8/12/16 Episode 356: Twenty Lessons, Part 5--Interesting vs. Fun

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the parking lot! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work. I gotta drop off my son at camp again.

Okay. So today is another in my series, Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. So this is based on my GDC speech that I gave, talking about the twenty different lessons I learned in twenty years of making the same game. Magic, obviously. So lesson number one, I already did, I talked about fighting against human nature is a losing battle. Lesson number two was aesthetics matter. Number three was resonance is important. And number four was use piggybacking. But number five, which is today’s talk, is don’t confuse “interesting” with “fun.”

Okay. So let me—this is a pretty complex topic. And one of the nice things about doing a podcast is, sometimes in my speech, like I had like, you know, three minutes per topic. So I would have to sort of go through it. This lets me stretch out a little bit, talk about it in a little more depth. And this is definitely one of the lessons that I think will—having a little more depth will help quite a bit. Okay. So what do I mean when I say don’t confuse interesting with fun? So first, let me tell my story, (???) start with a Magic story.

Okay. So the very first set I ever led was Tempest, and then I led Urza’s Destiny, and I led Unglued, but the next big set I led, the large set I led was Odyssey. And at the time, I was really interested—so one of the things that happened early in Magic was, when Magic started, nobody knew anything. And one of the interesting things about Alpha I talked about is how everybody was kind of a new player. Nobody really had figured it out yet. And it was neat in the early days, to slowly watch people figuring out how Magic, you know, worked.

So this one man, named Brian Weissman, friend of mine actually—so Brian lived in San Francisco, and he was the first person to sort of build a deck that got a name. It’s actually called “The Deck.” It became so popular in San Francisco that just people talked about, “Have you seen The Deck? Have you played against The Deck?” And other people would build it.

And one of the things that Brian really builds his first deck around is the idea of something called card advantage. Now, I’m going to give a very simplistic version of card advantage, if you actually care about it, it’s a lot deeper. I’m giving the simple version here to tell my story.

So the idea of card advantage is, you have cards. You have cards in your hand, you have cards on the battlefield. And the idea is, whenever you can do something that gains you in the number of cards you have between cards in hand and cards on the battlefield, that’s advantageous. That the idea for example is, if I can play a card, and my one card destroys two cards, (???) two-for-one-ing, that’s good. Because I used one card but I got rid of two of your cards. I’m up a card.

Or, I can just draw cards. I can use one card to draw two or more cards. I can go up a card. So there’s certain things you can do that sort of gain you what’s called card advantage. In which the idea behind it is, if I’m just ahead of you on cards, if I’m drawing more cards than you or destroying more of your stuff than it’s costing my cards to do so, I’m gaining an advantage. That having more cards is advantageous. That’s the idea behind card advantage.

And Brian’s whole deck is really built around the idea of taking advantage of card advantage. And—one of these days I’ll do a podcast on The Dojo. But The Dojo was the very first—the Magic Dojo was the very first website dedicated to Magic. Of any size. And it was very much about sort of Magic strategy. It was a place where people could post their thoughts about how Magic worked and how it clicked and—so one of the neat things about it was, it really was a chance for people to sort of learn for the first time on a grander scale.

And so one of the things that I was fascinated by is as people discussed things and the idea of card advantage and card tempo, and all these sort of theoretical things happen, it was fun to explore and learn them.

And so one of the things that I got in my craw for Odyssey was, that card advantage—the advanced players had really learned that card advantage was important. And I said, you know, what if I took this concept that everybody sort of assumed was absolute, and proved that it wasn’t? What if I messed with card advantage? That was kind of the thought behind it.

So I made the set Odyssey, which had a strong graveyard theme. The two main mechanics in it was I had flashback, first set I did flashback, and had threshold. So threshold was the mechanic that said, if you have seven or more cards in your graveyard—the creatures would have two states. Or cards. Mostly creatures. But later we would do—actually, were there threshold non-creatures in the first set? [NLH—Yes.] I’m not sure if Odyssey had non-creatures. We later did that.

But anyway, the idea was, if I could get to seven cards in the graveyard, it upgrades. So like, one of the (???) examples was—what was it called? Krosan Horror, I think? [NLH—Krosan Beast.] So it was a 1/1 squirrel that turned into an 8/8 beast. Although it was always a squirrel and always a beast. The creature types for it. And the idea was, it was a 1/1 that became an 8/8.

Okay. Meanwhile, we had a lot of cards that enabled you to get cards into your graveyard. So for example, there’s a card called Patrol Hound. So Patrol Hound said, “Discard a card: Patrol Hound gains first strike until end of turn.” So at any moment you could always give first strike to this creature, it was like a 2/2. It was like a 1W 2/2 I think? [NLH—Yes.] But anyway, you could give it first strike any time you wanted, as long as you were willing to discard a card. It didn’t cost any mana.

So what ended up happening was, that was an enabler for you to get cards in your graveyard. And some of the time, the correct strategy was to throw away cards—you didn’t care, like sometimes you would throw your whole hand away to Patrol Hound, not that you even cared if it had first strike. You just wanted to get cards in your graveyard. Because if you had enough threshold cards out, all of a sudden, you know if your 1/1s become 8/8s, you could really have this giant switch.

And so it really did this thing that was backwards from how Magic had traditionally worked. The idea that it’s advantageous to throw your hand away, that’s kind of crazy. And I was really enamored with the idea of, oh, you know, you think this is the way Magic works, but it doesn’t. Magic is a surprise, it’ll get you, you know, it’ll surprise you.

So the one problem I ran into was, okay, you want to throw your hand, make your card better? A lot of players didn’t want to throw away their hand. We created an environment where we really were testing the bounds of what you could do, and a lot of players just didn’t like it. Odyssey did very poorly from the public.

The funny thing is, in retrospect, it was a very, very Spikey set, and there’s a lot of fans, because if you understand all the nuance of what’s going on, there’s a lot of cool things there. But if you don’t, it’s just making you do things you don’t want to do. Okay. Which gets us to our theme today, of don’t confuse interesting with fun. So what was going on here is—so let’s dive in a little, the difference between interesting and fun. This is a terminology that R&D came up with a while ago that we talk a lot about.

Okay. So, there’s two different types of stimulation. There’s intellectual stimulation, and there is emotional stimulation. So intellectual stimulation is like, “Hmm. Interesting, interesting. Very interesting.” And there’s fun, which is like, “Oh ho ho! This is fun!” And a lot of times what happens is, we—so intellectual stimulation has to do with sort of, you’re mentally—you’re examining how you think about things. You know.

And one of the ways I talk about Magic is, there’s a difference between looking at a card set—like, when we first preview cards, and playing the cards. Because when you’re looking at the cards, you get no visceral feeling, really. I mean, it’s mostly about (???), what do I think about it? I’m not in the act of emotionally enjoying it as much as I’m kind of thinking about it.

So when you look at a card set, there’s this intellectual stimulation goes on. Oh, I see what they did there. That was an interesting choice. That was an interesting decision.

But when you’re playing cards, it’s much more of an emotional response. I do something. Something happens, and the game turns, and, you know, there’s a strong emotional response. And so one of the problems in designing Magic is that the first time people see the cards is in card form. It is just—you can fall into this trap of saying, okay. I’m going to intellectually stimulate the audience instead of emotionally stimulating them.

And so here’s where my three minutes sort of—why I need a little more time. I wasn’t trying to convey that intellectual stimulation was a bad thing. It is okay to intellectually stimulate your audience. That was not the point of my lesson. The lesson wasn’t, “Intellectual stimulation: bad.” My point was that intellectual stimulation and emotional stimulation work very differently and have very different effects.

One of the things about intellectual stimulation is it’s obviously cerebral, it’s a little quieter, it’s more sort of tickling the brain. But it evokes a very different response. Emotional stimulation is something where you’re making people feel strong things. Okay? And the point I was trying to make in it is, they do different things.          And when you’re making your game, one of the things I always talk about for game designers is, every time someone plays your game there’s a better chance they’ll play again.

So for example. If someone has played your game a hundred times, the chance of them playing a hundred and first, really good. But if they played one game, the chance of them playing a second is way, way, way less than if they played a hundred.

And one of your goals as a game designer is, you want them to play your game, and at the end of playing it, you want them to want to play it again. You want to make a game that they want to keep playing. You don’t want to have a game they play once—and so one of the things is, what makes people—so like for example, when they’ve done studies and stuff about sort of like—what  makes people come back to a brand? Or what makes people come back to a location or a vacation spot, or, you know, what gets people to have a positive memory of something?

And what we’ve found is that it is much more emotion-based than it’s intellect-based. I’ve talked about this before, that like, humans really like to think of themselves as intellectual creatures. We do. We do. We’re top of the food chain because we’re so smart, we have big brains and opposable thumbs, and—but the reality is that we make so many more decisions based on emotions  than we do on intellect.

And that I think what happens is, a lot of times, people sort of want to stimulate the audience, and so they go, well what does it matter how I stimulate them? I’ll just stimulate them intellectually instead of emotionally. And the problem there is, if your goal is to get them to play your game again, if your goal is to say, okay, I want them to play the game, and then play it again, the emotional stimulation is more valuable there than intellectual stimulation.

Now, this is not to say that intellectual stimulation can’t create a positive emotional response. I mean, it can. But, when you are trying to sort of make your game, you need to recognize that it’s important to emotionally stimulate your audience. You want to create moments that have emotional resonance with them. That mean something.

Because what happens is, when you look back—so this is a thing about how memory works. When you look back, let’s say you went to the beach for the day. And you look back and you go, did I have a good day at the beach? What comes across stronger is not the physical-ness that happened at the beach, but the memories they created. Meaning, let’s say for example, you went to the beach and you mostly had a good day. But right—you know, at one point near the end of the day you step on a starfish.

Okay. Now, did you have a good day at the beach? No! I got stung by a starfish! That was horrible! That was very emotionally—it was a very negative emotional experience. Probably also physically hurt. Or I just went to the beach and I didn’t emotionally connect. The things I had there, I was lonely, or I had some feeling that wasn’t a positive emotional thing. That when I look back on a memory, I sort of say—I sort of like, ooh, was I happy, was I not? That you sort of look at the emotions of what happen. And a lot of gauging how memories are and how experiences were was you sort of thinking back on the emotional experiences. How it made you feel.

Now, there is—I know in Myers-Briggs there’s a whole scale of touch vs. feel and do you perceive things by how they emotionally make you feel or how they physically make you feel. [NLH—This is not true.] So there’s a spectrum here. I’m not saying—but in general one of the things I know they do when they look at memories is that people tend to weigh their emotional responses more. People tend to say, oh, something happened, it made me sad, oh, I don’t like that, I was sad.

And the key here is, when you’re making a game experience, you want at the end of the game—so the thing that makes people understand whether or not they want to play again. So one of the things we do when we do testing with people, playtesting and stuff, like external focus testing and things, we’ll have people play. And then one of the most important questions we ask them at the end of the game is, do you want to play again? Because if the answer is no, you’re in trouble. Your game’s in trouble. That you need to make a game that people play, and then upon finishing it, want to play again. And so a big part of doing that is making sure that you create a fun emotional experience.

Now. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also make an intellectual experience. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying though is, it is very important to create the emotional experience. To have people emotionally bond with your game. That is the thing that will pull them back. That is the thing that will make them most likely to play again.

So what I’m saying, don’t confuse interesting with fun, is not you can’t have any interesting stuff in your game. But don’t use that to replace fun. That is my point. My point is, you need to have the fun. You need to have the emotional stimulation. And a lot of people confuse intellectual stimulation with emotional stimulation, so instead of having emotional stimulation, they’ll just have more intellectual stimulation.

And in general what I’m saying is that the intellectual stimulation is fine, but it doesn’t have the potency that the emotional stimulation will have. And that when people are sort of remembering your game, that giving them high--emotional highs, it’s just more likely to get them to play again.

And so one of the things that happens a lot is, and this is Odyssey in a heartbeat, which was, I was really caught up when I was making Odyssey, to try to do something that I thought was an interesting challenge. Like an intellectual challenge. I’m like, oh. Well, players when they play this, they’ll come to realize—oh, they’ll see how I’ve taken this cornerstone of Magic strategy, and twisted it on its ear.

Okay, but there are a bunch of problems with that thought process. So number one was, what percentage of Magic players knew what card advantage was? This was—when I made Odyssey, this was—yk, Magic was four years old? Five years old? Not really old. And the idea is, okay. Yeah, there were websites that talked about Magic strategy, there was The Dojo, and probably by the time Odyssey came out there was a few others.

Okay. How many people read those websites? How many people who—okay, A. How many people visited those websites? Of the people that visited those websites, how many people read the content I’m talking about? And of the people that read the content I’m talking about, how many understood the content?

So here I was, I was making fun of this very sort of niche-y thing, and the problem was, most of the audience had no idea. And so what I was doing, I was sacrificing—like, I was making them do something that was not particularly emotionally fun, on the idea of what was intellectually stimulating, and the problem was for most of them, they didn’t even have the information.

So that’s another big problem with intellectual stimulation is, a lot of the time it requires knowledge. And if your audience doesn’t have the knowledge—like, fun is fun. I make you do something and it’s fun, fun is fun in a vacuum a lot of the time. You know, if I make you do something and you just, you laugh and laugh, you (???). I mean, intellectual stimulation, it can result in a lot of positivity. But, and here’s the big problem, it’s much narrower. It’s a much harder target to hit. And it is not the same—it does not create the same effect.

So, you know, I did something that—I was making fun of this very—I was making fun of something that most people playing the game didn’t even know existed. Or they knew existed, might not have known enough to understand what I was doing.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean—by the way, there are people that enjoy Odyssey that didn’t understand that I was messing with card advantage. You know, there were people that like, they just enjoyed it for what it was. But the problem was, a lot of the underlying—of what made it click was, I was playing off it was interesting because I was playing against things. I was going, isn’t it neat that you’re doing this? Hey, in Magic you don’t normally do that, but I’m making you do that.

And like I said, some of that is OK. Really the point of my lesson is not “Don’t use intellectual stimulation,” that’s not the point of my lesson. It’s “Don’t confuse intellectual stimulation for emotional stimulation.” What you need to do in making a game is understand when you’re intellectually stimulating and when you’re emotionally stimulating.

And, the point I was trying to make is, emotional stimulation—like if you say to somebody, what’s the point of the game? What’s the role of the game? Why are you trying to do the game? One of the most common answers is, oh, you’re trying to entertain the person. You’re trying to make it fun. Okay. Well, if you’re trying to make the game fun, that emotional stimulation is more likely to lead you to fun.

And that intellectual stimulation—once again, it’s not that there weren’t people that played Odyssey that didn’t enjoy what I was doing. There were. But it was a lot fewer. And that when I have done stuff that has been more emotionally resonant, that’s more—hits emotions, it just succeeds better.

Perfect example is Innistrad, okay? So let’s compare Odyssey to Innistrad. Two graveyard sets. They have a lot in common. Mechanically, there’s a lot of similarity. But in Innistrad, it was all about going, okay. We’re going to do monster tropes. You’re going to get to play vampires or zombies or werewolves, and they’re going to act like the monsters you expect them to be. And that so much of the set was giving this strong emotional response to, “Remember this? Remember this? Oh, there’s this?” And it was like, oh—like, it created this strong feeling.

And so, okay, Odyssey was very intellectually stimulating. And Innistrad was very emotionally stimulating. Well, which one was a success? Innistrad by a mile. By a mile. Because a lot of what made Innistrad sort of speak to people was, it created this sort of strong emotional sense to them.

Now, was there any intellectual stimulation in Innistrad? Of course there was. Yes. When I design, I want to make sure that the people who want to think about things can think about things. But—and that said. This is the big thing about the lesson, is you make sure you understand what is valuable for getting people to think about things, and where is it valuable to make people feel things.

And, it is more important to make sure that people feel things. Only because feeling is a lot more universal. That making people feel things is—you’re more likely to have all your audience feel similar things than think similar things. People think a lot different. Emotions, in some ways, emotions are more universal than necessarily thought patterns. That you could do something that is interesting to some people, but making it interesting to, like—if I make something interesting, I’m going to hit less people with my interesting, than if I make something fun. I’ll just hit more people.

So a lot of what my—the point of this lesson is, is saying, okay. Understand intellectualness of it, understand where making people think adds value, but also understand where it emotionally hits, where the play, the emotions create where they have value.

And in general, one of the big truisms of Magic is, we want the card reading to be as good as we can make it. But if I have a choice between a card reading amazingly and playing amazingly, I will choose the playing amazingly. Because—now, Magic has one big advantage that a lot of games don’t have, which is we’ve been around a long time. The average player who plays Magic has played a long time. So if we put out a new set, they’re going to sample it.

Now, they might not like it, and if they don’t like it, they’ll go, okay, I’m walking away for a little while, wait for the next block. But they’re going to sample it. So if I make a card that doesn’t look as good but plays as well, look. Odds are they’re going to actually get a chance to play with it and get a feeling. At least they’ll play with the set.

But if I make something that’s sort of intellectual and I miss, you know, that then there’s a lot—that’s a big thing is, intellectual—so here’s another larger meta-thing that’s going on. Which is, people who make games pretty much are game players. You can’t be a good game designer and not be a game player.

So one of the traps to fall into is thinking of your game—sorry, thinking of making your game as unto itself a game. And a lot of times what happens is—this will tie into a theme later down—is you get really caught up on what fascinates you, the guy making the game. Or gal making the game. That—like I said, I was making Odyssey, and I was—of course I was in the top 1% of game comprehension. That was my job. I think about Magic 24 hours. I spend 40 hours a week doing nothing but Magic. And in my spare time I also played Magic. And I read websites, and I’m as invested as possibly could be in the Magic ecosystem, in the Magic game.

So when it’s like, okay, let me look at something—and I was playing around something that was, like, you know, the elite of the elite of like, you know, this is high-end strategy at a time of—information wasn’t even that widespread yet. Like—we’re talking a point at which not everybody was on the internet yet. It’s very easy to think now, well, like everyone’s on the internet. That wasn’t true fifteen years ago. A lot of people were. And a lot of Magic players were in general just because Magic has a little more an advanced crowd as far as technologically.

But still, a lot of people weren’t online, and a lot of people for sure weren’t reading The Dojo, or even if they were on The Dojo they weren’t necessarily reading the strategy articles. You know, maybe they were just reading the tournament reports which were also fun.

And I think the big thing there was, I created an experience—like what happened was, I said I was so enamored by the intellectual experimentation I was trying, of taking something that was so ingrained, like I was really—what happened was, I fell into the trap was, I was trying to sort of—I was fascinated by the intellectual challenge, but I didn’t stop, I didn’t step back and say, okay. Fine, this is fascinating to think about. Do you want to do it? Is this fun to do?

And what we found was, for most players it was not fun to do. They didn’t want to do that. The fact that they could turn a 1/1 into an 8/8 by dumping their whole hand, A. They probably never even thought of doing, and B. Even if they thought of doing it, (???) want to do. They wanted to play their cards. Like, that was one of the big lessons of Odyssey is, people want to play their cards. Let people play their cards. You know.

That it is—I mean, one of the balances of making a game as complex as Magic is, we have lots of different people. And yes, there’s people that, what they love about the game is the intellectualness of it. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t components of that. I mean, Magic’s a complex game. It gets to have that. But it can’t have that at the sacrifice of having the emotional resonance that the game needs. I need—I want my players to play and feel something.

In fact, I talk about this right now. That when I design Magic now, one of the questions I ask myself every time is, what emotion am I trying to evoke out of my audience? What am I trying to do? I mean, this ties into stuff—some future lesson stuff down the road coming up. But I always have to ask myself, okay. What emotion am I trying—you know, I’m talking about Innistrad earlier.

In Innistrad, it was a horror genre. Right? I’m trying to scare you. I want you to be afraid. I want things to happen that created suspense. I wanted a little bit of terror. I wanted you to see a creature and go, oh, I’m worried. Oh, look, it’s a human that I know is a werewolf! I know the werewolf side’s gonna be problems for me. Okay, what could I do to keep him from turning into a werewolf? I don’t want him to be a werewolf! That’s gonna be bad.

And especially if you have two, three, four werewolves? You know, four humans that will become werewolves? Wow, that’s really scary. And that’s important. I’m trying—one of the fun things of getting people to play your game is you want them to walk away going, I felt something. The game moves me to feel something. Because that feeling of something, that emotional thing, that just goes deeper. You know. As much as we as humans like to think we’re intellectual creatures, in the end, most of our decisions are made emotionally, not intellectually.

You know, sometimes we intellectually rationalize emotional decisions, we do that all the time. But in the end, most of the decisions are made emotionally. So if players are going to decide whether or not to play your game, I guarantee you it’s much more likely to be made emotionally than intellectually.

And what that means is, if—for example, let’s take the two different versions. Version one is, I play a game, and it was very interesting, but it wasn’t fun. It was really interesting, very thought-provoking, really made me think a lot about things. But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t a fun experience. And the flip side was, I play a game, not that interesting, didn’t make me think a lot, but it was fun. Okay, which game am I more likely to play again? And the answer is, I’m way more likely to play the fun game.

Because, the intellectual game, I go, well, it made me think. But ehh, I didn’t enjoy it. Do I want to do that again? Do I want to spend my time on something I didn’t enjoy? Where the flipside is, I go, well, I didn’t think much, but man, I had a good time. I’m doing that again. You know.

And that it’s so much more easy to dismiss the intellectualness than the emotionalness. And so a lot of the point of don’t confuse interesting and fun is, what I was trying to say is you need enough fun. You need enough emotional stimulation. I would argue you also need some intellectual stimulation. But, but, if you only get one, the emotional stimulation is more important than the intellectual stimulation.

And a lot of what I was trying to say is, understand when you’re doing something, when you’re stimulating your audience, how you’re stimulating them, in what way. Where am I intellectually stimulating them, where am I emotionally stimulating them? And make sure that you don’t confuse the two. And they’re different animals and different things.

And like I said, I do want you to intellectually stimulate your audience. That is fine, that is something you need to do. It’s just a priority one step below emotionally connecting with the audience. Creating an emotional response out of them.

Because like I said, at the end of the first game—like let’s say for example. I believe that what makes people get more intellectual about the game is spending more time on it. If you actually grasp the game, and look over time, I believe eventually as you play more, the intellectualness of the game slowly creeps up.

Because what starts happening is, I start learning more about the game. I start having a better sense of strategy. I start—the lenticular cards that I didn’t see before, now I see. So as you get more advanced in the game, you start applying more intellectualness to it. And that is where it’s more—that is where more intellectual stimulation can have a bigger impact.

But the problem is, if players aren’t going to really click into the intellectual stimulation until many games in, if you don’t have the emotional stimulation, they’re never going to get there. You know. If you make a game that’s like, well, on your tenth game it’s intellectually really stimulating, but if the first nine games aren’t emotionally stimulating enough to get to the point where they can be intellectually stimulated, they’re never getting there. They’re never playing your tenth game. Yet the tenth game might be the most interesting intellectual thing you’ve ever had. But they’re not going to stick around.

And that was a lot of my point about interesting vs. fun, is understanding what role interesting plays, and what role fun plays. Intellectual stimulation is very, very good for your more invested players. That people—I mean, once they play and had fun, you want to sort of keep them engaged, and one of the things that happens the long term, is intellectual stimulation helps keep them from getting bored.

In fact, that’s probably one of the biggest things about intellectual stimulation is, it gives them more ways to think about the game. It gives them more ways to explore the game. That intellectual stimulation is something you want in your game, but you want it more long-term. And it can be at a lower amount and more hidden, because it doesn’t need to be something the audience sees right away.

But emotional stimulation needs to be there from the get-go. That at the end of your first game, if they weren’t emotionally stimulated, if you didn’t sort of evoke something out of them, I just don’t think you’re going to see them again. And that’s what I’m saying, is don’t confuse the two, they have different functions, and especially for—like I said. One of the big challenges about—the biggest challenge I think the game designer has is making the player, after playing game one, want to play game two.

Now. I also want you when you’re playing game hundred and one to play game hundred and [two.] I mean, we spend a lot of time on Magic on the advanced players. We spend a lot of time doing things that the less experienced player will never even see, they’ll not experience, they won’t get. I’m not saying you don’t want to do that. You do want to do that. But don’t confuse doing that with doing the part which is really important to getting people in the game is making that emotional stimulation. You need both. And, I’m saying that the emotional stimulation is more important, because if you don’t have that in spades, you’ll never get to the point where your audience can appreciate the intellectual stimulation.

And that, that is my point of don’t confuse intellectual with fun. Not intellectual. Don’t confuse interesting with fun. That you want to understand what about your game is evoking the emotions you need. In fact, one of the questions you have to ask is, what emotion or emotions am I trying to evoke, how am I doing that, how successful am I at doing that?

Because if you’re not doing that, if the game doesn’t have an emotional response that you are aiming for and trying to do, and if the players don’t feel something when they play, I’m telling you, they’re not going to come back and play the game again. That people who don’t have emotional satisfaction are way, way less likely to repeat the game.

Now. At the same time, I think it’s fine. I think intellectual stimulation is good. I think it’s something that would help give your game legs so that people continue to play it. But just make sure that you don’t confuse the work you do for the intellectual stimulation for the work you do for the emotional stimulation. The emotional stimulation is really, really important. Especially early on.

So that is my big takeaway for today, is understand when you’re being intellectual, when you’re making the game interesting, and when you’re being emotional. When you’re making the game fun. The game has to be fun. The early experiences, if they’re not fun, it’ll—you know, the intellectual stuff can matter later, but it won’t matter off the front. So make sure you hit emotional, hit it hard, and don’t confuse the intellectual part for the fun part. Completely different things, they have different contributions to your game, make sure you understand what each does and where you use them, and don’t try to replace     [fun] with [interesting.] Because you need fun. Interesting is not a substitute for fun.

Okay, guys. That is all I have to say about lesson #5. Don’t confuse interesting with fun. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed, I am now in my parking space, so you all know what that means, this is time to end 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.