5/27/16 Episode 334: Twenty Lessons, Part 2--Aesthetics

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 another in my Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. This is one based on the talk I gave at the GDC, the Game DevelopersConference, where I talk about the twenty big lessons I learned in my twenty years designing Magic. So I already did the first one, which was when you’re fighting human nature you’re fighting a losing battle. So today is “aesthetics matter.” So I will explain what aesthetics are and why they matter.

Okay. So, let me start with the example I gave in my talk. So in the set Avacyn Restored, the card that I got the most complaints about, and by a decent magnitude—like, I probably got three times as many complaints about this one card than any other card in the whole set. What was the card? Griselbrand.

Okay. Griselbrand. Why’d I get complaints—was it a weak card? No, it’s actually a very powerful card. In some of the older formats it’s—it’s relevant in older formats, meaning it’s pretty powerful. Okay. Is it a flavor thing? No, no, Liliana’s one of the most popular characters we have and he’s one of the four demons that she made the pact with. So he was completely relevant story-wise.

Okay. So it wasn’t a power issue, it wasn’t a flavor issue—why did people complain about the card? And the answer was, he was a seven-power creature, with seven toughness, who for seven life could draw you seven cards, and he cost eight mana.

And a lot of people are like, “Oh, whatever.” And why is this important? And the answer is that one of the things you have to keep in mind when designing your game is that how your audience perceives the game is very important. Like, the first lesson was talking about understanding human behavior. [CARD] Are you fighting human behavior? (???) get in trouble fighting human behavior. Because human behavior isn’t going to bend for you all that often.

Well, this lesson’s about human perception. And human perception, ehh, doesn’t bend any much more than human behavior does. So there are ways that people perceive things, and that one of the things that’s an ongoing theme of all my talks about this is that holistically (???) matter. People don’t approach your game piece by piece. They experience it all at once. They experience it as a whole. And so you have to think about how all the component parts come together, because that’s how the audience is going to experience it.

It’s not like you go to see a movie and you’re like, well, I liked this component and this component. You know, it’s like no no no. Did you like the movie? Did the movie as a whole come together? Whether or not you enjoyed the movie is all the pieces coming together and working together.

So for example, let’s talk a little bit about what aesthetics is. So I took a class. I went to—for those who don’t know, at college I went to the College of Communication at Boston University. This was a communications school. So I was studying—my major, actually, I majored in broadcast and film, with a minor in screenwriting. But—so I was all about, I used to joke, TV and film. I would watch movies and TV shows and try to understand popular culture. So they required you to take a class on aesthetics. And it wasn’t even something I chose to do, requirement. And I didn’t understand quite what aesthetics was when I took it. I had to take the class.  

So aesthetics has been called the philosophy of art or the science of beauty. And the idea behind it is, how do people function? How do people perceive? Like one of the things about the class was, okay. Let’s actually get into you want to do communications, you want to communicate with people? Well, let’s figure out how people receive the information. And so we spent a lot of time talking about how does the eye work. How does the ear work. How do people absorb information, and then how does the brain process information.

So what aesthetics is, is it says, look. There are certain ways, there’s certain things the brain needs. That the brain is set up in such a way that it just kind of wants certain things. Why it wants those things? That’s a fine question. I’m not really going to get into why necessarily, because that’s a big philosophical debate, but I will say that one of the things they do in a lot of these tests is they will go across the world and they will find lots of different cultures. They will even find cultures that have never before interacted with other human beings.

And they will show them, for example, pictures of people’s faces. And people will be able to—people will prefer and not prefer certain qualities of faces regardless of what culture they were raised in, where they were raised. Because there’s certain things they’ve learned is, like, built into the way the brain functions. There’s a lot of different qualities, now I’ll talk about a few of them.

For example, the human brain likes symmetry. It finds symmetry more attractive. It likes balance. Balance is something that is very sought after for the brain. It’s big on pattern completion. That’s the problem we had with Griselbrand. That they like a sense of patterns, and the brain likes some sense of order.

And so what happens is, when your brain goes out and looks at things, if things sort of match its expectations, if it does what it wants, it’s happier. And if it doesn’t, it sort of sets the brain off a little bit. It’s like, “Ugh, something’s wrong.”

Now, knowing this, knowing that the human brain has certain things that sort of pacify it and certain things that sort of irritate it, you can use that effectively. For example, one of the things    you can do is, if you’re trying in your game or story or whatever to irritate your audience, you can use this to advantage. When things are a little off-kilter, when things don’t quite match the aesthetics, you can make them off-kilter. If your goal is to make them uncomfortable, you can.

But my point today is, you shouldn’t make your audience uncomfortable unless your intent is to make your audience uncomfortable. And the lesson with Griselbrand or anything is, look. Do you want the focus on the game component, or do you want the focus on the composite? How it’s put together? And my answer is, most of the time we want you paying attention to what the thing is. I don’t want you seeing Griselbrand and going, “Ugh, something’s wrong.” I want you to go, “Ooh, Griselbrand.”

So the fact that we made a choice that sort of, instead of people focusing on “Yay Griselbrand, wow it’s powerful, wow it’s flavorful,” the fact that so many people were like, “Ugh, something’s wrong about it,” that was a problem.

And one of the things that I will stress time and time again is, the reason you need to understand how humans function, and the reason I say humans is because odds are your number one consumer is going to be humans, you need to understand how they function. And this lesson says you need to understand how they perceive things. Because if you don’t match the need for perception, it will really cause problems.

And anyone who follows me knows I talk about this a lot, about the importance of expectations and the importance of matching expectations. There’s different kinds of expectations. Today I’m talking about aesthetic expectations.

So one of the things that I do a lot of time when I design cards is, I’m very conscious of where there might be aesthetic expectations. Now be aware, I’m earlier down the line, there’s people after me who change things. And I, of everybody in R&D, am most the most believer in aesthetics. The most who’s like, no no no, we need to get the aesthetics dead right.

Most of the time that happens. But Griselbrand is a good example where it just—you couldn’t make it for seven mana. It was too powerful for seven mana. And I think the correct answer in retrospect was, then change some of the other numbers. Don’t make it seven-seven-seven-seven-eight. You just change a few of the other numbers, and it’s not aesthetically unpleasing.

Now, one of the things about patterns and things is, not everything necessarily has a clean pattern. So one of the things you do is, just be careful that if you set up a pattern, that you follow the pattern. Here’s my caveat, by the way, let me (???) saying this. If your goal is to not draw attention to what you’re doing, if your goal is to make it feel correct, this is what I’m talking about.

Yes, there are times and places where you’re purposely going to break aesthetics to make ill ease in your audience. To make them sort of a little bit upset. On purpose. That is fine. I have nothing against using human perception in a way to play to something you’re trying to create. That is fine. In writing you do it all the time. What I’m saying is, if that’s not your goal, if you’re not going to draw attention to something, then you shouldn’t be drawing the attention. You know.

One of the things to keep in mind is, when you’re making your game or creative—this applies to all creative arts, but I’m talking about game design. When you’re making your game, you have to know when and where you want to pull focus.

That is a term—I think it’s from photography. So one of the things in photography they talk about, if you ever take a photography class, is you want your audience in the picture looking where you mean for them to look. You want to have some understanding of what’s going to draw the eye of the viewer. And this actually ties into aesthetics, it’s similar. I mean there’s a lot of overlap here.

One of the things you have to be careful is, if you put something in your art that really will draw the eye, but it’s not the point of the picture, you’re compromising your picture because some element’s going to pull focus. It’s going to pull people away.

The same thing is true in journalism. In communication school, not only do you have to take a class on aesthetics, you gotta get a class on journalism. The school is divided into three sections: there was broadcast and film, journalism, and advertising/public relations. And so you had to take classes in all the different things before you get your major. So even though I ended up being broadcast and film, early on I had to take a couple journalism classes.

So one of the things in journalism they talk about is they call “don’t bury the lede,” which is get to the point quick. You don’t want your audience focusing on something that doesn’t matter. So they’re really big on there about pulling focus in articles is, what matters in your story? Focus on what matters. What matter in your photograph? Focus on what matters. What matters on your game? Focus on what matters. In Magic, what matters about the cards? Focus on what matters.

And that one of the things that that says time and time again is, you have to understand when something will make your audience break focus. Pull focus. For example, in photography, color does that a lot. That certain colors, red being the one that I remember, the eye is drawn to red. So if you have a picture with lots going on, and one red item, your eye tends to get drawn to the one red item. It’s why people tend to like red cars, that it is an attention-getter. It’s why fire trucks are red, it draws your attention. That you want people to see that.

But anyway, so what that says is, if you’re going to take a picture and there’s a bright red thing in it, and you don’t want your audience looking at that thing, that’s a problem. Well in game design, for example, if you set up some aesthetic missed connection, if there’s some pattern to be completed, and you set it up for your audience to find the pattern, they will hunt down that pattern. They will look for that pattern. And if that pattern isn’t there, you’re setting yourselves up, because they’re just going to be disappointed. They’re going to spend time and energy trying to find something that both isn’t there and isn’t the point of what you’re trying to do.

So one of the big lessons that I’m trying to get across today is, you need to understand holistically how your audience is approaching whatever game component you’re trying to make. And make sure that they’re focusing on the thing you want them to focus on. Don’t pull focus on your own game. Don’t make them pay attention to something that’s not the thing they’re supposed to pay attention to.

And the reason aesthetics are so important in this camp is, people are drawn to—when aesthetics are right, it feels good. And here’s the interesting thing. When aesthetics are right, people don’t necessarily go looking for anything. They just go, “Ahh, that feels right.” But when aesthetics are wrong, the audience says, “Ugh. Something’s wrong.” And then they start trying to figure out why something is wrong. And then they will figure out the pieces that don’t match up.

Like when most people first play Griselbrand, the first thing (???) is “Something’s wrong with this card.” Maybe it didn’t even happen right away. Like it’s not—so people at first are like, “Agh, something’s wrong.” Now, like I said. You don’t want—that’s not the first impression you’re going for. And the reason aesthetics are so important is, when aesthetics are correct, it just feels right. It’s just like, oh, this is right.

So one of the things, for example, how you can tell kind of Magic cards—every once in a while people pretend, you know, people will on the rumor mills make up their own card, pretend like, “Ooh, I heard a rumor.” And people always look at the cards and say, “Is this real, is this not real?” And one of the things that happens a lot is go, oh. These don’t feel right. These don’t feel like Magic cards. Yeah, I don’t think these are the real thing.

So be aware that not only are there general human aesthetics, your game will start crafting aesthetics around itself. So that’s another important thing to understand is that you will start doing things as a subset—like there’s basic human aesthetics. (???) humans need. Pattern completion and such. But your game will start creating its own sub-aesthetics. That there’s certain things you will do that people will come to read.

So for example, in Magic, we have come to make associations between power/toughness combinations and colors. So if I show you a power/toughness combination, you’re going to have associations. So if I show you a 1/5 creature, you’re probably going to go, oh, that’s more white or blue. But if I say red, you go, ooh, red, why is a 1/5 red? That’s not red. Red’s not 1/5. And that something about that, you then—I mean, you have to figure out what’s going on.

Now sometimes, there’s reasons and stuff to do stuff like that, but most of the time you have to be careful. Like, okay, why—we’ve set up certain aesthetics within the game. Why are we breaking those aesthetics? And once again, there’s a time and a place for breaking things, I’m not saying you can never break aesthetics. What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t break aesthetics without purposely breaking them. You should break them because you’re aware you’re breaking them and you mean to break them. Not because like, “Eh, whatever.”

And that’s the biggest complaint I get. Sometimes when people, I talk about this lesson of aesthetics and how important they are, the biggest complaint I get is, “Really? Really does that matter? Is that that important? That can’t be important. That can’t be more important than other things.” And the answer I give is, look. First impressions are really important. One of the reasons we do a lot of playtesting with fresh eyes is, we want to know what people think. First impression.

Now. There’s a lot of other things that matter, first impressions aren’t the only thing, but you want a positive first impression. All you’re doing when you don’t match aesthetics is, you are lessening your audience’s enjoyment for sure, in the first impression, because something will feel off, and it’s possible—like I know there’s certain things where we—like, I know when I look at stuff and we’ve messed something up, and I just can’t not see the mess-up. Every time I see that card I’m like, ohh, we did this little thing wrong. It’ll bug me.

And I know there’s where we deviate something and we don’t quite match the aesthetic, that’s not a one-time thing. It will gnaw at you every time you see the card. And like I said. One of the things to keep in mind is, how is your audience responding? Do they like it? Do they not like it? If your audience doesn’t like it, that’s a problem. If it’s causing some sort of disconnect or some sort of unease, that’s a problem. It doesn’t matter what’s causing that. Sometimes people want to look at things and say, okay. Well, this is an insignificant thing. Why does it matter? And I’m like, if it affects your audience, it matters.

A good example sometimes is I had a teacher, a writing class teacher. So we were talking about names one day. What you name your character. And the teacher was saying that names are important. You can’t randomly pick the names for your characters and go, “Whatever.” Because names have a certain feel to them. And you want to make sure the name matches the style and feel of the character you want.

And what he said is that it’s very easy to take it as a small detail, and say it doesn’t matter. Because whatever, he’s got a name, it doesn’t matter. But what you find when you’re writing is, the name really—you need your audience to connect to the name. You need your audience to go, “Yeah, that feels right.” And if it doesn’t, if somehow what the name sort of signifies and who your character is, if there’s a mismatch there, your audience doesn’t assume you just didn’t care. They assume there’s a reason. Oh, is this character duplicitous? Does this character seem one way but really—they start adding content into it.

And so what happens is, while you might think it’s some insignificant little thing, it’s not, and it’s warping how your audience perceives things. And as an artist, you should always care about how your audience perceives things. The holistic whole is important. When someone sits down with a game that I made, I want everything in the game to be on mark. I want everything to be purposeful.

And that when something pulls the focus, when something makes them think about something other than what—like, Griselbrand is a perfect example. The second that you’re not appreciating Griselbrand as a card, that you’re not caring about the character or the art or the mechanics or something we want you to care about, as soon as some other factor’s making the card about that thing, that is a mistake. That is a failure.

Now, I’m not saying necessarily it’s the worst failure in the world, but it’s a failure. Yes, a lot of people enjoy that card. Yes, Griselbrand is doing a lot of good. But could it have not done all that good and not caused the problems it’s causing?

Like, when I look at the questions people ask me, I don’t—like, for example, there’s an important lesson I learned as a camp counselor, (???). So one of the lessons I learned as a camp counselor is I had young kids. I liked when I was camp counselor to deal with young kids. So usually, whatever the youngest kids that went to camp. Usually four- and five-year-olds, sometimes six- and seven-year-olds depending. I loved working with little kids.

And one of the things that—one time, I had a counselor who clearly, clearly did not want to be with little kids. I think they let the counselors pick what ages to be with, and so many of the counselors wanted the older kids that they had a counselor that like—I guess he said “I don’t care” is probably what he said, so they stuck him with the little kids. Actually, it wasn’t even a he. It’s a she. And she said to me that—she was talking about the kids, and the kids—they were four or five, whatever. They cared about a lot of really inconsequential things.

And she said to me, why do I seem to care about these inconsequential things? Like, the kids are talking about something, about the latest whatever the kids the kids cared about, and I would talk with them in interest about that thing. And my co-counselor’s like, I don’t understand why—what does it matter? What does it matter what Care Bear or whatever? And I said, look. It’s funny, because I go, one time, I had a little girl and she was really upset, and I called the Care Bear by the wrong name. She had a Care Bear on her shirt, and I said, “Oh, it’s Cloud Bear,” and she goes, “No, it’s Happiness Bear!” Whatever, whatever. I don’t remember… once upon a time, I knew the names of the Care Bears. Like, I said Heart Bear and it was Tenderheart Bear or whatever. And she cried.

And the point was, it was really upsetting to her. It was really upsetting to her that I didn’t know the Care Bear name. And the point was, did it matter? To her it mattered. Like, the details matter. Because you can’t judge things based on what you think about them, you have to judge them about the person you’re dealing with. So for that little kid, that mattered. I had to learn the Care Bear names, because it mattered to the kids I was dealing with. They cared. And if they cared, I had to care. Because my job was keeping the kids happy. And if by calling the Care Bear by the wrong name, I made them unhappy, well then I was failing at my job, so I needed to care about these little tiny details.

The same is true in your game and your art, whatever, that you have to care about little tiny details, because your audience will care. And there’s no such thing as an insignificant detail. One of the things in writing class they teach you is research. That the second you do one thing that reads wrong to your audience, they’re pulled out of your story. That’s why you have to be very careful about making sure that if you’re in a place you don’t know, that you study it. If you’re dealing with something you don’t know, you study it. Talk to people that experienced that thing. Because if it reads false, even if one thing reads false, you throw your audience and they’re out.

And so one of the things today that—I mean, when I say aesthetics matter, I mean you need to understand how your audience is going to perceive things, what matters to them, what feels right about them, and be on that. I mean, today I’m talking perception. All my lessons will see, start blending together, but today what I’m saying is, I mean, last time I was talking human behavior, now I’m talking human perception.

There is a way that humans in general will perceive things. There just is. And one of the things that’s important, if you’re somebody who’s going to try to generate responses out of an audience, you’ve got to understand how the audience works. You’ve got to understand how the audience thinks and feels. Why we do playtesting, it’s why market research is important, it’s why talking with your audience is important. That you need to understand the impact of what you have.

Now, once again, I’m not saying that Griselbrand is like some major failure to the point of—I wish we had changed it, hey, the card was still fun, people still played with it, it’s not like you miss one small piece it’s forever damning your game. But it matters. It’s important. And I really—today’s lesson is to say to you, it is so easy to just brush it off. Because it’s like, ehh, what does it really matter?

But the thing that I’ve learned time and time again, working in the job I have, is not everybody cares about everything. But everybody cares about something. I have a lesson coming up that will get more into that detail, but… When you are putting something together, it is not the component pieces. It’s the sum of the pieces. It’s what happens when you put them all together. And that you can’t think of your cards in Magic or think of your components or whatever as just all whatever. Just willy nilly pieces. You’ve got think of it has how it fits in the cohesive whole, and how your audience is going to perceive that cohesive whole.

Because remember, anything you do that distracts your audience, that makes them focus on what you’re not—want them to focus on, you’ve made a mistake. I will say this time and time again. It is your job as the creator, as the game designer, to understand where you want the focus of your audience, and make sure that the focus is there.

Today’s lesson is, don’t pull focus. Aesthetics matter. You have to understand where and why and how your audience will evaluate something. How they will perceive something. So aesthetics matter because—in a lot of ways I’m talking about what happens when you don’t follow aesthetics. But really the lesson is not—I mean, one of the lessons is follow aesthetics. Another lesson is understand aesthetics. They matter. You know what I’m saying?

That another part of this lesson is, if you want to do a job, there’s certain skills you have to learn. Well, one of the skills to be a game designer is you have to understand psychology. You have to understand people. You have to understand how people function. That if you are trying to make people happy, if the measurement of your goal has to do with emotional responses of your audience, well you better understand what goes into their emotional responses. Why do people like things and not like things?

And today’s thing is just saying, look. One of the things you have to understand is, how something is presented, how something is perceived, affects the emotional state of the audience. That if you’re taking a picture and there’s something in the picture that’s really bright red in the wrong part of the picture, that’s going to affect your picture. If you’re writing a novel and you name your character the wrong name, a name that doesn’t kind of match up with the feel who the character is, that’s gonna throw your audience. You know. If you’re a camp counselor and your little kid has a Care Bear on his shirt, and you call it by the wrong name, it’s going to have an impact.

That those things matter. The details matter, the aesthetics matter. You have to understand how people perceive things, why people perceive things, and then make sure you’re addressing that in the thing you’re creating.

There’s a lot of—like I said, and you’ll see, this lesson blends into a lot of other lessons. We’ll get there. But I can’t—I mean, I’m almost to work, but my big takeaway is, saying aesthetics matter means a bunch of different things. It means you need to spend some time and energy understanding what aesthetics are. You need to spend time and energy understanding what the aesthetics are for your game, for what you’re doing. Like, I also work on a game where we keep putting out more things, so over time there’s certain things, there’s patterns I create, that I have to understand those.

That I have to know, for example, have we made a card before that when I make a second card, it’s a pattern and I’ve started a pattern? I have to be aware of that. Am I doing something where I’m making a reference to another card, and so people will think of this card in context of that reference? I need to understand that

Now once again, the thing about Magic is, it’s not a solitaire endeavor. I’m not the only person that makes the game. The whole team makes the game. It’s not important that I understand this, it’s important the whole team understands it.

For example, the creative team needs to understand when they’re making references that reference other things. Because the audience, not all the audience, but some of the audience will get the references. And that’s important. And that’s why we spend a lot of time and energy not just—I mean, I focus more on the rules mechanics, the rules, because that’s what my team does. But the art matters. The name matters. The flavor text matters. Every little component about the card matters. Because how the audience is going to perceive it is taking it all in at once.

You know, one of the things when I was doing the Un-sets, that I spent a lot of time and energy on was at the end, coming back and looking at it all together, so we could tweak things, because one of the big things about comedy has to do with sort of presentation. We actually made a Simpsons trading card game, and my one contribution to the Simpsons trading card game is there were attributes on the card, that I went through and I organized the attributes in the funniest order.

And the reason is, they’re just—I studied comedy, there’s beats, that there’s just—certain things are funnier, and I wanted the game to be funny. It was an IP that’s supposed to be funny. So I was trying to match the aesthetics of the game we were doing.

That is important. Just understand what your game is, understand what your game is trying to do, and be aware of how your audience is going to perceive it. How, why, where—be aware of all those components. Aesthetics really, really, really matter.

Okay, guys. I am now sitting in my parking space, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work, so instead of making Magic—no, instead of talking Magic—I’m going to mess up on my ending today. Let’s try this one more time. So I’m in my parking space, we all know what that means, this is (???) the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time.