, and none of my creatures can get by your creatures, and there’s just not a reason to attack, and you have enough creatures that if I attack it’ll be bad for me, and like one of the things for example that Magic works really hard at is making sure there’s things like evasive creatures, like flying. Like unblockable creatures. Different evasion abilities.

And the reason is, because all I need is once I have one flier, all of a sudden, the clock goes back on. Okay, I have a flier, they don’t have an answer to my flier yet, if I hit them five times, they’re dead. Okay, now the game’s advancing again. Your inertia needs to make sure—you need to understand where your game will stalemate.

And obviously you work as much as you can to avoid stalemates, but stalemates will happen. If I’m going to have resources and you’re going to have resources, there’s going to be moments where they line up in such a way that it’s not advantageous for either one of us to advance. It’s going to happen. It’s hard to avoid.

The key, though, is you want to make sure that you understand where your stalemate points happen, and then take action, build into the game ways to break that stalemate. With Magic, ground stall is a big problem. That’s where evasion comes in. That’s why there are fliers, that’s why there are other evasive creatures. That all of a sudden says, okay, well maybe I can’t get through on the ground, but now I start the clock up again, because I have something that you now have to deal with. That it’s causing the game to advance.

And in general, by the way, the thing about stalemates is when you play your game, when you’re doing your playtesting, one of the things to keep in mind is, ask yourself every minute. Has the game advanced in the last minute? If the game hasn’t advanced in the last minute, write down why. What happened? What is keeping it from advancing?

Those are your—one of two things is going on. Either you’ve created a stalemate where players are stuck and you need to have a nudge to get them out of it, or you’re creating a moment of inaction where it’s more advantageous for players to not take action. That something strategically about the game is saying it’s better to do nothing than to do something.

Both those things you can answer in the design, and both those things, you not only should, you need to. Because the worst thing that can happen to a game, I believe, is players are in the middle of a game, they feel trapped, the game looks nowhere near completion, and they’re done playing, but the game is far from over. That creates a very negative—when you get trapped in the game, the chance of you playing the game again goes way, way, way down. Because it’s frustrating and you’re like, “Oh, this is not a fun game.”

And it says to the players, “If this happened once, it can happen again,” and so you have to be very careful. You want to make sure that you reduce the amount of times it happens. I’m not saying it’s never going to happen. It’s going to happen. But you want to make sure you have answers so that it doesn’t happen often.

Okay. Another thing that it does is it helps—I talked about this a little bit earlier, it helps make sure that there’s advancement. One of the things you want to do is, when you think about your goals is you want your player to have mini-goals adding up to the larger goals.

Which is, they know what they need to do, and you want to make sure your game has sub-goals to say, “Okay. In order to advance in my bigger goal, here’s things I need to do.” And the reason the sub-goals are important is, you want your players to be able to check things off. That you want your players to say, “I had to do something, and I did it.”

And you want that to be constantly going on. The game can’t just be about, I have one singular thing to do. Oh, have I done it yet? No. Have I done it yet? No. It has to be, I have one thing to do, and I have smaller goals to accomplish that bigger goal. And I have to be able to mark and see the smaller goals.

So inertia will help with the goal in that it will help create smaller goals, so that you are building toward getting a larger goal. That one of the things that’s really important is, you want the player—I mean, they’re doing this mentally, but essentially think of it this way. They have a little sheet, where… I know the way to think of it. It is, in video games, a lot of times there is some marker that represents how close you are to your objective.

It’s very common, for example, on a sidescroller, that there’s a map at the top, and there’s a little bar to kind of show you how much farther you have to go. How far are you, how far do you have to go? And the most important thing there is it just goes, “Oh, okay, I’m getting closer.” It’s kind of like whoever invented this on the computer, that when you want to have something happen, they do this thing now where there’s a status bar. Two percent done. Ten percent done. Fifteen percent done.

And the reality is, I don’t know that that status bar has any actual correlation to how much work is actually being done. Maybe it does. But psychologically, it’s really important that when I’m waiting for something to happen, that if I was just waiting for five minutes, it’s a lot more frustrating than looking at it, it goes, “Five percent done.” I go, “Okay.” Well, I know how long five percent took, so 95% should take—I have some sense of progression. And I have some idea of what I think it will take.

Where imagine it just spins until it’s done. It’s a really helpless feeling. It’s like, “Is it done yet? Is it done yet?” You have no sense of where you are. And that you want to make sure that you have a little status bar for the player, that the player understands where they’re at. And that the status bar also can make little goals so they can advance within it.

Okay. Next, inertia forces players to have to improvise. That if you are forced toward action, like one of the things that is fun is, so I think I’ve told the story about how… my float story. I think I’ve told this story. Of how when I was in college, one year we had to build a float. And very little money was put toward it. Not a lot of people volunteered toward it. And so we had a handful of supplies, but not very much. And we had one night to do it in.

And the fact that there was a deadline, that it’s like, “Okay, at six a.m., you gotta turn the float in,” or whatever the time was. And it really made the sense of, “Okay, we can’t just sit around. We have this deadline.” And it just forced us to improvise. That one of the things you want is you want players—so remember, the rules are not there—the rules are there as means to help the players. It’s a tool for the players. And that one of the fun things to do is to figure out what the rules allow and don’t allow.

That rule-testing, pushing against the rules to figure out what you can do, is a fun part of game-playing. And that inertia really will make that happen. It will go, “Okay, I’m desperate, because there’s a clock, and I gotta get things done. Let me improvise and figure out what we need to do.” That there’s a lot of fun that comes from having to adapt to the situation and when you see time running out, it’ll make players go, “Okay, I gotta do something, what can I do?”

And that forces innovation. And innovation is where a lot of the fun lies. That a lot of the fun of gaming is saying… so, one of the things that is neat for your game is, if you keep putting players in situations they’ve never been before, okay, I always talk about “restrictions breed creativity.” That restrictions force you to break out of the mindset of how you normally look at something. And so one of the tricks that inertia can do is it can force upon the player situations they’re not used to, add it with the clock, it says, okay. I have to deal with this because there’s a clock, and I’ve never dealt with this before. SO now I’m forced to improvise.

And that space is a lot of fun. Especially for people who like games. That the idea of “I’m forced into this open space…” and like I talked about earlier, sort of the fiero moment of I have to rely on my skills in an untested area to show that I’m able to excel at it. Because there’s this great thrill of saying, “I did it. I faced something that was challenging, but I was able to do it.” And there’s little more compelling in game-playing of having what they call mastery, where you figured out how to solve a problem.

In fact, by the way, at the GDC this year, I went to a talk that talked about how fun is defined as not a singular emotion but a process of emotions, and it talks about starting at a negative state that you don’t want to be at, finding a mastery loop to figure out how to get out of that state and move toward a happy state so that you through your own actions move away from a negative state toward a positive state. That that, this talk was saying, is what fun is.

Which is a very interesting definition. The idea that fun is you understanding that you are in a place you don’t want to be, seeing the place you want to be, and through your own expertise, through your own skills, you manage to move yourself from an unhappy place to a happy place. That (???) of what fun is. And inertia helps do that. Inertia forces your hand to do that.

Okay. It also, speaking of other top ten things, it also tends to help with the catch-up feature. Which is, part of what you want for a catch-up feature is you want people to feel like there’s actions they could take that would help them catch up.

And inertia and catch-up often can play in conjunction with each other. That it’s sort of like, “Okay, I need to take risks.” And usually, one of the biggest catch-up features is, there’s a strategy that’s riskier but has a high reward to it. And as you’re winning, you want to stay away from the risky strategies because you’re winning. You’re ahead. But as you’re falling behind, you have less to lose. And so you’re more willing to take risky strategies that might get you ahead. Because if you’re already losing, well what, you’re going to lose more? And so you’re more willing to take the risks.

And inertia definitely pushes in that direction, where it can force players’ hands. As players see other players advancing toward the end, they get to recalculate what risks they’re willing to take. And as their risk evaluation goes up, as they’re willing to take more risks, there’s more opportunity for catch-up features to come into play.

So once again, like one of the things I want you to see is when I talk about these ten things, they don’t live in a vacuum. These ten thing all interrelate. That part of having a good catch-up feature is having inertia push you toward the desire to use the catch-up feature. That it’s linked.

I mean, one of the neat things hopefully as you listen to the podcast and I’m trying to show how things link within each podcast, that like already I talked about how inertia interacts with fun and interaction and surprise and getting your goal and your rules and your catch-up. Finally, it also can help with strategy.

Because one of the things that happens is, one of the goals of strategy is that you want your player to come back and play your game. And so strategy does this neat thing where it says to the player, there’s something you gain for playing.  And in future games, it is an asset. And that comes—that’s strategy. Strategy is this thing that I learned from previous games, and then I can apply that knowledge to future games.

So one of the things that inertia does is it forces you into a state where you have to act quickly. And, strategy prepares you for that state. So one of the reasons that if you make a game that really forces you toward things happening, and makes the action go, one of the things that will help your strategy is having knowledge of what to do.

Like, one of the things that’s very intimidating is not knowing what to and figuring it out. Now, there’s a thrill element of trying to figure out (???) thing, but one of the nice things is, as you play a game and you get used to it, you start having answers to these problems that you then can solve much more quickly.

Now, you need to make sure that your game is always pushing. You don’t want your player to have strategy and go, “I’ve solved it, now it doesn’t push me anymore.” No matter what skill level your player’s at, you want the inertia to constantly be pushing. The inertia has to push all players at all skill level. But, and here’s the important thing, which is as you learn the game, you definitely allow the more skillful players that understand the strategy to adapt quicker to it.

And so the inertia will be a means by which to help the player that understands the game, who’s played the game before. And that’s a means to advance the strategy. Like, oh, I gotta take action, I gotta do something. Oh wait a minute, I’ve been in this situation before, I’m acting out of a sense of knowledge. I have some experience what I need to do. Okay, I’m more at ease, I can use this strategy.

So inertia definitely, like one of the things you want is you want your players to recognize there’s moments where their strategy can help them. And that inertia puts you in a situation to make that happen.

Okay. Almost to work. And today was chock-full. I’m hoping these are useful for you guys. I get a lot of feedback, when I was at GDC I got a lot of feedback from game designers who I was very honored to… these aren’t beginners, these are like, these people are my peers, making games in the industry, and the number of them that really said very kind things about this podcast was very sweet, and much… I try my best to do what I can to sort of bring up the discussion of game design and game design theory.

So let’s recap, since I’m not too far from work. Okay. So why you need inertia. Number one, it makes the game end. Remember, you want your game to end before the player wants it to end. That’s really important. Of everything I’ve told you today, I cannot stress it enough. That if your game ends before your player wants it to end, that just makes them want to play it again. If it ends after they want it to end, it gives them a reason to not play again.

Number two, it keeps the pacing of your game. It keeps your game evolving. It keeps it dynamic. Also, number three is it makes stuff happen. It helps to tell a story. It helps make the game, if there is consequences and it’s advancing forward. It helps create a clock. It helps the audience understand, your players understand where they are and where they need to be. And how far they have to go to win the game. It builds a sense of urgency. It makes sure your player feels like they need to take action and don’t sit around. Remember. Players will err toward not doing something when they’re not sure what to do. So your game has to make sure that no matter what, it propels them toward action.

Next, if forces conflict. If players have to act, odds are it increase the chances of them interacting with one another. So having inertia in your game will make your players have to deal with other players. And remember, the players themselves can help be one of the forces of inertia. That players see other players, if you build a clock, and players can see what other players are doing, it helps players go, I need to take action. They are advancing toward the win condition, they are farther ahead than I am, I need to do something.

And a lot of times, it’s I need to interact with them. I need to be the thing that slows them down. Or I need to do something that speeds me up. Or whatever you need to do. The sense of conflict that gets created by inertia can help propel the game along.

Next, it allows for opportunity for surprise. That when players have to keep going, it allows things to happen. Some of it can be built into the game, some can be surprise elements the game has built into it, some can be surprises that just come from the interaction the players have with one another. Like, one of the great things about having other humans to play with is, humans will not always do what you expect them to do. That humans sometimes will get creative or do things that are unexpected. And a lot of the fun in games can come about because the persons you’re playing with, because of the inertia, because of the sense of urgency, take actions and do things that maybe you don’t know. That can definitely surprise you.

Inertia breaks stalemates. It keeps the game from stalling out. It’ll make sure that you’re constantly advancing towards your goal. It’ll help make mini-goals so you not only advance toward your goal, but you’re recognizing that you’re advancing towards your goal. And that you feel—you don’t feel helpless. That you the player feel as if you’re taking action, moving toward something.

It also helps the catch-up feature. Because by propelling people, it makes them realize that they need to take action. As they see that somebody’s getting more towards the end, it makes people take bigger risks. And if your catch-up feature allows the chance to have risk/reward, it’ll take the people behind and let them do riskier things to maybe try to catch up.

It will also make them improvise. That players, when their hands are forced, it makes players have to take steps and do things. And that that’s where a lot of the fun moments come from. Where players are sort of forced to do something they hadn’t thought through, and in the moment make decisions. And like I said, there’s a lot of exciting emotions. There’s adrenaline, fiero, all sorts of cool things happen when players kind of have to push themselves.

And finally, it reinforces strategy. That when you get players, when inertia makes the game constantly moving, players who have been there before recognize that they understand things that other players might not, and it gives them a sense of happiness that they have a commodity that they’ve gained from previous games. And it makes them more invested in the game itself.

And that, my friends—I felt like this podcast had inertia. I (???) all the way through. But anyway, that is all the elements of inertia, so I thank you guys for joining me for the—I think this is the fifth of my ten podcasts, future ones will come down the road. But I just parked my car, so we all know what that means, it means it’s the end of my drive to work. And so instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Thanks, guys.