7/15/16 Episode 349: Twenty Lessons, Part 4--Piggybacking

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 podcast series. So it’s number four. [Part One, Human Nature; Part Two, Aesthetics; Part Three, Resonance] So, so far I did “fighting against human nature is a losing battle,” number two was “aesthetics matter,” number three was “resonance is important,” number four is “use piggybacking.” So this is a tricky podcast because I’ve already done a podcast on piggybacking. So I’m going to try to make this one a little bit different. Obviously if you’ve heard the other piggybacking, there’ll be some overlap between the two. But I’m going to tie this one in to my lesson a little more and I’ll talk some stuff that I used in my actual speech. 

So anyway, we always start with an example from Magic. So my Magic example is from Theros. So in Theros, it was a Greek mythology-inspired set, so we made our own world, but the world was inspired by Greek mythology. And one of the things we do in top-down sets like that is we like to have individual cards that are just pure top-down designs. That are reminiscent of something people know, so we made a card for Trojan Horse.

For those that might not know the mythology, Trojan Horse was a story where there was a battle, the battle of Troy, and they were trying to figure out how to defeat the Trojans. And so what they did is, they built a giant horse. And left it as a gift. Because the Trojans had a walled city. And so they could protect themselves. And so the Trojans were like, “Ooh, a gift, a wooden horse. Okay, awesome.” And they bring it inside their walls. And it turns out that the soldiers from the enemies were inside the horse. And then at night they come out and are able to attack the city. And that’s how they won the Trojan war.

So anyway, the Trojan Horse is a classic tale. So I think it was Ken Nagle that made it. So Trojan Horse—I don’t remember the stats exactly. It was like a 4/4 or something. But it was a creature that had defender. And when you give it to your opponent—I’m sorry, when it enters the battlefield, you give it to your opponent. But it’s got defender so it can’t attack you, it can only block. And then every turn, you get—you the person who cast the card,        the owner of the card, get a 1/1 soldier token. So the idea’s pretty cute. It’s like, I get this thing, I give it to my opponent, but then soldiers start pouring out of it.

So anyway,  it was obviously really cute, and early playtesting—in early playtesting we just use normal design names, so early in playtesting it was really popular. People really liked it. Ha ha, Trojan Horse that’s cool, and people were quite excited. And the feedback was really good. People liked the card a lot.

So at some point, we started getting sort of more real names. Now, there’s no Troy, the city of Troy doesn’t exist in Theros. Akros was our equivalent. Akros was our—there were three cities, and Akros was our—not, exactly Troy, the closest equivalent, it was the more military, the Spartan city if you will. And so instead of being Trojan Horse, it became Akroan Horse. Because it’s Akros.

And then, somebody on the creative team came up with an idea that said, hmm. What if just to shake things up a little, what if it wasn’t a wooden horse? What if we just changed it a little bit to give it a little more identity of our own? So instead of being a horse, they said what if it was a wooden lion? That would just—it’s still a wooden creature, it’s still the armies, all the things are there, just we’ll shake it up a little bit and make it a lion. So instead of being Trojan Horse, it became Akroan Lion.

Then an interesting thing happened. In playtests, I started getting negative comments about it. People were like—they just didn’t get it. Why would I have this card, and it’s defender, but I give it to my opponent, and it makes tokens every turn? And while people loved Trojan Horse, they really didn’t like Akroan Lion. They just didn’t like it.

And what I realized was that we had crossed the barrier where people understood what top-down thing we were doing. That when it was a Trojan Horse, people said, oh, well I see, okay, I got it, it’s Trojan Horse, I got it. And all the mechanics made sense. But when we removed that, when we were enough removed from it, that we weren’t making the direct tie to Trojan Horse, people like didn’t understand. The mechanics didn’t make any sense to them. They were confusing.

So eventually what we did is, we talked to the creative people, and they said okay, yeah, the lion’s not working, they changed it back to a horse, and so you look at the picture, it’s a wooden horse, it says Akroan Horse not Trojan Horse, but you got it. You figured out it’s Trojan Horse.

So this gets into our lesson, which is use piggybacking. So let me explain what piggybacking is. So last time, the last lesson we talked about was resonance and the importance of resonance. And what I explained in that lesson was, there’s a lot of value for making use of things that people already have some identification with.

That when you make use of—zombies was my example. When you make use of something that the audience comes with pre-built-in sort of emotional connection to, you as a game designer get some value kind of for free. You’re playing off of something your audience has feelings for. It wasn’t even something you generated, but something you can take advantage of. Because it is—one of the tools of game designers is making use of whatever resource is available. Well, one of the resources available was your user’s brain. Things they already have associations with. That was the last lesson.

So piggybacking says, okay, let’s take that to the next level now. There’s another really important thing that resonance does. And what that is, is it’s a teaching tool. So one of the things you have to understand is, when you are trying to make a game, you have a couple enemies, if you will. A couple things you’re battling against. One is, is ignorance. One is, is you need your audience to learn what they need to do. But, and this is the tricky party is, you don’t have infinite amount of—you only have so much space what people can learn. That one of your sort of bottlenecks, if you will, is your audience has to understand it. That if your audience was supercomputers, you could do whatever, and they could absorb it all. But humans have to learn it. And if people—people are willing to put a certain amount of energy to learn your game, and then they’re out.

Like one of the things I try to explain to people is, when someone is first approaching your game, first learning your game, they are going to go, okay, I’m going to learn this game. And they’re going to give it a shot. But if you don’t manage in the first time playing the game to capture them, they’re on. They’re not going to play again. There’s so many games to play that if I play it and I don’t quite get it—there’s some die-hard people, like let’s say you have a game that all your friends love, okay, maybe you’ll spend a little extra time because you’re like, well, I can see so many people love this game, okay, maybe I’ll spend a little more time learning it, but without some emphasis, really strong emphasis, most people, if they don’t have a good time playing your first game, they will walk away and never return.

And there are multiple reasons why someone might not enjoy the first time playing. But one of the biggest is, they just don’t know what’s going on. That there is what we call “barrier for entry.” In fact, I’ve talked about this quite a number of times in this podcast. Magic’s number one, I think weakness is the barrier to entry. It’s a complex game. There’s a lot going on. Once you understand it, it’s really fun, (???), I mean it’s a great game with all sorts of wonderful things going for it.

But it is daunting when you first pick it up. It is—I mean, one of the things that makes it such a compelling game is its depth. But its depth is a weakness when you’re first starting to learn, because there’s a lot going on. And as I often talk about, when teaching someone to play Magic, it’s not important that you teach them everything the game is, because that takes forever to learn. It’s teaching them enough that they have a fun experience.

But one of the things, and this is why piggybacking is so important is, one of the first challenges as a game designer you have is, you need to have what we call an on-boarding experience. You need to figure out for a way to play the first game and have it be an enjoyable experience. Because if they don’t have a good first experience, they’re not coming back. They’re not gonna play your game again.

So what that means is, that you need to figure out how best to help people learn how to play your game. So, piggybacking says, okay. Here’s what—piggybacking is the idea of using resonance as a tool to teach. And what that means is, if I come to play a game, and the game makes use of knowledge I already have, then my barrier for entry, the amount I have to learn is less than if I didn’t do that. Because if I say to you, oh, this thing is like that thing you already know, you go, oh. Okay. And my Trojan Horse is a good example, which is, that card in a vacuum is a very complex and confusing card. But with the template of “It’s the Trojan Horse,” it becomes a much easier card. Because when you know it’s a Trojan Horse, you’re like, oh, I know the story of the Trojan Horse, it’s telling me something, I look at the mechanics of the card, I can match it for what the story is, and all of a sudden, these things that seem incongruent, that don’t seem to make sense, make perfect sense.

And that is the difference. I mean, the reason I use that story as my starting thing is, it’s a perfect example how, with or without the filter of piggybacking, it goes from fun and delightful to confusing and unfun.

And so part of what I’m going to talk about today is how to use the tool of piggybacking. I mean the reason it’s its own lesson, I mean resonance was lesson number three, is lesson number four is saying, okay. Hey, resonance does a lot of good things, I talked a lot in the last lesson about sort of how you use it to get emotional responses, that people have—if you’re trying to make people feel something, and you use things they already have feelings for, makes it easier.

The same is true sort of in rules and knowledge, which is, let’s take Magic as an example. We want to teach people how the mechanics of Magic work. Well, the more we can use real life experiences—so for example, the simplest mechanic in the game of Magic to teach, I have found, is flying. Why is that? Because I’m like, okay, I have a creature with flying. You have a creature without flying. Well, what would happen? What do you think would happen? And I’ve done that a couple times. And the person’s like, oh. Well, the flier would fly over the non-flier. Okay, and? Okay, well then the non-flier couldn’t block it because it’s flying in the air.

And like, they literally can tell me. I just tell them what it is, and I can walk them through explaining the rules for it. Because the rules are so endemic to what the flavor is, that it’s not even—I mean, if you think about it, flying has rules to it. There are actual rules you need to learn. But the flavor is so strong that all I have to do is say, hey. You know this. And they do know it. And that makes it much more approachable. So one of the things to think about is, when you’re making your game, how can you do that?

Okay, so my one other example, this is my one other overlap with my other piggybacking podcast, but it’s such a beautiful example I’m going to do it one more time, I’ll try to switch up the story a little bit but I apologize to listeners that heard the other piggybacking one.

So George Fan is the creator of Plants vs. Zombies. He is a big Magic player. So one day, George Fan swung by the offices to see the offices. One of the cool things, by the way, is, there’s a lot of people who are Magic fans who—like, we will have a lot of sort of celebrities swing by who want to sort of see the offices. We don’t normally do tours but—so we’ve had, you know, bands and actors and all sorts of people who have swung by. Anyway, it’s kind of cool.

Anyway, so George Fan was there, and he was there with—well, we were showing him around. So I was showing him around, often, I will often play host. I know I give a good tour. And so we were having lunch, and I was talking about Plants vs. Zombies. And so I was really curious how he chose what he did. Like, why plants, why zombies. So what he was explaining was, the game is basically a tower defense game.

So for those that don’t know their video games a tower defense game is a game in which it started as—you had a tower, originally, when it started. And like, there’s armies attacking you. There’s forces attacking you. And you get to put your forces in the way. And the idea is, you can’t let their forces get to you. And there’s like a long, winding path and you get to put things wherever you need to. But it was a kind of game where you’re sort of defending yourself. Called a tower defense game.

So George was trying to make sort of a simple tower defense game. He was trying to take a lot of what was fun about a tower defense game but sort of break it down and make it a little less complex. Because tower defense games were a little—not really sort of mass market-y. They were a little more core gamer. And so he said, okay. I mean, he simplified it, and he made just lanes, and he made a much more lighter sort of flavor to it. But the question is, why plants, why zombies?

So what happened was, he needed to have—in a tower defense game, when you plant units, they are where you put them. They don’t move. They stay located in the area you put them. And always—whenever he played tower defense games, the flavor fail he felt was, you would have an army, let’s say, and you had put a legion of soldiers somewhere. Well, let’s say I put someone in this one spot. And right next to them there’s a problem. But nope, they can’t move, they’re only in that spot, and it’s like, come on soldiers, they’re right there. Right next to you needs help. Come on, can’t you move?

And he understood why in the game, from a strategic standpoint you don’t want them to move, but flavor was a fail to him, that it felt like they were flavorfully capable of moving, and it seemed like they would want to be able to move, why couldn’t they? And so he looked to find something that would convey to the audience that it couldn’t move. And so he came up with the idea—what he said (???), okay. What could I use that once you put somewhere, you have no expectation it could move?

And he came up with the idea of a plant. Literally, plant. It’s in the name. It’s planting. It can’t move. That if I plant something, I have no expectation—if I put a flower somewhere, that flower can’t move. It’s literally planted in the ground. Of course it can’t move.

Likewise, he was trying to figure out—the enemy in a tower defense game just has to be this slow, endless wave of creatures. And he wanted something that just sort of reinforced that you would expect a slow wave of creatures. And he realized that zombies did that. Zombies captured that flavor.

So Plants vs. Zombies, I mean, it sounds like after the fact, like oh he’s just picking two comical things, but he wasn’t. He was really saying, I need to convey important things in my game, and so Plants vs. Zombies is not random thing vs. random thing, it’s thing that conveys the most important quality vs. thing that conveys the most important quality.

And the reason I use that example is, it’s such a good example of piggybacking that—it’s so good. As a matter of fact, when piggybacking is doing its best work, you don’t even understand that the choices made were made for educational reasons. That when you are really sort of using piggybacking at its best, it just feels like pure flavor. It doesn’t feel like, oh, I was trying to be educational, I was trying to help learn something, and that’s why piggybacking is very valuable, which is, when players go to judge something, they actually don’t judge it on how complicated it is.

Meaning they don’t go from ground zero and say “How much is there to learn?” They start from what they know and look at the differential with how much do they have to change. Not how much does the game—you know, like if you sort of took a game and wrote everything down about the game, so zero to that information, that’s so much information. But that’s not actually how people view how complex something is. Because they erase everything they already knew.

So the more things they come in where they already knew something, the less complicated it is. That’s why for example, games do this thing where they reach a high cultural awareness. Games get simpler to learn. For example, I will use Monopoly as my example here. That because Monopoly has taken on at a cultural level, meaning there’s just concepts in Monopoly that before you even come to Monopoly, you might be aware of, because it’s so used in pop culture that there’s just qualities that like I don’t have to learn. Because I already know aspects of the game before I come to the game.

So piggybacking plays in that space of, when you’re trying to lessen complexity, one way is just to have things be less complex. That is number one. You just say, okay. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to make a very simple game.

The problem is, that’s really hard to do. And really simple games usually have a depth problem. Your tic-tac-toe, pretty simple game. Not hard to learn, ehh, not that deep. You know. There comes a point in tic-tac-toe like “I’m never gonna lose again.” Not particularly a fun game anymore.

And so there are a couple ways you can do this. So the biggest one, I’ve talked about this before, is what I call “lenticular design.” Which means that I can design things in such a way that the beginner doesn’t see the complexity that later more enfranchised, advanced players will see. And so the idea there is, I’ll make something that on the surface I think I understand, and then as I play more, I realize, oh, there’s layers to the onion, if you will. That as I peel one thing off, there’s more things to learn.

Now, lenticular design is good, but there’s limits to how much you can do. There’s still things they have to learn. The other big tool is piggybacking. Is saying, I have some complex game, I have some complex ideas, let me marry these complex ideas to things the players already understand so that I am helping them.

So I’ll use—I’m going to use the metaphor of the metaphor. Very meta. Metaphor-meta. Okay. So one of the things that—I read a lot on creative thought and communication. One of them they talk a lot about, about creativity, is the importance of the metaphor. And the reason is, when somebody’s trying to understand something, if you can give them a context that they already understand, it becomes easier for them to understand. That you need a bridge. That if I have “I don’t understand this idea,” I say, okay. I’m going to help you understand the idea. And one of the best bridges to help you understand, is the metaphor. Because what the metaphor says is, I’m going to take something you already know, and use that as a teaching tool to teach you what you don’t know.

And if you notice, for example, I like using metaphors a lot. I’m very metaphor-friendly. And the reason is, I understand that when—I’m in Communications. I’m trying to, in my podcast, in my writing, I’m trying to explain things to you guys. Well,  in order to explain things to you, I tend to use either examples or I use metaphors. I want to use something that you go, oh, I see what you’re saying, okay, that’s easier for me to bridge and understand it. And so metaphors are this neat tool to sort of help be a bridge.

So piggybacking is the same basic thing as a metaphor. Saying, okay. And so one of the things when you have a game, one of the things you look at—I mean, there’s a couple different ways to make a game. Number one is, I start top-down, meaning—Richard got to flying not because he needed to figure out a way to make things unblockable and said “Ooh, what could I call this?” No no no. He actually said—I mean, I’m sure he knew he needed evasion, but he was just trying to capture things and go, oh, these things fly. Maybe I should have a mechanic that represents flying. Pretty sure that’s how Richard got to flying.

But sometimes we come up with mechanics first. So when you’re sort of doing top-down and you’re starting with flavor, well, your flavor’s guiding in the first place. But when you do what we call bottom-up design, where you start with mechanics, a lot of what you’re trying to do there is to say, okay. Is there some flavorful thing that I can tie this to so that I can make people understand it? And then sometimes you tweak things so that it makes better sense.

And a neat thing about looking how Magic works is, we always try to make sure the mechanics and the flavor are interlinked. But we sometimes start with the flavor and sometimes start with the mechanic. It depends on the kind of design we’re doing.

But the reason that’s so important, the reason that I want to have a very cohesive feel between the mechanics and the flavor, is the game is just easier to learn if there’s a direct tie. If the mechanics mean something contextually beyond just what they do in the game.

And one of the things in general flavor does, if I talk about piggybacking, a lot of this is the value of flavor. For example, when I talk about the ten things every game needs, one of the things I said is flavor. And one of the things that flavor did for you, I explained, is that it helped give you context. That flavor, like a metaphor, is really good at giving you context. Because if you pick flavorful things that you’re aware of, you go, oh. Oh, it’s a dragon. Well, I know something about dragons, I’ve seen dragons.

For example, I know dragons fly. I know dragons breathe fire. I know they’re big. And so all of a sudden, it’s like you make a few key choices, and that flavor helps your audience just have a better jumping-in point to understand.

And so one of the things we try to do all the time—so a lot of piggybacking is intrinsically tied to trying to make the flavor of a set make sense. And like I said, sometimes it’s top-down, and sometimes it’s bottom-up. But no matter what, no matter what order, before you the audience sees it, I want to make sure that I’m like, okay. What does it do? What does this represent? What’s the flavor? And make sure that that ties together.

Another thing I’ll always do is not only will I do that on a mechanic-by-mechanic basis, I will do that on a set-by-set basis, meaning how do these things tie together? What’s the overall thing going on? What is the world we’re trying to capture? What is the story we’re trying to capture? That I’m trying to use a lot of different components to sort of tie it all together.

Because the idea is, when you come and play a game—play Magic for example, I want you to be able to skip over the “I don’t understand what’s going on” part. I want you to get to the “Ooh, I get it, that’s fun” part as quick as I can. And so the more that I find the flavor for doing that, the more that I’m able to sort of say, “Get it? It’s blah,” the better.

Now, another important thing about piggybacking to understand is that—like I said. Piggybacking A. Makes it easier to learn, because you’re front-loading information that’s already known, 2. It makes it more fun, because people in general enjoy flavor, so using flavor as a—I mean not—the beauty of piggybacking is, not only are you making it easier to learn, you’re in general making it more fun. Now, one would argue that making things more fun makes them easier to learn. But there is a very key important thing there.

So, the big question now is, okay. I want to use piggybacking in my set. How best to do that? Okay. So let me walk through the means by which you can maximize your piggybacking.

Okay. First off is, you want to figure out where there’s disconnect. Like—sometimes piggybacking comes on because you’re doing top-down design. And there, assuming that you’re trying to make sure that your mechanics reflect what you need mechanically, it’s pretty easy. Like, okay, I want to represent this thing, so like let’s take Theros or Innistrad where I was doing a top-down design. Theros being a fine example. Like, okay, I’m doing Greek mythology, I’m trying to get the sense across, I was making sure there’s individual cards that capture individual ideas, I then tried to make those larger ideas, you know, adding the gods in or adding in the sense of what heroic meant, and people going on the trope of the (???) hero, and playing in all that space allows me to sort of craft a mechanical through-line that people—made them understand what the set did. That’s top-down. Top-down’s a little bit easier, because you’re starting from a place of matching some flavor.

Bottom-up’s a little trickier. The key on bottom-up is, is saying, okay, I have this gameplay I like. Zendikar’s a really good example. Okay, I have this (???) I like. It was all about lands for us. And then I’m like, okay, well what does that mean? I have a world in which you care about lands, and I worked with the creative team, and then Doug Beyer of the creative team actually came up with the idea of, what if this was adventure world? What if—because one of the things you want in the, like in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or Raidersof the Lost Ark or the adventure things is, you want—it is the hero vs. the environment a lot of the time. That like, I’m the hero, but everything around me is trying to kill me.

And so like, what if we made a world where the world was trying to kill me? It’s a very dangerous world. And we said, okay, well that seems like an adventure world. Like, who would go to a world where the very world itself is kind of trying to kill you? And like, adventurers would. Why? Okay, there’s some reward, there’s treasures or something. But that—we now start getting into trope space that were familiar. And the idea that like, I’m in a place so inhospitable that the very environment is fighting me.

And then once we got that, and said okay, that seems like interesting space, and it plays into what we’re doing, and then what we did is, we then built things to match that flavor. So even when we do bottoms-up, at some point we try to figure out what the flavor is, and then use some remaining portion of what we’re designing to fill in the gaps to reinforce that flavor.

So like, in Zendikar, we came up with traps and allies and quests. That were all things that were adventure-based things. And so once we sort of made mechanics and found flavor for most of those mechanics, we then filled in by doing some top-down stuff to then reinforce it. Like, okay, this is adventure world, what else would I need to do? And then, by having the whole thing interconnect, we really help make you—A. the play is fun because it represents something you know, and B. all of a sudden now, okay, what are quests? Oh, I get it, I’m going on a quest. What are allies? I get it, I’m making an adventure party. What are traps? Oh, of course, people are trying to stop me. And all of a sudden it’s like, you start sort of making the pieces to it, and then it just clicks together and makes it easier.

And one of the things that’s funny is that when I first did my piggybacking, first I wrote an article on it and then I did apodcast on it, one of the things I found interesting is, how many game designers sort of were doing exactly that, but had not really ever put a name to it. That it wasn’t something they were consciously thinking about, it was something kind of they had learned to do.

And one of the things that I—one of my goals of stuff like, you know, podcasts like this, you know, my Twenty Lessons podcasts is saying that there’s certain rules that experienced game designers kind of just learn, but it’s not always labeled. It’s not always put down somewhere for people to see.

And I think that when I look around and I see—like, for example, Richard Garfield made an awesome game called King of Tokyo. And one of the neat things he did is, he said, you know what? I need to do this component. Well, I’m going to take something that is reminiscent of another game that you know, you know, it’s reminiscent of—he took Yahtzee and said, is there a way to take the dice rolling of Yahtzee—in King of Tokyo they’re not normal dice. It’s not—you’re not doing what you’re trying to do in Yahtzee. Meaning Yahtzee’s a pattern recognition thing. You’re not trying to do that. What you’re trying to do there is, you need to roll dice to acquire resources, it’s how you get your resources.

But he said, you know what? People are used to—I’m going to give you five dice and three rolls—he followed rules that people already knew, and all of a sudden, like when you go to roll the dice, it’s just like, oh, yeah. Yahtzee die rolling. It’s a thing you already know.

You know, and I see a lot of great games that say, okay, I’m going to take existing elements of games. This is, by the way, I talked a lot about flavor piggybacking, this is mechanic piggybacking. Where you say I’m going to take another game, in which there’s some component you understand—like I’ve seen games use all sorts of different components, where you’re like, oh, oh, this is like that game I know, this is a component. And they’re using it in a different way, but because I understand, oh, like when you’re playing King of Tokyo, if you’ve ever played Yahtzee, the dice just become so much faster because I get to shorthand it.

So there also is mechanical piggybacking which is important, which says, okay. People have done a certain thing enough times that there is a cultural understanding of how an element of a mechanic works, and I can use that. I’ve seen games that make use of melds from card games or make use of just—board games that say oh, I understand that when I land on somebody, I make them go back, or—you know, there’s different games that sort of say, oh, there’s a vernacular for games.

And the way I compare it to is in the movies, one of the things when you study movies is, they show you the first time somebody did something, and like, and there is a language that movies use that evolves over time. And eventually what happened was, once somebody did it enough and audience learned it, then you had this free thing. That it wasn’t something new I had to teach the audience, they already had learned it.

And games have a similar quality, which is there’s just famous games that really function a certain way. In fact, there’s plenty of games that take advantage that people know Magic to make it faster to learn their game. And that games build upon games. It’s the nature of how things work. That game designers are inspired by games to make new games, and they make their own version of things and they do different things, but they take elements and components to build a new thing. And so that’s another big way you can use piggybacking, is not just a flavor piggybacking, but a mechanical piggybacking. Like I said. Anything you can use in which my audience knows something and it makes it easier to learn the new thing, gets you to piggybacking.

So—but anyway, I’m almost to the end of my ride today. So my big lesson today is, when you are thinking about piggybacking, basically, think about your game, and say, of the things I have to teach, is there something that there’s a pre-existing way to teach this thing? Either there’s a flavor that matches it so strongly that people understand the flavor, or there’s a mechanical thing that you’ve seen before or done before.

It doesn’t even have to be a game, by the way. It could be something people learned from somewhere else. But is there some mechanical component that people have learned, that people know how to use something, and so it makes it easier to use when you’re approaching this game. Sometimes that’s component pieces, sometimes where that’s using game mechanics from other games, but it’s saying, okay, you understand this.

And that if you can take what people need to learn—remember, once again, that teaching somebody is not zero to the whole game, it’s what they already know plus what they don’t know. That gap is what you’re trying to teach them. And so the more you can take things you are trying to teach them, that tie them to things they already know, and interlink those together, the easier it is for people to learn your game. And that you lower that gap. And a big part of the barrier to entry is lowering that gap. And so piggybacking is a super valuable tool that you can use to make your game easier to learn. So that is why piggybacking is very important. And my lesson number four, use piggybacking.

Okay. With that, I’m driving up to Rachel’s school, so we all know what that means, it 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. I hope you’re enjoying all these lessons. Bye-bye.