5/6/16 Episode 329: Twenty Lessons, Part 1--Human Nature

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the driveway! You all know what that means! It’s time for my drive to work.

Okay. So today is the start of a long series. So I talk about how I went to GDC this year, and I gave a speech. So my speech was called “Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons,” it was all about in the twenty years of working on Magic, on the same game for twenty years, what were the twenty lessons that I learned? And what I decided was, instead of just doing a single podcast, I was going to do twenty podcasts. One for each lesson. So I’m calling the series “Twenty Years, Twenty Podcasts.” No, I can’t call it that. (???) Twenty Years, Twenty Podcasts. Okay. How about Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. We’ll try that. So Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts.

Okay. So today is lesson number one. So lesson number one was, fighting against human nature is a losing battle. That was lesson number one. Fighting against human nature is a losing battle.

So one of the things to remember is, I’m trying to make this series more—I’ll talk about Magic as my main examples, obviously, but I’m going to try to make it more general for people who are just—general game design theory. So one of the things that I learned is, so I guess I’ll start with a story. In my speech I always had a story. So I’ll start with my Magic story.

Okay. So it was during Time Spiral, and we had made suspend. So for those that don’t remember what suspend was, suspend allowed you to reduce the cost of your spell, and normally when you cast a spell in Magic, you pay your mana and you cast it right away. Well, suspend it was cheaper, you were trading time for money, money being mana in Magic, and so when you cast it you got it a lot cheaper than normal, but you had to wait so many turns for it to come into play. Technically what would happen is, you would exile it, put counters on it, every turn you’d remove a counter, and when the last counter was removed, it got cast.

So a lot of the Time Spiral cards were suspend creatures. And so what would happen is, let’s say you suspend something for four turns. That means you have to wait turn one, okay, I take off the counter, not yet. Turn two, take off a counter, not yet. Turn three, take off a counter, not yet. Turn four, whoo! I got it. And then players would attack with it. Because they’d been waiting so long. They waited four turns. They wanted to use it. The problem is, when you cast a creature, you’re not allowed to attack with it unless it has haste, because it has summoning sickness, right. Creatures can’t attack the turn you play them. So the problem was, people really have this desire to attack with it, because they felt they’ve been waiting so long that when they finally had access to it, they wanted to use it.

But the problem was, that’s not the rules of the game. The game doesn’t do that. And so we tried to do a bunch of things to communicate to people, “Hey hey hey, creatures have summoning sickness. You can’t do this.” And so we tried a bunch of different templating things, we tried just spelling it out directly in the rules, first we tried like in reminder text, then we realized no one read the reminder text. Then we tried putting it directly in the rules, but no matter what we did, the majority of people just kept attacking with it.

And so we were trying to figure out, how do we keep people from attacking with it? And finally the solution was, stop trying to keep people from attacking with it. Let them attack with it. We gave them haste. All the creatures came in with haste, they were allowed to attack right away.

And the solution to the problem was, instead of trying to make players act the way you wanted them to act, make what you were doing act the way they wanted it to act. So what I said in my speech is, instead of changing your players to match your game, change your game to match your players.

So one of the things in general, there are things in life that are so fundamental that they change the way humans function. Like I remember for example the first time I got an answering machine. So for those that are too young to remember life pre-answering-machine, once upon a time, if someone calls you on the phone, if you weren’t there—remember. This is before cellphones or anything. Phones were plugged into the wall. They were at a location. So if somebody wanted to call and talk to you, you had to be at a location that they knew where you were, and you had to pick up a phone and talk to them.

So the idea was, if I wanted to communicate with somebody, I had to catch them at home. And so it was (???) sometimes, because if I could not catch them I could not talk to them. There were times I had something important to say to somebody, and it could take a week or more to somehow catch them at home.

So eventually I remember I got a gift. I was in college I believe at the time. And my parents gave me a gift, it was an answering machine. Brand new at the time. And the answering machine, (???), someone could call, and if you weren’t home, it could take a message. They could leave a message for you. And that was revolutionary. It really changed how you functioned, because before, if you knew that someone needed to contact you, you had to be near a phone. And once again, it’s before cellphones. Before the phones were on you.

And that was very fundamental, just in the way it acted, the way people responded. Knowing that there was a place by which I could leave information, that someone could retrieve the information, changed how you function.

And then again cell phones came out, and now the phone is on you. That completely changed how you function. Once upon a time, if I wanted to meet someone somewhere, we had to plan ahead of time to know where to meet. And if one of us was late, the others would just sort of wait there, and eventually they’d leave, they’d go “Well I guess they’re not coming,” but there was no way to communicate. Now it’s like, when I get there I’ll call you on your phone because you have a device on you. You know.

And like these are just examples of things that fundamentally changed how humans behave. I’m not saying you can’t do that, it is possible to change human behavior. But it is really, really hard to change human behavior. And so a lot of what I’m saying is, assuming your game is so revolutionary that it’s going to change the fundamentals of how humans function is a bit naïve.

And so one of the big lessons I learned, and one of the things about my speech was, I put the lessons in order for a reason. This was a very important lesson and I wanted to start with this lesson. Because the idea is, when you are designing a game, like one of my ideas if you follow along with my writings and stuff, one of the big things is, and I spend a lot of time on this, which is you have to understand who you’re designing for. There’s a very popular expression that’s “Know your audience.” Well guess what. Your audience is human. And that means you have to understand how humans function.

One of the things that’s interesting, I’ve definitely taken some psychology classes, and my mom for those who don’t know, I mean she’s retired now but was a psychologist, and one of the things that’s interesting if you study psychology is, people are individuals. But there definitely are, as you study humanity, if you study people as a whole, there definitely are a lot of—people function in certain ways. There’s a truism.

Like one of the things that’s really interesting is, they’ll do experiments where they go around the world, and they will ask different things of different cultures, and certain things change from culture to culture. That they’re nurture, not nature-based. That oh, you learned to do something, you’ve learned it, and it’s a cultural thing. And that you go to one culture, and people do it a certain way. And you go to another culture, they do it a different way.

A good example there is, the idea of… there’s a lot of cultural things about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and morals and values. And that tends to be very cultural. That’s what is right and what is wrong can change greatly from culture to culture. But there are other things that transcend that. That are sort of human things.

For example, one of them is emotions. Like when they study emotions, it’s not like “Oh, well some people have certain emotions, some people have other emotions.” No no no, emotions are pretty basic to the human experience. That the idea of being happy or sad or fearful or angry or disgusted, those are all really, really basic human feelings. And so one of the things you find as you sort of do studies around the world is that there’s things that tie humans together.

So, the reason I bring up emotions is, one of the ongoing themes you’ll hear throughout all my talks is I want you to understand your audience and I want you to understand how your audience functions. And so it’s really important to realize that humans, one of the things that unify how humans function is emotions. That it is a common bond that runs throughout all of humanity.

All humans—like, it’s very interesting. They’ve done this thing where they take faces of people sort of expressing emotions, and they go around the globe. They’ll go to places where—they’ll go to the deepest, darkest, like villages in the middle of nowhere who haven’t had outside—don’t even interact with the outside world. And they’ll ask them, like they’ll show faces of “Is this guy happy or sad?” That’s universal. People can look at a human face and know the emotion on the face.

That is not something that is learned, that is something that is intrinsic to the human behavior. I mean, I guess it’s learned on some level. But it’s not culturally learned. Like, happiness is happiness.  All humans have happiness. It’s not like some cultures have happiness and some cultures don’t have happiness.

And so one of the things that, like, one of my ongoing themes that I want to stress here is that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make your game so that you understand the audience as you’re making it. That once again, the idea of “I’m going to make people fundamentally change to adapt to my game” is… like I said. I’m not saying you can’t make games that change people. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to make games that change people. But assuming that your game will change people, assuming that people will just function in a way that is not how people normally function is not going to lead to success.

Now one of the things that’s interesting is, in my job, I’m often called to do things we haven’t done before. So I am called to shock people. And that’s okay. That’s different from what I’m talking about. One of the things I’m trying to figure out is, like when humans are faced with something they don’t know, they have to figure it out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, humans are creatures of comfort obviously. Habit is important to humans. But humans also like surprise. Those who know my… theylike comfort, they like surprise, they like completion, are the basic elements of how humans function.

So it’s not that you can’t do new and different things and try to make people act in different ways. But whenever I try to make something, to fundamentally make people act differently than how they show they normally will act, it’s an uphill battle. And a lot of what I’ve learned in Magic is, when I have a new mechanic, what we try to do is, we like to take our mechanics and playtest it with people that don’t know what we’re doing. Magic players, but… one of the things is Wizards has a lot of employees, R&D is a tiny fraction of Wizards, so we have a lot of people who do play Magic who work at Wizards.

One of the nice things is, if you work on a game, that’s what you do for a living, most people say “Yeah, hey, I should learn how to play the game. I make this game, I should know how to play it.” So most people at Wizards, the vast majority know how to play Magic. And so we have a lot of people we can test on that don’t necessarily know things.

And so one of the things we do all the time is, we will do a playtest, we’ll put words on cards, meaning we will spell out on the cards what the cards do, so you can read the cards, and that information’s there, but then we do no other help. We don’t guide them, we don’t tell them anything. We just let them play and watch what happens.

And one of the things that’s very interesting that I learned not just from watching our playtests, but we do what’s called focus groups, where we get people who are players or non-players or whatever and we put them on the other side of the two-sided glass and then we watch them play. So there’s a lot of times where what you do is you get people to play and then you watch them play, step back and watch them play.

So here’s some things I learned from years and years and years of doing this. Number one is, people don’t really read the card. They kind of read the card, they want to get the gist of what they think it does, but as soon as they think they understand it, they stop reading. Like literally they read enough until they get to the point that they think they know what it is, and then they stop.

And a lot of times, people will make mistakes that the card just tells them how to do it. Like if they had just completely read the card and understood the card, they wouldn’t have had a problem. But they don’t. Humans are pretty famous for jumping to conclusions. And so one of the things that’s really important, like one of the things I’ll talk a lot about is, the reason you want to match expectations is, you just make your game easier for people to learn

That one of the giant things of game design in general is, what I call “barrier to entry.” That there are points where people can check out of your game. One of the biggest times when people check out of your game is when they’re trying to learn your game. That people go “Okay, I want to learn this,” and hopefully this is easy just to learn, and maybe they know somebody who already plays who enjoys it or whatever. There’s something about the game that drives them and they want to learn. They will then give it a shot, and at the end of that period if they weren’t happy, if it wasn’t a good experience for them, most people, not all, but most people will go “Yeah, okay. I tried that, no I’m not doing that.” And so the biggest exist point for barrier to entry, the biggest time when people will leave your game is when they are learning your game.

So one of the things that’s really important is making sure that your game functions intuitively. That your game functions the way people to expect it to function. And that one of the things, and I’m going to hit this theme again and again, is you want to understand what your audience expects and then deliver on your audience’s expectations.

Now, once again. That doesn’t mean you can’t surprise them. That doesn’t mean you can’t do things that are different from what they expect. You can, but you can’t disorient them on every level of your game. Your game can’t be “Nothing is what you expect.” Because I’m telling you, if they play your game and there’s no sense of comfort there—once again, remember. Comfort, surprise, completion. In that order. Okay? This is communication theory. The first thing you have to do is make someone feel comfortable. Nobody wants surprise until they feel comfort.

And so the beginning of your game is, you need to get them to understand the basics of what your game is, so they go “Oh, I see what it… okay, I’ve got it. I understand what you’re trying to do.” And when I talk a lot, for example about ten things every game needs, one of the things that I got into was the idea of your game needs a simple, easy, graspable concept. It’s why I talk about the hook.

Now the hook’s usually something a step above that (???). But inherent in the idea of a hook  is I can sum up what my game is about,  so you can get the essence of what my game is. You know, Magic at is core is fighting with magic. That’s what it’s about. We’re magic users and we’re fighting. You don’t need to know the word “planeswalker,” you don’t need to understand all the logistics of how exactly everything works, that’s in a nutshell what it is. And that sounds—fighting with magical duels, that sounds like fun.

So remember that one of the things when I talk about fighting human nature, what I mean is, you have so many battles with your game. You’ve got to get somebody to learn your game. You’ve got to get somebody to want to play your game a second time. You want to get someone to continue to play your game. You want to get someone to invest in what you’re doing, to learn about your game, to want to get better at it. There’s a lot of things you’re trying to get your players to do. And part of that is, you need to make them feel comfortable. First and foremost. They have to understand what’s going on.

Now, once again, we’ll get to surprise, you have to excite them, you have to do some things they don’t expect. I’m not saying—yeah, if everything is run-of-the-mill, at some point they go “Yawn,” and move on. They might also leave your game because nothing about them entrances… like, here’s the double-edged sword you have to deal with. On one side you have to make sure they can understand it and appreciate it, and that they aren’t overwhelmed by it. But on the other side you want to be enough different, enough novel that they’re like “Ooh, this is fun, this is… I haven’t done this before.” And there’s a balance you want to get there. There’s a balance between being easy to understand and being novel.

So this first lesson, fighting human nature, I’m not talking about the novelty at all. Humans like surprise. Humans like novelty. So this lesson is not “Don’t have novel things.” What this lesson is is, be careful when you make your game, what your audience expects to do, and be really, really careful when your game fights that expectation. Because if your game is fighting sort of what the people’s intuition is, they’re going to keep getting it wrong.

And once again, we learned this lesson during suspend, but I will repeat it one more time, which is it doesn’t matter if you clearly spell out to your audience what they’re supposed to do. Suspend clearly spells out what it’s supposed to do. A little confusing I guess because it had a lot of operations to it, but this idea that oh no no, as long as I explain to my audience, things will be fine, it’s not good enough. It is not good enough. It’s not a matter of just explaining. People—and once again. You will write rules. People will read as little of your rules as they can. People will try to figure out your game without reading your rules if they can help it. And even if they read your rules, most people do not read all the rules. They skim the rules. They want to figure out the thing they need to know, skim to find it, find it, “Good, got it,” and go.

Like one of the things for example with focus testing is I have watched people play games, and not just Magic but different games for focus testing. And it is bang-your-head-on-the-table frustrating at times, because there are things that people will do where they just clearly, they will just not even try to use any of the tools you have to help them learn how to play. You will spend months and months and months, sometimes years fine-tuning your rules to get it to a precision so you can teach people what you want to teach them, and they will just ignore it.

Worse yet, the craziest thing is, they’ll read the rules and they’ll still get it wrong. They’ll even—because they’ll just jump to conclusions. People will jump to conclusions. And really a lot of this lesson is saying is, people have a natural—like, one of the things about writing. Back in my writing days. One of the things they teach you is, there are certain expectations for how stories function. There are certain kinds of stories, certain structures to stories.

And that’s not saying that you can’t ever break those structures, but you need to break them for a reason, and not just to break them. Like you should not write a story where things don’t function the way stories function just to do it. As a general rule of thumb that’s horrible. Doing things just to do them—actually that’s a whole lesson I’ll get to later. You want to make sure that what you are doing naturally flows.

And that’s one of the reasons playtesting is so important, is you want to make sure that what your audience’s gut instinct is, lines up with what you’re asking them to do. Because if their gut instinct is wrong, then you’re going to run into problems time and time again.

And that’s why I think the best game makers understand—oh, so for example, here’s a story from A Whack on the Side of the Head, my favorite book by Roger Von Oech. He talked about how they were trying to figure out—they went to a college, and they were trying to figure out where to put the sidewalks. They wanted the sidewalk to be the most efficient possible. Because there was like a big, giant grassy center court.

And they wanted to put sidewalks in, paths so that people could walk on the paths, but they didn’t know what was the correct way to do it. How did people want to walk? Did they want to walk straight across? Did they want to kind of curve? What was the way to do it? And so the solution they finally came up with was, don’t put any in. Just let people walk across the lawn. And then come back in a month after school’s started and see what’s worn. What natural path did they take? When people had no—the idea was, let people kind of naturally form their paths, and then once we realize that, then turn those into the actual paths.

And I think that is very similar to what we’re talking about here, which is that part of what you’re trying to do on some level is metaphorically what I just explained, you want to figure out what pathways your audience wants, your players want, and sometimes what you do is, put it out there and see where they go. What do they want to do? How do they want to do it? And that one of the things you have to be open with as a game designer is being open to, they may not do it the way you first thought to do it.

And the reason is that you have a game designer’s mind. There’s things you’re trying to solve, and there’s a lot of attraction to things that are simple, there’s a lot of attraction to things that combine components to lower complexity, like there’s a lot of things you as a game designer want to do to make things, I don't know, feel better, and a lot of times those instincts are dead on. But sometimes they tend to fight what players want to do.

Sometimes you’ll talk yourself out of, like, well… like a good example is—I mean, I actually use this example later on, for a different lesson, but I won’t (???) specifics of it, but there was a mechanic that someone playtested it, and they used it a certain way. And they’re like, aren’t players just going to do this? And my answer was, oh no no, they’re not going to do that. That’s not… I don’t think they’ll do that. I think they’re going to do this other thing. And it’s like, well, but that’s—if they want to win, this is the way they should do it. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but that’s not the fun way to do it, they should do it this other way. And I just didn’t listen to them. And really what he was saying was, look, I’m going to try to do what I’m going to do, and this is natural, this seems like—according to what you’re doing, this seems like what I’m supposed to be doing.

And I talked myself out of it. And you really, really have to listen to your playtesters. Your playtesters are going to give you golden information about what is and isn’t matching their early intuition.  They’re not going to word it like that, by the way. They’re not going to say “I have an intuition this.” They’re just going to say that things feel off, or things feel wrong.

And once again, the reason you want to do a lot of playtesting with different people is, any one individual might believe a certain thing or feel a certain way. But what you’ll find is, people as a whole will tend to lean in one direction. That human nature will kick in, and usually there’s something that the majority will do. It happened with suspend.

Now, suspend is a good example. There are people I met, Erik Lauer being one of them, who is complete—that’s not how they function. Erik is a very logical person. And to him, look, there’s a rule. When creatures come into play, you can’t attack with them. Well, why does this one work differently than that rule? Our thing is hard for him. It didn’t intuitively match how he thought the game would work. But he was the minority, the majority of players didn’t feel that way, didn’t function that way, so we made the change because we wanted to match where the majority of players were at.

But be aware, when you’re testing, that there’s going to be individuals that don’t follow that. It’s not 100% of your audience. Human nature is consistent overall, but it’s not consistent on a person by person basis. There might be things that most people do that one individual person can’t do. Which is why playtesting with a group of people is important. You want to not just try one or two because you can get swings when you’re using a small sample size. You need to test enough.

So another thing, by the way, let me talk about complexity a little bit. One of the other big things that as a game designer you’re always facing is the specter of complexity. When I talk about there are exit points, one of the big things that causes exit points is complexity.

People as a general rule don’t like to feel dumb. And that when they can’t get something, when they’re trying to play a game or do whatever, if at some point they just can’t understand something, they quit it. Because it makes them feel bad. That you don’t want to feel bad about yourself, and there’s a point at which you’re like, “I don’t understand this. I don’t want to deal with it anymore. It’s making me feel bad about me.”

Now, be aware once again, there’s a big difference between what we call core and casual gamers. Core gamers are gamers that like gaming is their hobby. They are dedicated to gaming. They are hardcore. They are serious about their gaming. And a core gamer is willing to spend a lot more time and energy figuring something out. They’ll play much more complex games, they’ll play more (???) game without completely understanding what’s going on. Like a core gamer will often play the same game multiple times not completely understanding it so they can figure it out. But that’s a core gamer. That’s someone who like gaming is their thing.

A casual gamer is somebody who gaming is fun, it’s usually more social, but it’s something that they enjoy doing, but they don’t do it as often. Usually. And a casual gamer, it’s more about the experience, it’s less about sort of conquering the rules. That the gaming is a means usually to some other things, not a means unto itself. Where the core gamer, the game is a lot of what they’re shooting for.

So with a casual gamer, one of the things is, their bar is much lower. They’re not going to play multiple times. Like, one of the things I used to say is, you need to be able to give an elevator pitch of your game. And what I mean by that is, describe your game in just a few sentences. To get somebody to play. “Why should I play this game?” Well, here is in a very short amount of time, in just a few sentences, something that makes me go, “Ooh, that sounds interesting.”

Now, your elevator pitch doesn’t have to be verbal. Like one of the things Magic can do is like, “Look at these cards. Ooh, these are really pretty.” I mean there’s different ways to draw people in. Could be visual, could be aural, I mean could be—there’s lots of ways to do it. But you need something that says, okay, in a very short period of time. In under thirty seconds, I can make people go, “Ooh, that’s interesting, I want to know more.”

Then, when you’re teaching them, what you want to do at least for a casual player, you want to sort of have, ehh, really no more than five minutes to explain the rules. And even then, the shorter it can be the better. A more core gamer is willing to like, play through an entire game without really understanding what’s going on, but a casual gamer, if they finish the first game and they don’t understand what’s  going on, meaning A. they didn’t have fun, and B. they don’t understand things, they’re more likely to walk away.

So another thing that’s really important about sort of matching intuition and matching human nature if you will is, the more that you do what the player expects you to do, the less there is to learn. The easier learning is. That if I want you to play a game, and my first intuition, the first thing I would do is wrong, is not playing the game correctly, well then I’m just more likely to bounce off the game. But if I do something and my gut instinct is to do something and that’s just the right thing to do, it’ll feel more natural.

And that’s a general sense of—I don’t think people think of games this way, but people—for example, use my dressing room metaphor. I want to buy a piece of clothing. So I take it and I go to the dressing room and I put it on. And I look at it. I go, do I like how it feels? Do I like how it looks? You know, am I happy with the experience that is this piece of clothing?

I would argue that games, there’s a dressing room period, that when you first enter a game, first time you play a game, you are trying that game on for size. Do I like it? Do I like how it feels? Do I sort of like how I look playing it? And the thing is, the more negative emotions that are attached to that experience, the more I feel awkward or I feel dumb or I just feel out of sorts. You know. If I play the game and I’m happy and I’m laughing and I’m having fun and I’m—you know, it is creating positive emotions, then that’s a good dressing room experience. I’m like, ooh, this dress looks good, or this shirt looks good, or these pants look good. And I’m buying it.

But if I have a negative experience, and I’m like ugh, I don’t understand, or wait a minute, that doesn’t feel right, or if I have some experience where I’m ill at ease, where something just feels off, I’m more likely to give up. I’m more likely to go ehh, not for me. These pants, not for me. This shirt, not for me. This dress, not for me. Whatever I’m trying on, not for me.

And that I think one of the things when I talk about fighting against human nature is an uphill battle is, you don’t want an uphill battle. You don’t want a battle. When you’re trying to get somebody to learn a game, you want to be careful.

I mean, once again. It’s not that players can’t have any stress in the system, but you want the stress in the right places. You want them, like for example, if there are a lot of interesting decisions and there are hard decisions to make, that’s not necessarily going to drive a player away. I mean, it can, depending on the kind of player, but pretty much like, oh, here’s a neat and interesting decision. That is more fun. But “I don’t understand how you play,” that’s not fun. You’re willing to accept a little bit of it, because in learning there’s like okay, I don't know, and I need to do things to know, but fundamentally, there’s a point at which you’re like okay, I just don’t get it. Okay. Moving on. Not for me. Not my pants. I tried it, it’s not for me.

And that one of the things that is so important about matching the player expectation is that when things make players disconnect, that that’s a negative emotion, that, you know, leads them closer to stepping away from your game. And so one of the things that I talk about not wanting to fight human nature is, you want to sort of have your game, when someone plays it, just it feels right.

And—I mean I’m going to get into this a little bit in my next—notice these podcasts are not consecutive.  But I’ll be doing the series from time to time. Next time I’m going to talk a little bit about perception, so this overlaps that lesson. But you do want things to feel correct for your audience, and it’s really important that when they first start playing, you want your rules to feel correct. You want your gameplay to feel correct. And part of doing that is understanding expectations and meeting expectations.

Now, once again, that is not saying you can’t surprise people. That is not saying you can’t do something they don’t expect. That’s fine. By the way. That is fun. Surprise, correctly used, is a lot of fun. But the place not to put that is where it’s like, well, people would expect to do this, so I’m just going to change this for no reason. I’m just going to change it to change it. I’m just going to do this to be different. That is very dangerous. And like I said, I’m not saying you can’t do that, but there needs to be a purpose behind it. You need to be making the change very much because you (???) to make the change.

So one of the big—I’m trying for each of these talks to sort of talk (???) takeaway. So my big takeaway is the importance of playtesting, and the importance of understanding. So it’s not just a matter of playtesting, it’s a matter of when people play, watching people, and try to get a sense of where there’s discomfort.

I mentioned this before in another podcast, but one of the signs of whether or not your game is succeeding is by watching the emotions of the players. Are they experiencing things that are—in general, are they having positive emotions? And it doesn’t mean for example, like yes people can get puzzled by things and people can have moments, like I’m not saying that all your emotions need to be happy emotions, although be careful, in general you don’t want too many unhappy things. There’s times and places for games like that, I’m not saying you can’t make them. But you need to be careful of that. But you want to make sure that whatever it is you want your players to experience.

Like—and this is an upcoming lesson too, these all tie together, which secretly is the last lesson. You want to make sure that when you are playtesting and watching, you want to understand what are you trying to evoke out of your audience and then watch and make sure that is happening.

And that another thing is, after you’re done playtesting—this is important. Once you’re done playtesting, the next thing you want to do is you want to get feedback directly from your audience. In R&D we tend to write up notes, usually when you do focus testing you talk directly with them. You have somebody who’s an expert at asking questions—usually not you—come in and ask the questions.

It’s important, by the way, that the people answering the questions don’t think that you are the person who has anything to do with the game if you happen to be the one asking the questions. Once again, I’ll stress it again, if people believe that saying something bad will upset the person they’re talking with, they won’t say it. It’s just general human nature that—don’t fight human nature. Generally that if I feel like oh, I say something and I am affecting the person right across from me, like, oh, well—you’ve learned societally to not do that. So if you are the one asking questions about your game, do not let them know that you’re the one who made the game. It will warp their answers.

But anyway, talk to them. Get feedback. Find out what they like and didn’t like. And then, if something didn’t work for them, try to figure out why it didn’t work. What about it. A really good question to ask people, if they do something incorrect, is what did they expect to happen and why did they expect that to happen. You will get very illuminating answers.  A lot of times they’ll say, oh, well I expected this because blah, and you’re like oh, that’s a very good point. Okay, let me take that into account. And you can learn a lot of things—(???) funny, as I’m talking I’m realizing all the other lessons I’m hitting. But I will come back around. Anyway, I’m not too far from my daughter’s school today, so I’m just going to wrap this up.

So anyway, you do not want to fight human nature if you can help it. And that one of the things that—in short what that  means is, when you make your game, you want to understand the essence of your game, what is your game trying to do, you want to have the nice elevator-pitchable version of it that you can explain to somebody, and then you want to make sure that your game flow-wise matches the expectation.

Meaning when you give the elevator pitch you’re going to set expectations. Oh, this is really important too. A lot of matching human behavior is proper expectation-setting. That you want to make sure that your audience knows what they’re expecting so they can expect the right thing. If you set false expectations, a problem you run into is, people will be ill at ease, they will feel bad because they expected one thing and got a different thing.

So sometimes, with human nature, it’s a problem of not properly setting expectations for what to expect. That if you set it properly, it will match human behavior, you just set it up incorrectly. That’s a very common problem.

So anyway, I’m hoping today that you see your audience is human, they have certain expectations, it is your job as the game designer to understand those expectations, and pick your battles carefully. Once again, I’m not saying you can never sort of fly against expectation or intuition, but you really gotta be doing it for a reason. And don’t do it a lot.

In general you should understand what your audience expects, how they expect it, and then use that as a template to figure out how best to make your game. And I’m almost to school, I will leave you with this thought, which is you the person making the game are trying—your goal is not to test your audience necessarily, your goal is to provide an experience for your audience, and that involves testing them, but you’re not testing what they’re willing to do to play the game. That’s not where you want to test them. You don’t want to test them to see are they willing to do this. You want to test them, and here’s the things they want to do, and test them in the space that they want to be—where the fun lies. Once again I’m talking about lots of other lessons.

But anyway, human nature, it’s important to understand it, you need to understand human nature to be a game designer, follow that through, understand what your players want, use playtesting to understand that, talk with them to understand it, and then, once again. Do not change the players to match your game, change the game to match your players.

Okay, guys, I’m now in my parking space. You all know what that means. It’s the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time.