8/26/16 Episode 361: Twenty Lessons, Part 6--Emotional Impact

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 dropped my daughter off to camp again.

Okay. So today is another in my series, Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. Where I’m talking about the twenty lessons I learned over twenty years of designing Magic that I gave in my GDC speech.

So so far, I’ve talked about how fighting against human nature is a losing battle, how aesthetics matter, how resonance is important, how to make use of piggybacking, and how to not confuse interesting with fun. Today is all about understanding what emotions your game is trying to evoke.

And so I’m going to talk about emotions today and emotional responses. I have all sorts of stuff to say. Luckily, I have a whole car ride to say them in. Okay, so. Let’s start with my example. So each one of these I start with my example, and then I sort of get into the lesson as a whole.  

Okay. So first, okay. Oops, sorry. Gotta avoid hitting other cars. That’s my—once again, number one rule here on Drive to Work is drive safely to work. Okay. So let me talk about my example. So my example was Innistrad.

Okay. So when I sat down to make Innistrad, Magic had done top-down design before, Richard Garfield had done Arabian Nights, Brian Tinsman had done Champions of Kamigawa. We definitely had done a few sets where we sort of started with flavor and designed to match the flavor. But I had never done that. So my first chance doing that was Innistrad.

So, Innistrad started simply enough, saying, okay, we’re going to do horror. Gothic horror, specifically, but we’re going to have a world which plays into the genre of horror. And so what I wanted to do was figure out, what would people expect?

And so I figured out, like, oh, we want to have monsters, and what are the tropes we wanted. But one of the things I really needed to figure out was, what was going to tie it all together? What was going to make Innistrad design sing?

And the thing that I finally realized—because what I did is, I went back and looked at the film. Because obviously, you know, whenever you’re trying to do a genre, you’re looking at the things that most define it. So yes, there’s horror stories in books and TV, but films really are the place where the most definitive thing happen. So I said, okay. Well, what happens in the films?

And one of the questions I asked is, how do the films make you feel? And that was really important. Because what I realized was, is I was trying to capture the feel of a horror movie. And what is that? Well, it’s trying to scare you. It’s fear. It’s trying to make you feel unease, trying to make you feel nervous and afraid. It’s scaring you.

So I said, okay, well what do I need to do to scare people? I want to scare the audience. Magic traditionally doesn’t necessarily create a sense of tension. It can, but it’s not the default for Magic. But could I do that?

I realized what I needed to do was, I needed to figure out a way to sort of create suspenseful moments in Magic. Okay, well one of the ways to do that is, what if you know something bad is coming and you’re waiting for it to come?

Like, one of the things—Alfred Hitchcock talked about the difference between surprise and suspense. And he says, surprise is two men are in a bar—sorry, in a coffeehouse or something having tea, having coffee, and a bomb explodes. That’s surprise. Suspense is, two men are in a coffeehouse having coffee, and you see a bomb under their table slowly ticking down. And you cut between them having their conversation and the bomb ticking.

That is suspense. Because you don’t know when the bomb’s going to go off. If the bomb just explodes, okay, you’re surprised. But when you know it’s coming, but don’t know when, or don’t know whether—will the men finish their conversation before the bomb goes off? You’ve created suspense.

So one of the things I want to do is say, okay. I want to create suspense in the game. So the first thing is we played this idea of dark transformations. Which is we had cards that had two different sides. And one of them was the werewolves. So the werewolves were human on one side, and then under a certain condition being met, which is no spells get played, they flip and become werewolves. 

So one of the things that was interesting is, when you played the human side of werewolves, the human sides aren’t the scary part. The human sides, eh, they’re okay, but they’re not particularly scary. The werewolf side is what’s scary.

So one of the things is you would play these cards, and you play the human werewolves, and your opponent knew that under the right conditions, the werewolves are going to come out. That is scary. Or, I made a mechanic that was all about things dying. Morbid. And the idea was, now whenever something died, you had to worry, like, uh-oh, am I about to get punished? Is morbid going to happen? So like, I made mechanics that really played into that. Same with flashback, if you have things that went to the graveyard, but they could cast the spells again. There was always this thing of, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t quite—you know, I wanted to create suspenseful moments. I wanted to create something, when people played, the way the game played, is they weren’t ever quite sure what was going on.

And the key to this, the reason this gets to today’s lesson is that one of the things I think when people make games is, that they very much think about—like I said, I talked about last time, interesting vs. fun. I think people think a lot more about intellectual stimulation than they do about emotional stimulation. But in the end, when you try to figure out whether or not someone had a good game, people tend to talk in terms of fun. It was fun.

Now that’s not to say that you can’t get intellectual fun, but most of the time what fun means is, there was an emotional response. Fun is, I enjoyed myself, or I felt and experienced something that was enjoyable. And so one of the big things I’ve learned is, understanding what emotion you’re trying to evoke in your game is crucial, because a lot of creating the experience you want to create, making a game that is memorable for the person who plays it, has to do with are you creating the proper sort of emotional stimuli. Are you making them feel something?

But in the end—like, so, I’ve talked about this many times, but apropos for today, is one of my themes as a writer—I’ve talked about this, how I took this class and the teacher wanted you to—the teacher explained that all writers have a theme. And if you read (???), you’ll realize that there’s some inherent theme to their work. And since all writers have a theme and you’re a writer, what is your theme?

And the theme of my writing that I found out is, I love this idea that people want to think of themselves as intellectual creatures. But in the end, we make all our major decisions on emotions, not on intellect. That, you know—I know we like to think that we think things through. But in the end, it’s our gut and our emotions that tend to drive our actual decision-making.

And so, it’s important when you get to games, you think about games, that you want to realize that. That what’s going to make somebody appreciate your game or love your game or play your game—the test I always talk about is, you play your game once. And we always ask, whenever we do focus testing, we always ask people, would you play this again? Would you want to play it again?

And if they say no, your game is in trouble. If they say yes, it doesn’t inherently mean you’ve got a hit on your hands, but it means you’re going in the right direction. That you want to create a play experience where the end of the play experience, that the player goes, I had a good time. I want to experience that again. That was fun.

Usually (???) very successful, one of the questions we will ask is, first we say would you play it again, we ask if you would recommend it to somebody else, and we also ask them—normally when you do focus testing, you get paid. That’s normally what happens. We get people in. And one of the questions we ask sometimes, if you say to them, would you be willing to give up some of your money and in its place, get a copy of the game?

So that’s one of the best questions, because it’s like, would you actually purchase this game? Because if people do not like the game, they will not purchase the game. If I say to you, do you want to give some money, have this game? They have to really enjoy it to go, yes, I would.

And so one of the things you want—when you’re making  a game, you want your audience to be invested in it. And be invested, that means having an emotional response. So when you sort (???) back, what that means for you the game [designer] is, what are you trying to make your player feel? That’s a very important question, that a lot of players, or a lot of designers I don’t think think about. Or not think about enough. What are you trying to make your players feel?

Now, here’s the important thing to understand. It is not—you want them to feel something. It doesn’t—a lot of times people think that in order for someone to enjoy something, you have to make them feel only positive emotions. And that is not the case. One of the things is, people do enjoy experiencing different emotions as long as it’s in a safe place.

What I mean by that is, one of the reasons that games and movies and stuff are—for example, being afraid is generally not a positive experience. So why then do people go see horror movies? You know. Sour food in general is not particularly a great sensation, but why do people like to taste sour candies? There are things people do that like, in a vacuum, like why would people like that? So I’m going to talk about a play I did to explain an important lesson I learned.

So in college, I wrote a play called Leggo My Ego. And the premise of the play was, the main character is trying to make a big decision. But rather than see the character, we go inside his head, and the whole play is his emotions arguing about this decision.

And in it I had a lot of mix of characters. So there were thirteen characters in the play, let’s see if I can remember them all. So therewas the Ego who ran the meeting, there was the Id and the Superego whorepresented the two sides, and then there was, let’s see. There was Love, there was Lust, there was Curiosity, there was Bitterness, there was Guilt, there was Curiosity, there was Depression, there was… Rationalization crashed the meeting, not actually an emotion, but she crashes the meeting. And there was… (???) else, there was thirteen characters. No. There was eleven characters. So.

Anyway, and the idea was, they were all arguing about different facets of it. And so I was really trying to hit different qualities. To try to—oh there was Paranoia, was also an emotion. So one of the things that’s interesting when I did the play was, I knew for example that I could make love a fun character. But bitterness. Would people like Bitterness? Or Depression? Or Paranoia? Like, some of these were very negative emotions.

And so one of the things I experimented with was how funny did I want them to be? How enjoyable of characters? And the lesson I learned is, what made Depression fun for people was how depressing Depression was. What made Bitterness fun was how bitter Bitterness was. And what I found was, if you took Depression’s lines in a vacuum, they were just nothing but depression. They were depressing. Because all did was say depressing things.

But what made it fun for the audience—and the audience really got attracted to a lot of the more negative emotions, and the reason was, what was fun was, that no matter what the situation was, [Depression] found a way to make it depressing. That any topic could be depressing. Or Paranoia could be afraid of it. Or Bitterness could be bitter about it. That the fun of the characters was as long as they experienced that emotion purely, you know, that I had to make sure that Depression was depressing. If Depression was depressing, Depression was very funny, because it was fun to watch how depressing Depression was.

Which was a little at the time it—I assumed the more positive emotions would be more well-recepted, and the negative emotions would not. But what I found was, the negative emotions, people really got into. Because when you’re in the safety of something, when you’re in a play or you’re in a game, that—or a movie, you know, it’s—you know you’re in a safe space. Like, actually being afraid is not fun, but being afraid where you know, hey it’s just make-believe on a screen, is fun. Because the emotional rush is exciting.

And so that—one of the things I say to people is, you need to create an emotional connection with your audience. But that emotion that you’re stimulating doesn’t necessarily need to be a positive emotion. It doesn’t need to be happiness. You know. What you want to do is you want to really evoke something.

And I’ve seen games—you can make people sad, you can make people afraid, make people guilty. You can make them—you can make them all—you can make them angry. You can do all sorts of things. But as long as the game is sort of presenting and people get to see the purity of what they’re doing, people can be very excited by it. And that your game does not need to be, oh I’ve just made them happy.

But once again, they have to understand the context of the emotion you’re doing. Take Innistrad as my example. I was trying to make them afraid, not because inherently being afraid is fun, but I was trying to have you experience something, and the thing that you experience, you associate with those emotions. So if I’m going to have you play with monsters, and you know, vampires, and zombies and werewolves, and I’m going to hit all the tropes of horror movies and such, well I want you to sort of have the correlating emotion to go along with that.

And what happened was, people really enjoyed that. They enjoyed the sensation. Now, one of the things I’ve learned is when designing a game, is I want to each year make different emotions. One of the fun things about Magic, the reason Magic has lasted so long is, you know, each Magic expansion is kind of like a new game. It uses the same rule sets as the old game, so it’s easy to learn, because you already know the basics of the game, but essentially we keep making new games.

It’s the way I think of it. It’s like, I’m a game designer, and I make lots of games. They just happen to share a rule set so they’re easy to learn. So that once you know how to play one version of the game, you can easily play the other version of the game. But what I am trying to do, what emotion I’m trying to evoke in one set is very different.

Okay. So let’s contrast. I was doing Theros a couple years later. So Theros was a Greek mythology-inspired set. Where I was trying to tap into Greek mythology. So the interesting question I had there is, okay, well what emotion am I trying to evoke out of my players?

Innistrad was a little easier. I was doing the horror genre. That’s about fear. Very clearly. That’s not a giant surprise. It’s about fear. So the question was, okay, Greek mythology, that’s not about fear, what is it about?

So I spent a lot of time and energy reading Greek mythology stories. You know, I watched a few movies, thought about what exactly was I trying to do? And what I eventually realized was that if I could get people to think in a certain way, I had to match what kind of feelings were you trying to have. What was the general feeling?

And what I realized was, the stories I was trying to tell, the heroic—the myth of the epic hero, that’s kind of the core of a Greek mythology story, is somebody goes on a quest, and, you know, meets with the gods and has to do mighty things to prove that they’re a hero. What kind of story was I telling?

And what I realized was, the stories were all about growth. That a character would go on a journey, and they would become a hero. Monsters would grow. You know. That there was all this idea that, you know, the gods sort of were trying to get people to—you know, wanted devotion from the followers and that would grow.

What I realized was I was making a game that was all about sort of the excitement of growth. Of, that things were getting better. And that there was this accomplishment. So I really said, oh. Well, this one’s a more positive one. It’s about building something. It’s about creating a sense of accomplishment. Of working up and making something.

And so Theros came from a very different place. I wasn’t trying to scare the opponent, or scare the players. I wasn’t trying to create a sense of tension. That was what I was doing for Innistrad. What I was trying to do for Theros was create this sense of achievement. This sort of—a sense of accomplishment. And so I built in a lot of quests and tasks and things for you to do, where like I was trying to make myself better.

Now, it could be I was using the heroic mechanic and I wanted to make my hero better by targeting them or doing something like that. Could be I had my monsters, I’m making my monsters better by using the monstrous ability and upgrading them. It could be I was playing with gods and playing with devotion and I was just trying to get my devotion up to make my gods more powerful.

But in each case, I was going a certain direction, and so one of the things to realize is, you want to match up your—what your game is doing with what your emotion is doing. That’s my (???) is that it’s not enough for your cards to hint toward the emotion, you need the gameplay itself to create that sense of emotion.

Now. The big lesson today is not that you need to have a specific emotion. The thing today is… sorry. A little traffic there. The thing today is to learn--to figure out what emotion your game is doing. What are you after? What are you trying to evoke? If you can figure out what you’re trying to evoke, then you can work at figuring out how to create that emotion. Once again, that there’s an important tie between, if you want your players to feel something, you have to give them the gameplay that encourage this type of feeling.

So whatever your emotion is. Let’s say for example you want to make them mad. Well, what are they doing in the game that will make them mad? If you want to make them excited, what in the game will make them excited?

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t create multiple emotions in your game. But you do need to have a focus. You do need to know, overall, what you’re trying to do. Now, your game could shift gears. Your games could sort of go for one emotion, change to a different. Like, one of the things that’s possible is—and the more you control your narrative, the more you control, like, one of the things about Magic is, we don’t have a lot of control in what our players are going to do in the sense that they could—there’s a lot of self-controlled what they’re doing. They get to pick the pieces.

And so, in Magic, we have to be much more focused, because we have to have all the things going in the same direction, because if we want people to experience something, if some of the set is one thing and some other, then well, maybe they do something, maybe they do the other, it’s hard to have a consistency.

So Magic is kind of unique—well, not unique. But Magic requires a little more direct focus than some other games. Now if your game has sort of a narrative quality where like you’re following the story along, well it’s okay, then you can have exciting moments and scary moments. You can change things up a little bit. But that’s more important where you control the narrative and the mechanics, so at any one moment you could have that experience.

But the thing to remember is, as people are building—as you’re designing your game is, you want to understand what the end state emotion is. What are you trying to create? And to think about, [are] your mechanics evoking that? Are your mechanics creating the sense that you want?

And that one of the things that’s good about playtesting is, once you understand—and be aware, it’s not that you’re going to start your game knowing exactly what you’re trying to do. Innistrad, I had a general sense because I was doing something top-down. Like I was trying to capture a certain genre, and that genre, okay, it’s associated with a very specific emotion.

But I do other sets that are a little more complex. You know, like Greek mythology, Theros, for example, well, Greek mythology’s not as clearly, clearly connected to an emotion. Although I could find emotions once I understood the stories.

But, let’s say I’m doing something else. Like, you know, last year I designed Battle for Zendikar. That was a two-sided conflict. And I was playing in interesting trope space. Like, one of the things there was, I was trying to get you to—the battle was what we—once again, I was trying to play into trope space.

And the trope space there was the idea of rebels vs. the establishment. Rebels vs. the Empire. And that one side is established and has all the dominance, and the other side, you know, is a ragtag bunch that’s in trouble, that they—like sort of on paper they shouldn’t win because they’re outnumbered, but they care more. You know, they’re the plucky rebels.

And so there’s a sense of, the emotion I was playing in there was the idea of, okay, what emotions are we playing into? You see Star Wars and you see the Rebels fighting against the Empire. What’s going on there? And the idea there is this righteousness of, you know, we have to do the right thing, like we have the right cause. You know. And that there’s something fun there, the idea of, you know, fighting to protect what is yours. And so we really played around there with Battle for Zendikar.

You know, before that we did Khans of Tarkir, and Khans of Tarkir was this warlord world. This sort of Asian-inspired world of war. And we definitely wanted to create this sense of conflict and I had different factions, and—another thing, for example, like Ravnica and Tarkir are factions, one of the things I also try to do is, not only was there a tone for the whole set, like clearly it was a war-torn world in Tarkir.

I wanted to create a sense of people were fighting and just like, you know, it was a ruthless world. It’s one of the reasons the main character chooses to try to change the world. Well, you want to create a world that felt really ruthless, and so I centered my mechanics in combat so that there’s a lot of fighting going on. You felt like you’re constantly fighting.

Then what I did is for each of the factions, I tried to give them a different sense. We gave a word to each of the factions of the thing they were fighting for. So like the Jeskai were all about cunning, and Temur were about savagery. And part of that also is to give a sense of what you were trying to achieve. What you wanted.

And that’s—let me give you a little bit for today. Let me talk a little bit about why emotions matter. Why do you care that your audience feels something? Why can’t your audience just think? You know, like, obviously games are mental exercises. And there’s a lot of mental challenging going on. Why is the emotion part—can’t I just mentally challenge them? Can’t I just test their skills? Why do I need the emotion? Why does that matter?

And the answer is that the way humans experience things is, they sort of judge based on the impact on them. That when I—when you talk to every person and say how was your day, you don’t tend to get a neutral state of the state of the day. What you tend to get is how the day impacted on them.

Now, different people will look at it differently. You know, some people are more about how it made them think and some how it made them feel. But in the end, it is very much about how did it impact you.

And when you’re making your game, you want to think about that, which is your players have a lifetime of experience. And what you want to do when you play the game is you want to tap into things that they already have. I talked about this in piggybacking, I talked about this in resonance. That your goal when you make a game is not to start from scratch. It is not to say, I have a blank piece of paper, and you know, my player is a blank piece of paper that I can then do whatever I want to.

No, they’re people that come with lots of baggage, if you will. They’re pre-loaded, I said in my talk. And so one of the things you want to think about is, okay. I’m trying to evoke a response out of them. How do I do that? And my answer essentially today is, their emotions are the most universal and powerful thing that are going on.

That if I really want somebody to sort of have a strong feeling, well, emotions are the place that allow me to do that. That emotions are very potent. But, but, and this is the important thing. Emotions are pretty universal. That what is sad is pretty universally sad. I’m not saying it’s 100% crossover.

But if my goal, like you know obviously my background is writing. If I want to write a sad story, I can write something that people will find sad. There’s just universal sadnesses if you will. And there’s things that will make people angry that’s pretty universal. Things that make people scared and it’s pretty universal. That one of the things about emotions is, not only does everybody feel them, not only is it something that everybody can connect to, but it’s something that everybody can connect to together.

And so one of the reasons that—because when you’re playing a game, remember, I mean there’s solitaire games, but most games are not solitaire, most games you’re playing with other people. So part of trying to understand if someone’s going to enjoy your game is not just that they enjoy the game in a vacuum, but do they enjoy the experience playing with other people?

So this is important. That when you are interacting with other people, the interaction with the other people has a big role to define how they feel about something. And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that those other people are—one of the things that’s very important about gaming in general is you create bonds between people. That doesn’t happen necessarily—like, you the game maker, can help work toward that. You the game maker have some way to input how much interaction players have. And one of the big ways to do that is, are you finding universal truths that people can connect with?

Now, we talked about resonance earlier. And resonance is one of those ways. That one of the things that helps when we do Innistrad is, zombies mean something. That people have seen zombie movies and TV shows and zombie comics and zombie books. Like, zombies have an emotional meaning, and so when people see zombies, they have a certain feel. And other people can have those feel. And then you sort of create bonding moments because people can sort of share on that. That’s why resonance is important.

But emotions are, I would argue, even more important than resonance. Yes, a lot of people see monster movies. Yes, a lot of people, zombies mean something to them. And that’s important and obviously, one of my big lessons is all the resonance. But today I’m saying a slightly different thing. Which is, if you can get your audience not just to feel things, but feel the same things with one another, that is super potent. That if you can get your audience to be afraid, but not just afraid alone, afraid with other people, then you create bonding moments.

That one of the things that most—so, a little psychology for you guys. One of the things that most bonds people together is when you have shared experiences. That for example, they talk about how one of the most bonding things is war. It’s fighting together in a war. Because you are feeling really strong, intense emotion, and the same emotions at the same time, and you’re doing it together. That a lot of bonding is shared emotional experiences. This is really crucial. If bonding comes through shared emotional experiences, then having a universal emotional experience is key to helping people bond through your game.

And I can’t stress enough that at the end of your game—like one of the things that’s interesting is, I’ve talked about how when I was in college I had a group of friends, and we played all the games we owned, and then we would eventually sort of go out to the game store and buy a game and bring it home. And one of the things that was very interesting is, at the end after college was over, we had all these games that we as a group had bought. So we divvied them up and we gave them to people.

So there’s this one game that we played, and it was a game that involved, like, you saw ink blots, and then you would write what you thought they looked like. And then people would try to guess who said what. But what happened was, the game for us             became this game where we were just entertaining each other. That part of the fun of this game was, we were trying to make each other laugh. And so you would try to see things that you could get other to see, but go, ooh, they had—other people wouldn’t think of it that way, but you were trying to really get it—so what happened was, you would see these inkblots, and you would try to get people to see things that you could see that were funny. And we would laugh and laugh and laugh, and you know, it was really—we really enjoyed the game.

And then, what happened was, we divvied up the games, it was one of the games I got, and then I tried to play with a different group. And they didn’t understand—like the game, my game group had sort of said, you know what? This game isn’t—we want to make this game fun. What do we need to do? And we sort of came up with something. And the group made the game fun. The game was not inherently fun. A lot of the silliness that we put into it wasn’t inherent in the game. The game didn’t require you to be silly.

So what happened was, you know, when I took this game to other people, because the game itself wasn’t inherently silly, the game group had made it silly because the base game wasn’t that compelling for us, what happened was, what I realized was, I had not realized that the group had made the game fun. The game hadn’t made the game fun. And I played the game with other players, it just wasn’t fun. And I had this weird moment where like, oh, this is such a fun game, what happened, why isn’t this game fun?

And what I realized was, a good gaming group will find ways to make games fun, even games that aren’t inherently all that fun. And that one of the things when you’re a game designer that you want to do is you don’t want to leave it up to the group to make it fun. You want to make it fun. You want to make the game inherently fun. And what that means is, if somebody plays with one group, and then goes and plays with a different group, it’s still fun. Because it’s not the group that makes it fun, it’s the game itself.

For example, my little inkblot game I was talking about, if the game had kind of encouraged silliness and encouraged the kind of things we were doing that we enjoyed—but it didn’t. You know. It just said, so, what do you see? Is it a dog? You know. And we were getting a lot sillier with it. But when other people sort of saw the inherent game, they just did what the game told them to.

And that’s another thing. This is a theme you’re going to hear a lot from these talks, is don’t blame your player for doing what the game tells them to do. That when someone sits down to play a game, the assumption is, the person who made this game knows what they’re doing. Okay, I’ll do what you tell me to. And there’s a trust. There’s an inherent trust between the game designer and the game player, that if the game player does what the game designer tells them to do, it’ll be a fun experience.

And if there’s not, if there’s not a fun experience, then guess what. The game player blames the game designer. And guess what? They’re right! It is your job as a game designer to make a game that unto itself creates a fun experience.

And today—I mean I’ll get into other things as we go along in these talks, but today it’s all about, look. You want to create an emotional bond between your audience and the game, you want to create an emotional bond between your players and other players. You want to create a fun experience, a fun bonding experience. Assuming it’s a two-player game or more. Still want to make a fun experience in single-player but (???) bonding in single-player.

And so the idea is that if you are consistent, if you understand what emotion you’re trying to get, what emotion you’re trying to have people share, if you’re consistent in that, that increases your chances of the individual having fun, and of the group having fun. And of the group bonding over the game.

Because one of the big things about any game is, there is a group dynamic that goes on in games that I guess is important to understand. That the group will only play something that the whole group wants to play.

Now, here’s how that dynamic works. Games fall into three categories. There’s positive association, there’s neutral association, there’s negative association. If a game is positive for everybody, you know, it’s easy for people to pick and play it. Everybody’s like, I like that game, that’s fun. Boom. You get everyone to play it.

If some people are neutral and some are positive, you still can get it, the neutral people aren’t going to push for it, but if there’s enough positive people the neutral people will go along. It’s not a game that necessarily they would promote unto themselves, but they’ve played it, it’s fun, they’re willing to play it.

But then you get to the negative experience. And the negative experience says, I didn’t enjoy that game. I don’t want to play that game. And unless you have an overwhelming number of positive, a single negative will drive the experience from happening.

What that means is, let’s play a game. Let’s say there’s five people want to play a game. If one of those people thinks negatively about your game, you are in trouble. Now, maybe maybe maybe the other four are really positive about it, and maybe they override the negative, you know. It’s not impossible. But just having a single negative makes it so there’s a good chance of going somewhere else.

That one of the things when people are picking games, is what veto power. Which is, it’s not that people let other people dictate necessarily what you do play, but they do give people power to sort of steer away from things. “What should we play?” “How about this?” “Ehh, I don’t want to play that.” You know.

Like there’s a game we play, R&D used to play quite a bit, when you go to lunch. And then the lunch game works as follows. Somebody makes a suggestion where to go. Anybody else can veto that suggestion, but if they veto that suggestion, they’re forced to come up with an alternate suggestion. And it’s something they’re willing to do. So it’s like, “Do you want to get pizza?” “No. How about sandwiches?” And then anybody else can veto that idea, but they must always create an alternate. And the idea is, it provides a sense where, people then have a choice of accept or veto.

And I think the way people play games is kind of similar. “What game do you want to play?” Well, somebody will suggest a game. And then other people kind of go, no, I don’t want to do that, and then they tend to offer up other games. So like, “I don’t want to play that game, how about this game?”

And so the reason that the emotional thing’s also important is, not only will it make people more likely who have played your game the first time to play a second time, but it makes it more likely that when in a group dynamic they can play it. And that is very important. So. The—lots of (???) components here. I’m not too far from work.

So let me wrap this up a little bit. So the dynamic today that I’m talking about is, making sure when you make your game, you understand—underlying, what it is you’re trying to get people to do. So question number one I would ask yourself when making your game, what emotional output am I trying to get? What response am I trying to get out of my players?

And I’d say when you’re designing it for the first time, try a singular emotion. I do believe on more complex games, especially controlling the narrative, you can change the emotion, but I think when you’re starting out, figure out the one emotion you’re trying to get. What’s the key experience? What’s the key emotional experience?

Number two, then say, okay. If I’m trying to create this response, what are my mechanics? Are my mechanics doing that? Like, when I was on Innistrad and I was trying to create a sense of suspense, are my mechanics creating suspense? When I play this mechanic, is there a suspenseful moment? And if there is not, I do one of two things. I have to rethink what emotion I’m creating, or I have to rethink my mechanics. But your key mechanics have to be pushing toward the emotion you’re trying to get. If they’re not, then that’s not the thing you’re trying to do. If the main thrust of your game is not doing what you’re saying—you know, not creating the response you want, well then it’s not succeeding.

Now. Once again. Sometimes it’s very clear what emotion you’re doing, sometimes it takes a while to figure it out. But it’s an important thing to understand. That when people play your game, what are you trying to get them to experience? And it needs to be a little more than “I want them to have fun.” That’s the easy fallback. “I want them to have fun.” Well, how? Why? What are they doing? What—you know.

So be aware of what emotion you’re trying to do. Number two is make sure you have the emotions that reinforce it. That your emotions play up the things you’re trying to do. Because if you don’t, if you’re like, “I want people to feel mad,” but my mechanics are all about feeling happy, well then I’m not going to create the effect I want. So you have to walk through it and understand that.

Number three is to understand that you don’t necessarily need positive emotions. And I’ll stress this again, my sort of Leggo My Ego lesson, which is, people can really positively respond to negative emotions. But they need to be in the context of what that is. And remember, games can have a safe space where people like—okay, it’s not real life. That if I experience something, much like watching a movie, there’s some distance because I know I’m experiencing—like, in role-playing, in games in which you’re sort of taking on characters or something, one of the things that’s fun is experiencing things that in real life would be upsetting, but in a context that I know they’re not real—art. And that’s another place where emotions can really shine, is where you let people sort of feel darker emotions.

And I know there’s a resistance. One of the things people seem real afraid of is, I have to make people smile. I have to make people laugh. I have to make people have fun. And it’s all about like, happiness. I must create happiness. And the thing I’ll say to you is, there’s a lot of—like, Innistrad being the example of the day, there’s nothing about being scared that is inherently happy, but it can be fun because in the safe space of the game, where like, okay, you know, there’s not actual zombies about, it’s all in a game, it is fun to run through that and experience that.

That having emotional—like, people will constantly do things. Like, people will jump out of airplanes. People will eat crazy sour things or crazy hot things or, you know, people will do things that in a vacuum seem, like, why would somebody ever want to do that? Why would you want to jump out of a plane? But there is an excitement that comes from jumping out of a plane. There’s a fear that comes from jumping out of a plane. Why would somebody want to eat the hottest Tabasco sauce they can?

Well, there’s emotions that come with it. There’s experiences that come with that. And if you can experience some emotion, in a safe space where you know—like, true fear, where you’re truly in fear of your life, that’s not fun. No one wants to experience that. But something in which, you know I’m jumping out of a plane and I have a parachute, and like, okay, it’s going to be scary, but I honestly feel I’m safe in doing it, you know, there is a lot of fun there.

And so remember when you create your emotions, understand what emotions they are. And make sure you look for the universality of your emotion. That if I’m trying to make people sad, make sure that I’m—one of the traps you can fall into sometimes is you get a little too nichey in your emotions.

And make sure that you’re broad, and that if I want—like, a good example with Innistrad is, I was trying to create suspense. I didn’t do that one way. I reinforced that multiple times through the  game, not just because I wanted to have the game feel as suspenseful as possible, but also I understood that what made one person feel suspenseful was not necessarily what made somebody else feel suspenseful.

Yeah, there’s some universality to it, I’m not saying that—I mean, the nice thing about emotions is, there’s some general things you can do that usually work. But the other thing you want to do is you want to sort of have a breadth of emotional experience with any emotion you’re trying to do, because different people will latch onto different things. Like if I’m trying to get you suspenseful, maybe some people—like for example, the werewolves are very much “I sit in play.” I sit in play, and you know what’s going to happen, and you know what the thing’s going to be.

This is a lot like the bomb under, like okay, I know it’s going to happen, but is it going to happen next turn? The turn after that? I don’t quite know when it’s going to happen. You know. And maybe for example I have some instants in my hand, and like okay, I gotta—I gotta hold onto them, so every time they try to turn the werewolves, I cast a spell to keep it from happening.

And that one of the things that’s really interesting is that that was a different experience from something like morbid, where every time something dies, I have to worry, is something going to happen. That I was creating suspense in different ways.

And so one of the things is, when you’re trying to create emotions, make sure you do it in a bunch of different—like, different people will respond differently, so you want to hit your emotion multiple ways. One, to make sure it happens, and two, to make sure that it hits people as strong as they can. Because not everybody is going to experience the emotion. Not everybody is going to have the same touch point.

And so if I want to create something, yeah there’s universality to it, I think I can make people feel suspenseful, but it’s possible that a certain kind of suspense is less suspenseful for Player A than Player B. And so having a breadth of different things do that. That if I’m trying to make people sad, I want to hit that in a couple different ways. If I want to make them angry, I want to hit that in a couple different ways. If I want to make them suspenseful, or afraid, I want to do that in a couple different ways. And that makes a breadth of experience, and it ensures that different people who might connect differently find their way to connect to it.

The final thing, I’m coming up, I’m almost at work, the final thing to remember is, when you are playtesting your game, watch your playtesters. That one of the things that’s very interesting is that if you’re trying to evoke something, the true test if you’re trying to evoke it is, does that emotion get evoked?

So one of the things that’s—and this is really hard sometimes when you’re playtesting but it’s important. Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. Watch them play. Listen to them play. Do not interact with them. Do not—I guess there are playtests when you can interact. But in general, you want to have some playtests where all you’re doing is observing. You’re just seeing what they do. And a sign that you’re creating the emotion you want is when you’re playtesting, you actually generate that emotion. Oh, I want people to be sad. I watch them play the game and go, oh, they’re actually sad, or they’re actually afraid, or whatever emotion you’re trying to do. Watch them.

That is really important. That it’s not just enough to say “This is what I want to create,” you have to take steps to do it, and then you have to check and see, are you doing that? Are people feeling the way you want them to feel? Are people having the emotional response that you’re trying?

The other final thing I will say is, sometimes what will happen is you’ll try to create Emotional Response A and get Emotional Response B. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Just look and watch. Sometimes what will happen is, you think it will make people feel a certain way, and universally people feel a different way. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe like, in the end, that thing’s a good thing that people enjoy how that makes them feel.

Just like anything else, you can aim for one thing and end up hitting a different thing, but that different thing can be perfectly okay. Just make sure that when you playtest, it’s—you’re not just playtesting do people understand the rules, you’re playtesting are they feeling what you wanted them to feel. And you get that by watching them. You can ask them questions at the end as well. But really from watching them experience and play.

But anyway, I am now at—ooh, we had lots of traffic today. I am now in my parking space. So we all know what that means. It means it’s 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.