7/1/16 Episode 345: Twenty Lessons, Part 3--Resonance

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 twenty lessons series. So I did a podcast at GDC this last year, it’s twenty years, twenty lessons about twenty of the lessons I have learned in twenty years of making the same game. And so I’ve decided to take each of these lessons and put it into its own podcast.

So I’ve already done the first two ones. [Part One, Part Two] I talked about how fighting against human nature is a losing battle. I talked about why aesthetics matter. Well today, I’m going to talk about why resonance is important. So I’m going to talk about resonance, what it is, and then talk about what it matters for gameplay and why you should care about it.

Okay. So, to begin with, let’s talk about the example I gave. For each of my lessons, I started by telling a story. So this story goes back to Innistrad. Actually, Innistrad and Dark Ascension. So what happened was, one of the techniques that we learned—because Innistrad was my first time doing top-down design.

Not Magic’s first time, Magic had already done both Arabian Nights and Champions of Kamigawa, but I was on neither of those design teams. So the first time that I was on a design team, let alone running one, leading one, was Innistrad.

And so the idea was, walking in, I knew that we were trying to do Gothic horror. And that I wanted the design to capture the essence of Gothic horror. So one of the techniques that I tried is—so Jenna Helland was the creative representative for both Innistrad and Dark Ascension. One of the things we like to do is, we like to make sure that we have a representative from the creative team to sort of be there to make sure that as we’re building the design, that we’re sort of staying true to what the creative is. What the story is. What the art is. That we’re matching the overall sense of the creative. And especially true on Innistrad, because it’s a top-down design. We really wanted to make sure that the design of the set and the feel of the world were really linked up.

So one of the assignments I gave to Jenna was, I said here’s what I want you to do. Come up with names that just sound like really good names for the set. Get good evocative names. And so Jenna did that. And so what she did is, she brought the names to the meeting, and what we do is we literally would go around, people would pick a name, sometimes we’d randomize the names, and then we as a team would design cards for it. There’s a whole bunch of cards we designed. Evil Twin was designed that way. Bump in the Night was designed that way. Wooden Stake. Graveyard Shovel. Black Cat. There was a whole bunch of cards, and just we said, okay.

Like, Black Cat is a good example, we said okay. We want to do a black cat. Well, what would you expect a black cat to be? And we walked through, we’re like, okay, well black cats are unlucky. So clearly, somehow crossing this cat in some way is unlucky. And like, well, what if somehow, when it dies—crossing the cat is messing with the cat, and when it dies, something bad happens? Well like, what could it be? Oh, what if it’s discard? What if we make it a zombie cat, because we’re in a Gothic horror set, and like, okay, don’t mess with the black cat. It was literally a black cat. And it was unlucky to kill it because it then made you discard a card. And so we would sort of stop from the top and work our way down. And we ended up with a lot of really good cards.

Okay. So why did I bring up this example? Well, it gets us to a concept called “resonance.” So here’s the way I like to explain, use my little metaphor, is that I’ve already talked in a previous podcast about how your audience is human. You have to understand human behavior, human perception, okay. You’ve got to design to humans. That’s who your audience is.

Well, another important thing to understand about humans is, they come pre-loaded. What I mean by that is, when somebody comes to your game, they’re not a blank slate. It’s not as if they had no life experiences. It’s not as if nothing had already shaped how they see things. And so one of the tools you have available to you is not just the tools that you have at your disposal external to the project, but also you have your audience’s pre-loaded knowledge.

And what I mean by that is, I’m going to take zombies as my example. It’s what I used as the example in my speech. Okay, let’s take zombies. We put zombies in Innistrad. Okay. But we didn’t just—zombies weren’t this completely unknown thing. That most of the audience has pre-knowledge of zombies. That they’d interacted with zombies through pop culture, for example. They had seen TV shows and movies and read books or comics—they’d done a lot of things in which they’ve interacted with zombies. That zombies meant something and they felt about zombies in a certain way.

One of the things about resonance—a couple things. First off, there is expectation. That when you play around in a space where the person knows the thing, they’re aware of the thing, then it allows you to shortcut, and A. it has some pre—there’s ideas that come with it already. When people think about zombies for example, when you go to movies and TV and stuff, that zombies are this slow, prodding(?) force.

Like the thing I always like to say is, zombies are interesting horror villains. In that no one zombie’s particularly that threatening. That if you have a zombie, any human probably can handle one zombie. Especially if they have a weapon. You know, zombies are slow, they’re dumb, they’re not really organized, you know, they’re after your brains, but ehh, you know, any one zombie, a human, especially a human with a weapon, can handle.

What makes zombies dangerous is it’s not that there’s a singular zombie, singular zombies aren’t super dangerous, what makes them dangerous is that they come in large numbers. That they’re just going to overwhelm you. Yeah, you can kill some zombies. You can kill a zombie. Five zombies. Ten zombies. Twenty zombies. At some point they just overwhelm you. At some point you literally just can’t kill anymore zombies because you’re so exhausted from killing whatever number you’ve already done. And that that’s the scary part of zombies is that they come, never-ending wave of zombies. That there’s always more coming. That zombies are just kind of associated with like a zombie apocalypse. It’s not as if you fight a zombie in a world in which, ehh, there’s one zombie to fight. No, you’re in a world in which most everything has become a zombie. And, zombies also have the scary element of, as they kill people, they turn them into zombies. And so your zombie army just grows. As the zombies win, they just make more zombies.

Okay. All that, by the way, pre-exists. Magic didn’t invent any of that. All that—long before Magic, before 1993, all that was true. So resonance brings with you just pre-existing knowledge. And it brings with you sort of an emotional relationship with the subject at hand. That zombies behaving a certain way—so like one of the things when I was making the zombie deck, you know, the zombies in Innistrad was, I was able to say, okay. What was the expectation of zombies? What do people already know about zombies that they would expect zombies to do? And what is the emotional connection to zombies? How do zombies work?

You know, how do I get people to—like for example, I was trying to create a sense of fear in the set. I was doing Gothic horror, I wanted people to be afraid. So how do I do that? What do I do to make that happen? And like, okay. I’m using monsters. Well, monsters inherently are scary. And, when I take zombies, I go okay. Zombies are scary. Why are zombies scary? Well, they’re not scary because any one zombie necessarily is particularly scary, they’re scary because they keep coming.

Okay. Well, that gave me a lot of vantage point for how to design them. Because what I said is, I didn’t need to make them particularly big. It wasn’t like any one zombie is particularly threatening. In fact, here’s a really good example. One of the things we wanted to do—in fact, we did this in the design meeting. Is we said, okay. I want a big, scary monster for each of the monster tribes. I want, like—what’s the scariest version of the monster you can think of?

 

So for vampires, I made Count Dracula. Became Olivia Voldaren. But I mean, the idea—it’s the lord or lady of the vampires. It’s the leader of the vampires. This is not just a vampire, this is someone who commands vampires. Who could turn you into a vampire. Who has the ability to control you. Somebody who is scary.

So the interesting thing was, when we were trying to come up with the scariest zombie, what we ended up making was not a singular creature. We made a spell that summons thirteen zombies into play. And then, because it has flashback, it could summon thirteen more zombies into play. So what was the scariest thing we could do with zombies? Make twenty-six zombies.

Now, note. Each of them are 2/2 zombies. Not—like, Scathe Zombies, where it all started back early in Alpha. It’s not that scary, a 2/2 creature, you can deal with a 2/2 creature. You shouldn’t be afraid of a 2/2 creature. But twenty-six 2/2 creatures? Okay, now it gets kind of scary. And that was the thing we were working with, is the idea that part of what made our zombies scary was, we wanted to create the sense that zombies keep coming.

Endless Ranks of the Dead is another really fun card we made. And that idea is, however many zombies you had, it made more zombies. I think it was half rounded of the zombies. So if I have four zombies, it makes two more zombies. And then if I don’t deal with that, I have six zombies. Now it makes three zombies. And I have nine. Next turn, assuming I haven’t dealt with that, it makes four more zombies. It just keeps making zombies, and if you don’t deal with it, the zombies start coming in more and more number. It creates waves of zombies.

So the reason this is so important is, I was able to create a really cool, interesting, flavorful gameplay, and the reason I was able to do that was, I wasn’t making something up from scratch, I was following expectations. So that’s the thing to remember, that resonance—there’s a couple really important things. A. It helps you as a designer because it gives you something that the audience already understands to build off of. It just makes it easier for you.

And it gives you—because the audience has a relationship with it, has an emotional relationship, it has a built in sort of—you’re able to sort of—I always talk about what you want to do in a game, is you want to sort of, you’re creating emotional states in your audience. You’re trying to make them feel something. Part of having fun is you want to sort of put them through the emotional wringer if you will. In playing a game, you want highs and lows to happen.

Well, okay. Well, I was doing Innistrad, Innistrad was about making people afraid. So the question was, how do I do that? Well, let’s take monsters that they already know. Like if you notice, for example, Innistrad, all the monsters were very—it’s not like we made up brand-new monsters you’ve never heard of. It’s not like, oh, there’s four different kinds of monsters. There’s the “gigapols” and the “plamangos” and the “fremangers”, like if we had just made up monsters, they’d just be like, okay, what’s this monster?

But no no no. We made vampires. Werewolves. Zombies. Spirits, which were ghosts. Right. We made real, like monsters that people have equity with, that mean something to them. And that it allowed us to not just fine-tune what we were making.

For example, it’s a lot easier to just say, okay. Let’s design vampires. Vampires mean something. And I’m able to make mechanics that sort of take place in that meaning. And that’s one of the things that I think is most important in understanding why resonance is so important is, as a designer you are trying to evoke something out of your audience. Well guess what. If they already have associations built in—you know what I’m saying?

Like, one of the things that I’m trying to get to today is, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You don’t need to start from scratch. That one of the things about being a designer is, you use the tools at hand. And resonance says, hey, work has happened before you. People have told stories before you. People might have made games before you. People have done things which you are building upon.

In fact, one of the interesting things about Magic is, there’s resonance in Magic. Forget resonance outside of Magic. Just, we just made, I don't know, a hundredth Magic set or something. We’ve made a lot of Magic sets. And so the idea is, when we make something, a lot of things already have equity. A lot of things already mean something. That not only are we using resonance outside of Magic, we’re using resonance in Magic itself. That a Giant Growth means something to a Magic player. And that when I do a twist on a Giant Growth, there’s already expectations for what a Giant Growth is.

You know, a lot of what we are doing is, we are taking things of flavor, like the game, for example, let’s go back to Alpha. You know, Richard borrowed very liberally from a lot of fantasy sources. You know, you can see influences of Dungeons and Dragons. Of Tolkien. Of Greek mythology. That there’s a lot of places where he took monsters that meant something. You know. That a lot of what Alpha did and did really well was, it said, okay. Let’s take existing things people know, and then use that as a framework to build off of.

 

And a lot of the reason Alpha was really popular was, people had associations with a lot of what he was doing. Not that Richard never made things up. Magic has  made up its own creatures. We have Atogs and Lhurgoyfs and Vedalken, and there’s things we’ve made that are uniquely our own. But a lot of what Magic is going for is, we are taking the full breadth of the fantasy archetype, a little bit of the horror archetype, a little bit of the science fiction archetype, that we’re taking things that people recognize and have some association with, and then we’re using it to build around. We’re using it to build off of.

And for example, the reason that Innistrad I think was so powerful was, you came into it with expectations. Oh, vampires, well I know what to expect with vampires. Yeah, those are vampires. Zombies, I know what to expect with zombies. Yeah, those are zombies. And that was a real important of what we were doing. I think resonance is true in anything. I think top-down design even more so, because you’re building off of flavor.

Okay. So, that leads us to the next big question, which is, okay. You have resonance, you’re building off what the audience already knows, but there’s something a little more to it beyond that. So one of the stories I tell is, Aaron Forsythe, he’s the senior director of Magic R&D, he’s my boss, he was tasked with doing Magic 2010. And he came up with a realization. And this was a big turning point for Magic. Which was, he realized that when he was looking at Alpha, and looked at sort of where we were, that we had drifted a little bit. And that one of the big things that he really attached to was the idea of resonance. The idea of the importance of resonance.

And a lot of what I think Magic 2010 did is, you know what? This is a core set. A. he came up with the idea that we could make new cards, which is pretty big. But he also came up with the idea of, you know what? We really needed to be hitting—let’s make things people know, and make clean, cool, definitive versions of them.

And that one of the things that we try really hard, is we want to make sure, when we’re making something—so for example, archetypes talk about, for stories and for characters, the idea is that there are certain things that humans just associate and work with. If you ever go to, like TvTropes is a good example, where TvTropes talks about all these tropes, archetypes and tropes. Archetypes tend to be structural, and tropes tend to be components. But they’re all part of the same thing. Which says that there’s certain things the audience just relies on. They’re shorthand.

Like one of the things is, humans sort of—there’s certain kinds of things that they’re comfortable with. Certain kinds of stories. And when you take anthropology, and you apply it to storytelling. Someone like Joseph Campbell, a classic person. He said, okay. I’m going to study the stories that people tell. And what he realized was, it really was the same stories. That for example, Jesus Christ. Star Wars. Harry Potter.

Those are all the same structure. The same basic story you’re telling is the same story. It’s somebody who’s a little lost in the world, who comes to realize that they have an importance that they don’t understand. And through their journey, which is really rough at times, they come to see the hero that they are.

And you’ve seen those stories many, many times. Talk about the journey of a mythic hero. That is something that is really core to our identity as humans. There’s something about the idea that I’m leaving a dreary life. But wait a minute, actually, I’m important. That even though it seems like I’m not important, not only am I somewhat important, I am very important.

And that some of this speaks to us. Like, we want to believe that sort of the fantasy is, if your humdrum life, like wait, no no no. I matter. I’m really important in some way. And that the story—like, a lot of stories, sort of (???) things that are cathartic in nature.

And so the idea of archetypal stories, archetypal characters or tropes, is this idea that there are things that really resonate. There are things that really connect to people. And I know people—the first thing is go, oh, those are just clichés. And like, well, be careful. I mean, clichés come out of overuse of archetypes and tropes. But a lot of what they say is, the reason clichés are clichés is, there’s a kernel of truth there, that it gets overused, but it means something. It represents something.

And a lot of the cool idea of tropes is, you want to give a current spin to it. You know, a lot of what Magic tries to do is, we try to figure out what the archetypes are, what the tropes are, and we give a modern twist to it. Meaning it’s not that we’re supposed to do it as always done and not sort of put commentary onto it. One of the great things about stories is, what you do is you take a known archetype and then you put the modern twist, meaning you give the modern sensibility to the story archetype.

And the classic example there is, I’ll just use a recent example. Not that recent. But somewhat recent. So Shakespeare, for example, made a lot of plays. (???) So there was a—you have to go back about ten years, ten, fifteen years. But there was a bunch of—there was a series of Hollywood films where what they did is they said, okay. Let’s take this famous story. Usually with Shakespeare, sometimes it’s classic literature. And let’s apply it to high school. Let’s tell some kids to—you know, some stories about kids. High school students. About adolescents.

But let’s take Shakespearean models and tell a story based on Shakespearean—so what they did is took classic sort of archetypal stories, and told modern-day stories with them. You know, like Clueless, the movie Clueless is the novel Emma. Ten Things I Hate About You is Taming of the Shrew. And it was very interesting to say—I mean, West Side Story goes a way back, but West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet. That you can take these classic tales and you can tell them in a more modern setting, and it doesn’t lose any of the—in fact, it takes what is strong about the archetype and then adds a modern sensibility to it.

And each of those is a real good example of somebody who’s like writing from resonance. And the thing that’s important, one of the things that we do now, that’s the reason I bring Magic 2010 up is, it really said to us, okay. One of the things we do now when we build a set is we say, where is the vein of resonance? That every set has to have something where, like, okay, there’s some recognizable things we can work off of here.

Because one of the things we’ve come to realize is, if we make a world in which you’ve seen nothing, and this is even true of Magic itself, which is, if you come in and you have nothing to center yourself on, you have no place to start, it is hard to appreciate something new. Once again, if you go back to my teaching about communication theory. The first thing is comfort. Second is surprise, third is completion. But comfort is first. Meaning if everything is disorienting, if you can’t get a foothold, then you will have problems sort of digesting something. That if you go to something and everything’s so weird and different, that there’s no vantage point, that you just go “I can’t relate to it.”

So one of the things that’s important for anything, story—like, in writing a story, one of the things you want is, you’ve got to figure out the emotional beats of the character. What is the character going through? I have to find a universal issue that then I can—because, let’s say the main character’s having a problem with one of their parents. Let’s say their mom. Okay. Who can’t relate to having a problem with their mom? [NLH--…] You know. There’s just a dynamic relationship between you and your mom. And when you watch the character have this problem—it’s not that the problem’s exactly the problem you have, but you can relate to it. Who can’t relate not having some conflict with their mother? You know. Everybody. That just… it’s a universal human thing.

But at the same time everybody loves their mother! That there’s some relationship there, and that there’s conflict, but there’s a dynamic between relationship with mother that’s really universal. And the conflict about his relationship with his mother, even if there’s fantastical elements, there’s something that’s unique about it, at least the audience can relate to that experience.

And the same is for Magic. I talk about this a lot. That I want to make sure that enough of the gameplay that you’re playing, you’re familiar with. That I want it to feel like a game of Magic. I mean, it’s possible for me to take the game of Magic and stretch it, and though technically it’s the game of Magic, it would be so far away from a normal game of Magic that you’re like, whoa, what’s going on? You’re disoriented. And I’ve done that. I’ve actually made designs where early design, I’ve pulled too far away. People are like, whoa. This is a little too trippy. I need it more attached.

So one of the things we do now is when we design worlds, we say to ourselves, okay. We need to have some amount of resonance in it. What is the resonance? Now, some of the time, it’s top-down design. Okay, we’re doing Gothic horror world. We’re doing Greek mythology world. Okay, we’re doing a world in which there’s (???) resonance. I mean, part of our job there is to build off it, like okay, I want it to be a Greek mythology set, what do I need to do? Another time it’s based in the setting.

A good example might there be Khans of Tarkir. Khans of Tarkir wasn’t a top-down set, but we used a lot of cultural references. It had a lot of Asian influences. For example, like the Mardu had a lot of Mongolian connections. The Abzan had a lot of Turkish elements to it. The Jeskai were Shaolin monks. You know. That we really went and took real-world references to pull off of, and those also—Shaolin monks, like you think about, you got to cinema. You go to pop culture, and like, okay, you’ve seen the bald monk who’s trained in a temple fighting kung fu and learning the way and balance of the world. You’ve seen that. You’ve seen—that is a resonant trope that you’ve seen. And like a lot of people joke, like one of the pictures we had for Jeskai where people kept joking that it was reminiscent of Kung Fu Panda. And like, well, it’s the same source material. There’s a certain posing, that that trope space had a certain visual look to it.

That’s another place, by the way, we’ll also go for resonance, not just how it feels but how it looks. That’s another big place. I know Jeremy and his team are always sort of figuring out, what’s the resonant look angle? We’re trying to look like something, but we want it to be something you recognize. It’s not just weirdness, it’s like, oh, okay. Well, we’re in Tarkir, we’re doing Eastern Asian stuff, like what do the temples look like of the Jeskai? What does the forest of the Sultai look like? We want to tie into things so you have some expectation for it.

And other times sometimes what we can do is, we can figure out sort of the gameplay. Like, I know with Zendikar that we were playing very much into Adventure World, and a lot of it was like, okay, let’s take games like Dungeons and Dragons and movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and sort of get a sense of feel for those. It’s not even that we were—I mean, we did a little bit of matching exact things, but also sort of trying to match the feel of things.

And the idea now is, whatever we do, wherever we go, we sort of say, okay, where’s the resonance? Where’s the tropes we ca play around with? What’s the trope space? And it’s a very common thing now, when we’re building a world, we’re like, okay. What about this world is familiar?

In fact, one of the most important things we want to do, and this is—once again, this is communication theory 101, but you want to say what is familiar, and what is not familiar? So I talk about how—the three-beat in Hollywood. Where you take two existing things, and you put them together to show the context of what it is. That—I’m trying to think of a good example. I mean, like, for example, let’s say I wanted to make a movie that was all about—it was a fantasy world where dinosaurs ran rampant. I might go, “Lord of the Rings meets Jurassic Park.” Jurassic World, if I want to be up to date. And the idea is, oh, well Lord of the Rings says fantasy epic adventure, and Jurassic World says dinosaurs, and you go, oh, okay, you’re doing some sort of fantasy, but fantasy in a world of dinosaurs.

And what that does in Hollywood is it says, okay. I’m going to take “A”, a known quantity that’s successful, and “B”, a known quantity that’s successful, and smash them together. And the intersection of them, that’s a brand new thing. And so Magic, one of the questions we’re always asking ourselves is, what is the resonant thing and what is the new thing? And the new thing should tie into the resonant thing. But that’s something we’re always conscious of.

When I say resonance is important is, we don’t design a Magic set anymore without understanding what resonance we’re trying to tap into. What is the thing where the audience—like, if you look at Magic 2010 forward, you know, we really made an effort of going, okay. Like, when we reveal the name, we always show what we call the key art, which is one singular image. And so normally what you have to do is you get to see the name of the set in its—whatever treatment of its logo, and you get to see this piece of art. And just from the name in logo, and the piece of art, normally people go, aha! Like, smiles come across their face. They have a sense of what—not that they know everything we’re gonna do, but they understand the general area we’re aiming in.

That when you saw Innistrad, and just saw the name of Innistrad and the picture of Liliana sitting on the throne , you’re like, oh. We’re doing Gothic horror. Or when you saw Elspeth with the (???) hydra, and you saw the name for Theros, you’re like, oh, we’re going to Greek mythology world. That when we’re able to do that, it really invokes and gives a sense of the feel of the world.

And the reason for that, the reason that that singular image, that singular name and logo is—we are trying hard to make sure that we are connecting and doing something. And so a lot of the point of today is that part of doing your job as a game designer is, you want to evoke strong reactions out of your player base. You want to do something where they get excited.

And guess what. Before they even came to you, there’s things they were excited about. That you don’t have to create your excitement from pure scratch. That you are allowed to build upon existing things. That the audience already has things that mean something to them. You don’t need to start from scratch. Part of what you are trying to do is you are trying to create emotional feelings. You’re trying to sort of bring something to the table to get them excited and invested.

And clearly, clearly part of that is you have to put your own component in. I am not saying that you can just copy 100% and have something that will be successful. But what I’m saying is, likewise, you don’t need to 100% make everything. That there are pre-existing things your audience has that you could work off of. And that that is very much—that is as much a tool as any other tool you have at your disposal.

Sometimes people don’t think of their audience’s pre-existing mental state as a tool. You don’t think that, you know, because your audience comes with things already—like, I know some people are like, well, but you didn’t earn that. Somebody else made awesome zombie movies and zombie shows and zombie comics, and made them fall in love with zombies. Somehow like, well, you have to make them fall in love with zombies on your own (???), like, no no no, they fell in love with zombies, that’s great. I (???) zombies, and clearly, by the way.

Our goal was not, in Innistrad, to make—we weren’t trying to make Walking Dead  zombies, we weren’t trying to make Zombieland zombies, we weren’t trying to make World War [Z] zombies. We weren’t trying to make, you know, Plants Vs. Zombies zombies. We were trying to make Innistrad zombies. Magic zombies.

And we worked really hard to sort of—like, for example, the skaabs. PICTURE That’s a real—I mean, honestly it’s using  Frankenstein as a model, but they don’t look like Frankenstein. That is a very sort of unique element that we’ve created. You know. And we’ve created a whole world in which there are—there’s two different types of necromancers. You know, there’s ones that raise the dead and ones that build the dead. Like, Gisa and Geralf are like, they’re brother and sister, sort of represent the two ways to make zombies. We built a cosmology around zombies. The zombies in Innistrad are Magic zombies and have a Magic feel and do a Magic thing.

It’s not that we made zombies—we didn’t just copy somebody else exactly, but we took elements that they had introduced and they had sort of made popular, and figured out how to spin that to give our thing—you know, we took the archetype, if you will, and put our modern sensibility on it. We made it ours. That’s true of the vampires, that’s true of the ghosts, that’s true of the werewolves, that we made our version of them, but we didn’t just start from scratch, we didn’t just make—“Well, our vampires and our zombies and our werewolves are unlike any you’ve ever seen before.”

No. Like, you expect certain things out of your zombies. And we have to understand how the resonance is saying, what does the audience expect, and how can change it? So how can you sort of take the known and combine it with the unknown to make something that together is exciting, that’s understandable, but it’s something that people can latch onto. Because if you make things that the player has no handhold to start with, they’ll never get attached. They’ll never—you need to give them the starting point, and resonance is the perfect place.

That if you can say okay, the audience, humans as a whole come into this with some understanding, let’s play off that, put our modern sensibility on it. West Side Story was not exactly Romeo and Juliet. But it has a framework of Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed lovers, people that fall in love whose families hate each other. The group they come from hates the other group. That’s powerful stuff, that goes down through core identity. It talks about love and talking about having people that don’t accept it. I mean, it really speaks to a lot. And so by using resonance, you are able to build off it. Once again, you have to put your own spin on it, but it is a very important and valuable and very successful tool to do that. So that, my friends, is why resonance is important.

Okay, guys, I’m now dropping off my daughter. So we all know what that means, it 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. Bye-bye.