1/6/17 Episode 399: Twenty Lessons, Part 10--Exploration

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 series, Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. So at GDC this year, or last year—actually this year still, I gave a speech talking about the twenty lessons I learned in my twenty years working on Magic. And I’ve been going through each lesson as a separate podcast. So today is lesson number ten. Leave room for players to explore.

Okay. So, for each one of these, I started by giving a Magic explanation. So the story I will tell is about two cards in Magic. So one card was called Summoner’s Pact. So Summoner’s Pact was a green spell that allowed you to go get a green creature out of your deck and put it onto the battlefield. It was called Summoner’s Pact. And it let you go summon a creature.

The thing about it that made it special though, was that when you cast it, it didn’t cost anything to cast. And on the next turn—so, flash back a little bit. In Unhinged, I had made a card called… what was it called? Turbo-Charged…  What was the name of the card? It was a—the idea was, I made a little creature that had super haste. It was called—what was it called? Turbo-Charged Slug? I’m blanking on the name. [NLH—Rocket-Powered Turbo Slug.]

The idea was, I was—the Un-sets, I do fun things, and I play around with existing keywords. So I made super haste. And what super haste was, it was a creature that you played—it came into play the turn before you paid for it. And so the idea was, I got to play it for free, it had haste, I could attack right away, but on the next turn I had to pay for it.

And then, in I think it was Fifth Dawn—actually, not even Fifth Dawn. In Planar Chaos, there was a designer named Paul. And Paul submitted—based on—what’s it called? Turbo-Charged Slug? Super-Charged? I’m blanking on the name. Based on that card, he had made a series of cards that we called Pacts. And we ended up moving it off to Future Sight from Planar Chaos. It was in Future Sight. Sorry.

And the idea was, there were spells that you get for free, but you have to pay for it in the future. So a turn from now you had to pay for them. So the idea of a Summoner’s Pact is, ooh, I get to go get a green creature, and put it into play. But the downside was—or do I put it in my hand? [NLH—You put it into your hand.] I don’t remember exactly. I went and got a green creature. I have to remember whether it actually went to your hand or not. The important part is, you got to do it for free, but on your next turn you had to pay the cost of the spell. Or you lost the game. So you paid for the cost now, go get your green creature, and next turn I would pay for it. I didn’t have to pay for it this turn. The turn you cast it, you don’t pay for it.

And there was a series of pacts. There was a cycle of pacts. One in each color. Pact of Negation, which was the counterspell that you paid for next turn, that was the one that I think ended up being the most powerful. Just because being able to counter a spell without having to have the mana up to pay for it can be very powerful. Even if you have to pay for it next turn.

Okay, another card was called Hive Mind. So Hive Mind was a spell, it was an enchantment that said whenever anybody casts a spell, instant or sorcery, everybody casts the instant or sorcery. So the idea is that it copied it for everybody. So let’s say, for example, I have a Hive Mind out and another player casts “Draw two cards.” Then all players get to draw two cards. The idea is, whatever I do, everybody does. And whatever somebody else does, whenever anybody casts a spell, everybody casts that spell.

Now, Summoner’s Pact was made to be sort of a green deck that allowed you—the cool thing about—it must have gone to your hand, because the cool thing about it is, I then have my mana free to cast it, because I haven’t paid for it yet. I’m not paying for it until next turn. So it allows me to go get a creature and have the mana open to cast the creature. And so the fact that you didn’t have to pay until next turn was a bonus in this particular case. It just synergized with what the card was doing.

Hive Mind, meanwhile, was a spell that was all about just doing wacky things in multiplayer play. You know. It’s like, okay, now you could abuse it, you could build decks where, you know, you’re going to do things that might be beneficial for you but not beneficial for other players, or you could do different kinds of things. Or, it just allowed you to—whenever other people got beneficial things, you got beneficial things.

But the idea was, each one of these had a very different goal in what it did. But players found that they put them together—so if you have Hive Mind in play, so whenever I cast an instant or sorcery, everybody casts the instant or sorcery, and I cast Summoner’s Pact, well, what happens? Well, everybody casts Summoner’s Pact. So that means that everybody gets to go in their deck and get a green creature, which a lot of people don’t have, because they’re not playing green, and then, on their next turn, if they don’t pay the cost for Summoner’s Pact, they’re gonna lose the game.

So the idea is, when you combine Hive Mind with Summoner’s Pact, you allow yourself in a multiplayer game to kill a lot of the players. Because a lot of players won’t be able to pay for the Summoner’s Pact next turn. And so we take a card that helps you go get things and a card that does wacky multiplayer things, and all of a sudden it’s winning the game. That’s not what either card did.

And one of the points is, one of the things about Magic is that one of the joys is that we give you a lot of open-ended cards, and you the players can do things that we never intended. Neither card when it was created, the end result was then you win the game. That wasn’t the intent when either card got made. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is, we designed things to be open-ended, and you know what? You can mix and match those cards. You can put them together. And you can win the game with it.

And the idea is that one of the things that makes Magic kind of a fun game for people is, there is so much opportunity for you to find cool things to do. Cool things to do that the designers didn’t necessarily intend. You know. We didn’t plan that combo.

Now, we created the individual cards that went into the combo, so we clearly enabled the combo to happen, but we didn’t specifically design it. Which gets into today’s lesson, which is allow your players room to explore.

So part of what that means is that I talked previously about how you gave your players choices, and how you gave them details. And how you gave them customization. That there’s all these things you want to do to empower your player. To give things your player thinks that they want to do. Well, today’s lesson talks about how not only do you have to do that, not only do you want to give them those things, but talking about how you give them those things. And so this segues into my explanation.

So in each case I would give a Magic example of how it mattered in Magic, and then I would talk about the reasons behind it. So for this one, I have to finally talk about my days in Hollywood. So I get teased all the time. So for those that don’t know this, before I became a Magic designer, I actually worked in Hollywood. And I was a writer for television. And anyway, my claim to fame—I mean, I basically spent about six years working in Hollywood, a lot of the time I was a runner, a production assistant, doing all sorts of odd tasks. I think I did a podcast on this. [NLH--Please send me a link at @nlh_rt or NLh.Magic at Gmail if you know which one he's referring to.]

But anyway, eventually I actually had my big break, and I was  on the staff of Roseanne. The TV show Roseanne. I actually do not talk about it as much as people like to think I talk about it. [NLH—He used to.] But I have a reputation for dropping that information whenever possible. Actually it’s relevant here to this story, but I get teased a lot for it.

But anyway, part of my time and when I lived in Los Angeles, I was a writer, and I was actively pitching stories. So in Hollywood, there’s something they call “the pitch.” And the idea of the pitch is that you will have a meeting where you the writer go in with usually other writers, but people running—I was in television, so a pitch for television is, I get called in, and I need to pitch to the people ideas for the show that they run.

So in question for this one was, for example the job I got at Roseanne was, I got—so the way it works is, there’s staff. People work on staff on TV shows. And so—ideally, the job you want—I mean, one day you make your own TV show, but the job you want is to get on a staff of a TV show. It’s a gig, it’s a good-paying gig, and you work on that show.

But one of the things about it is, well, how do you get your foot in the door? So the Writers’ Guild, people that oversee writing, one of the things they said is, every season for a TV show, three of the episodes must be written by an outsider. And what that means is that they are required to go outside their normal writing staff for three shows.

By the way, all the stuff I’m talking about is from twenty years ago, maybe the WGA slightly altered the thing. So take into account that—but I do know that one of the things they do is, in order to allow new writers to have an opportunity, they require all shows to go outside for three episodes.

So what happens is, they have you in what’s called the pitch. And the idea of a pitch is, you’re gonna come in, and you’re going to explain why—ideas for shows. So like, okay, okay, I’ve got a great idea. What if… blah-de-blah.

And the pitches vary from place to place. Basically the idea is, you come in and you give them examples of shows—you come up with shows they could do, and then you pitch them ideas for shows. And your goal in one of these meetings is you want them to buy one of your ideas.

So for those that don’t know, a little insight into the TV biz, the way you make it as a writer, if you’re—let’s say you’re starting out, and you’re like, I’ve never written before. How do I get my foot in the door? And the answer is, you write what’s called a spec script, or a speculative script. Which means you take existing TV shows that already exist, and you write a sample script for that show.

Normally you write not just one but multiple. So for example, when I was getting in, this is twenty years ago, my sample scripts, like I wrote a Murphy Brown script, and I wrote—what else did I write? I wrote—I think I wrote a Doogie Howser script. I don't know. These are shows from long ago. I wrote a whole bunch of shows. I wrote a Frasier script. I wrote probably four or five different scripts. And my Murphy Brown script was probably my best script I wrote. Got me my pitch at Roseanne. They liked my Murphy Brown script and said, oh, we like this script, hey come pitch us ideas to them.

So the idea is, you walk in and you pitch them ideas for their show. And what you want to do is sell an idea. They want to go, ooh, we like that, okay, we’ll play you for that idea. And sometimes they buy the idea, some of the time, not only do they buy the idea, but they pay for you to write it. You get paid—if it’s your idea they’ll pay you for it, if you write the script they also pay you for it. But the ultimate goal when you walk in is to get them to buy a script.

So this is the lifeblood of—I mean, eventually if you establish yourself enough and you’ve written enough things, your resume of writing will help get you jobs. But when you’re first starting out, you haven’t done anything yet, so these spec scripts are very important.

And, early on there’s a lot of pitching. I did a lot of pitching in Hollywood. Not only did I pitch to Roseanne, I actually pitched a bunch of times to Star Trek, I pitched to Star Trek: Next Generation , I pitched to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Once again, this was twenty years ago. I pitched a whole bunch of stuff. I pitched to Married... with Children. These are all old shows because it’s twenty years ago.

I was actually going to pitch to The Simpsons by the way. The week after my Roseanne pitch I was supposed to pitch to The Simpsons, but my Roseanne pitch went so well I got a job, that I never ended up pitching to The Simpsons. Which I always wondered what if, because I like The Simpsons.

Anyway, so pitching is really important. Because it makes or breaks whether or not you can have a career. So one of the things in Hollywood that you have to do is you need to learn about pitching. You have to—you go to classes on pitching. Because pitching is really, really important.

So one of the things that I learned, something they drummed into you, I mean there’s a lot of different things about pitching. Maybe one day I’ll do a whole podcast on pitching. Pitching is pretty cool. But I need one point for today’s lesson. Which is—normally what happens is, you’re going to describe your show. You’re going to talk about what’s going on. And the same, by the way, even if you’re doing movies, you come in and you pitch your movie, like here’s what my movie’s about. A lot of pitching is, I have a story. I want you to hear my story.

But one of the techniques they teach you in pitching class is, what you want to do is not tell everything you have. You want to tell just enough that you then get the people you’re pitching to, to ask you a question. You want to sort of give just enough of your story that you draw in your audience and they ask a question. And then you continue saying what you want to say, but you do it by answering their question.

So why is this important? Well, it comes down a basic element of the way humans function. Which is that people are more invested in things that they feel they initiated. So let’s say I have ten minutes of story tot ell you. And I could for ten minutes tell you the story, but maybe I bore you, or maybe at some point you’re like, wow, he’s been talking for a long time. So instead of doing that, I tell you two minutes; worth, but the most exciting two minutes’ worth, enough to get you to go, ooh, I want to know more.  And then you ask me a question. So then I answer some of that. And then, I get another question.

So there’s a very different dynamic between “I talk to you for ten minutes,” and “I talk two minutes, you ask a question. I answer, you ask a question. I answer, you ask a question.” So in both cases I give away the same information. I have ten minutes of information to give away. In both cases I spend ten minutes giving the information. The big difference here is that in the first case, I talked to you for ten minutes. In the second case, I talked with you. That I was—you are an active part of what I was saying.

And the reason that is so crucial, the reason that’s so important is that people just have more investment in something they start. That if I ask a question and now you’re answering my question, well, I’m gonna listen more. Because you’re answering my question. I asked it.

And so the way this applies to game design is, people are just more invested in things they initiate. Okay, so you have your details. You have your choices. You have your customization. Okay. Now let your player discover it. Let your player find it. Rather than spoon-feeding it to your player, put it someplace where you think your player will get to it.

Because if your player finds it on their own, if your player comes across something and they’re the ones that discover the detail, or find the choice, or create the customization, if they’re the ones that make decisions to do things, and they feel like they made they decision, they chose to do it, that is a very different animal from you telling them to do it.

And like I said, once again, a lot of my lessons—in fact, almost all my lessons essentially are saying, hey. Understand human nature. Understand how humans work, and understand that what you’re doing with your game plays into how humans function. You’re not fundamentally going to change human behavior. You know. Going back to my very first lesson. You’re not gonna change human behavior. Have human behavior—work with human behavior. You know.

The way I like to say is, you know, there’s a river. I can acknowledge that the river has a current and is going in a certain direction, and work with the current, or I can work against the current. I’m not going to change the current. The river’s gonna run the way the river’s gonna run. I can make it easier or harder for myself.

And a lot of today’s lesson is a specific way to make it easier for yourself, which is, if you can take the elements that you think your player will like, and design the game such that they get to discover them—so let’s go back to Magic for a second, my example earlier on.

One of the things Magic does really well is, we make a lot of open-ended cards. We make a lot of things—you know, I’m not saying we never, ever make cards that can go together. But even if we do make cards that can go together, we don’t tell the players they go together. We just make things that are synergistic and let the players discover them. Let the players find them. We just show you cards. We don’t tell you how the cards get used together.

In fact, it’s funny. Once upon a time we used to write articles about card combos, and we’ve dialed back on that a little bit, because what we realized is, we wanted players to find their own combos. We didn’t want to tell you, hey, Card A and Card B go great together! It’s like, let you find Card A and Card B and let you discover that Card A and Card B go great together.

That a lot of what makes Magic tick as a game—now, I mean, once again, Magic has a lot of this. Magic—the nature of the game is, you take whatever cards you want and build a deck. You know. We are making you explore. We are making you find your own things because we don’t tell you what to do.

You know, we give you some restrictions for the deckbuilding, like okay, well your deck has to have so many cards, and this and that, and so many copies, and I mean we give you restrictions, but we don’t tell you what to do. We’re in fact very open-ended. I mean, we create formats, we create restrictions for you, but hey, you’ve got to figure out what you want to do.

And so Magic does this really, really well. Magic is great with this lesson. If anything, Magic—we err on the side of making it too hard. There’s too much exploration. One of the things we found with beginning players is, we start having to do a little more deck building for people because wow, it’s daunting to go, you can do anything. You can have everything. And that’s a little daunting.

But one of the neat things about the game is, when you discover a card or a combo or you find a way to use something, it’s not that we told you to do that. And in general, one of the things about your game that you want to do is, figure out what the cool thing about your game is. Figure out—like I said. You want to work all the stuff we’ve talked in. You want to figure out what the details are and what the neat choices are and where the customization is. All that figured out ahead of time. Build it in.

But then, you want to make sure that you are not spoon feeding your players. You want to make sure that you give the tools there, and let the players find the things on their own. So let me—I’m gonna—sorry—(???) hiccups.

I’m gonna talk about this concept and talk about some other ways, how other fields approach something very similar. And so one of the—I’ve gotten feedback on these, and one of the things I discover is, I’ve been a little repetitious in the way that I’ve been presenting these. So what I want to do now is, I want to talk about the same lesson, but I’m going to talk about how some other people tackle this lesson in other fields. Just to sort of give you a vantage point that’s a different kind of vantage point. Hopefully you’ll like this.

Okay. So first. Let’s talk about puzzle making. So one of the things that I’ve had my hand in a little bit is I—games and puzzles are very different animals. Games are all about, you have sort of infinite choices. That each person’s gonna find their own solution. Where puzzles, in the end, each player’s gonna find mostly the same solution. There’s an answer to the puzzle. So puzzles are a little bit different. But there’s a same quality that I want to talk about.

So, one of the things that you need to do in a puzzle is, you want your players to crack the puzzle. And this is the interesting thing about puzzle making is, if nobody ever solves your puzzle, you’ve made a bad puzzle. But at the same time, if everybody figures your puzzle out right away, you’ve also made a bad puzzle.

So the key to a good puzzle is, what you want to do is you want to figure out what is known as a eureka moment. Which is, you want to find something that’s clever, that’s logical, that’s consistent, and you want to make sure that you then bury those things within the context of the puzzle.

For example, let me talk about Magic puzzles. I used to make Magic puzzles. The way I would build my Magic puzzles is, I would find some really neat, cool interaction with cards. Usually what I would do is find a way to use a card that is not the normal way a card got used. Or find a card combo that’s not normal. And the idea is, part of solving the puzzle is saying, well wait a minute, I have to use this card in a way I don’t traditionally use it.

Like a very common thing is, I take a card that said “target player,” and ninety-nine percent of the time you’re the target player. You use it on yourself. Aha! But the way to solve this puzzle is realizing that you have to use it on your opponent. And I’ve set up the situation where you actually need to use it on your opponent. That’s a common one I would do. Or vice versa, sometimes you take spells you almost always use on your opponent, but there’s a reason why in this case you’d want to use it on yourself.

And what a eureka moment is, is you want to find something where the players have to figure something out that either isn’t how they normally do it or has to combine things in a way—you’re taking some moment that the player doesn’t normally do. There’s something about your puzzle where there’s some element of it that’s a little different.

Because what makes a eureka moment a eureka moment is the players have to realize—usually what keeps a puzzle, the key to a good puzzle usually is that the player’s own preconceptions are the thing stopping them. That the players—when you first look at the puzzle it seems like you can’t crack it, and what you have to come to realize is, oh wait a minute, I’m making some assumption that isn’t true. The key to solving the puzzle is making some leap of logic that I don’t normally make. But something that makes sense. Not something that’s illogical, but just like, oh, well, I normally do Thing X, but wait a minute. In this puzzle I don’t.

And the key to a eureka moment in a puzzle is, you want the player to figure out that something about how they’re approaching it is wrong. But what you want to do is they figure it out. A lot of times I talk about finding nooks and crannies in puzzles, which means, imagine for example you’re trying to find a hidden door or something. If everything’s super smooth, it’s just frustrating. You want a little nook. So you want something in your puzzle that gives the players little tiny clues without necessarily giving away the answer.

Because what makes the puzzle fun and compelling is, you want the audience to solve your puzzle. You know—if I did a puzzle—I mean, every once in a while you come across a puzzle where it’s like, I’m just basically telling you the answer. It’s just—one leads to two leads to three leads to four leads to five leads to six leads to seven leads to eight leads to nine leads to ten. Eh, you solved it. Not really compelling. Yeah, you wet through the motions, but that’s not really a compelling puzzle. What makes for a compelling puzzle is you the player doing the puzzle, feeling good about yourself. That you solved something, that you solved it. That you the puzzle maker figured out a way to do it.

So when you make puzzles, you want to work in that—sometimes there’s more than one eureka moment. But you want to sort of figure out a way for the player to earn the puzzle. You can’t just give them the puzzle, the player has to earn the puzzle. And that’s what I’m trying to say here with the game, is you want your player to earn the advantage in the game. You know. One of the things about games that are kind of like puzzles is, you need to figure out the game when you’re playing a game.

And what you want to do is have cool things to figure out, but let the player have the opportunity to figure those things out. Let the player have the opportunity—that in general, people—an awesome moment for people is when they get to feel good about themselves. That one of the reasons that people do things is there’s a positive reinforcement internally.

And one of the neat things that games and puzzles both do is make you feel smart. Make you feel clever. Make you—you know, that you want those aha moments, that the player goes, aha! I figured something out. I did it. It wasn’t done for me, it wasn’t handed to me, I had to do it.

What that means is, as a designer, a game designer or a puzzle designer, you need to give your player the moment, the ability to have the aha moments. The eureka moments. The moments where they get to feel like the smart one.

And, you know, one of the things that Magic does really well is we definitely think about combinations. We definitely think about synergies. We build a lot of synergies in our game. But then we don’t announce the synergies, we let the players figure out what the synergies are.

Okay. So let’s talk about a different example. Let’s talk about being a story writer. Another background of mine. Okay, so when you write a story, what you want to do is, you want the players to have agency in the story. What that means is, you want the players to sort of—essentially what’s going on is, the players once again want to feel smart. So what you want to do is you want to give them as much information as possible to let the player try to figure out where and what’s gonna happen in the story.

Now, you get to throw some twists and turns in, but even when you throw twists and turns in, you always support it. And what that means is that you always give the players clues of where the story is going. Often called like foreshadowing and stuff. And the idea is, you give them bits and pieces—now, a good craftsman will hide the bits and pieces. Meaning when I foreshadow things, I want to not make you always aware I’m foreshadowing.

A classic thing that happens a lot of times is, in the first act, they will do something in which they give you a piece of what’s going to happen in the third act. Like, LethalWeapon’s a good example, where—I forget their names, but the cop that’s about to retire. [NLHL--Murtaugh.] He is redoing his house. And we swing by his house in the first act and we see that he’s redoing his house, and you see the nail gun, and you know, you get the sense of, oh, he’s redoing his house, and it plays into the theme of he’s about to retire. Look, you know, it’s his glory days, he’s about to retire, you know, he’ll have more time to work on redoing his house, and you know, it sort of played into a piece of showing something about the character.

Now, in the third act there’s a major fight scene that happens there, and the nail gun is the thing—I don’t want to ruin Lethal Weapon, but it is twenty-plus years old. That nail gun becomes important. But the idea is, early on it’s introduced in a way that hopefully seems like, oh, it’s not a key thing.

Avengers has a similar thing where they have a scene—Avengers, the second Avengers. Ultron. Where there’s a sceneafter the party, where they’re playing around with Thor’s hammer. And nobody can lift Thor’s hammer because, you know, only the worthy can lift Thor’s hammer. And it’s a fun scene and it looks like it’s a camaraderie scene. It looks like it’s a scene—but, that pays off later in the movie. You know. That good movies figure out ways to take things that are irrelevant, put them early on—they try to hide them somewhat.

But the idea is that we give you information—so when something happens, you the audience, you feel like, oh, they give me information—and sometimes you figure things out. Like, for example, Watchmen,  a classic comic book series. I actually read—I mean, Watchmen, most people read Watchmen now read it as a graphic novel collected. But it originally came out in comic book form. And I actually read it every month.

In fact, the way it came out is it came out every month, and then he got behind so then it was like every six weeks and so—and I think on issue six. It was twelve issues. I figured out who the bad guy was. And Alan Moore didn’t reveal the bad guy until issue eight or nine. But anyway, for a couple months, like, I thought I knew who the bad guy was, and I told my friends, and they’re like, no, and I’m like no no no, and I had all these reasons to prove it. I went in the story and I took all the pieces, and like, I, like figured out what I believed the correct answer was using proof from the stories.

And I was right! You know, I felt awesome. The issue came out, and like, I am correct! I was like dancing for joy. I felt smart. I felt like the novelist, or in this case the writer had done a good job of enabling me to be able to figure things out.

And even when you don’t figure things out, when the twist comes or something happens, the reader goes, ohh, I should have figured that out! I saw all the pieces. You know. And that when you write something, you want to make sure that you give the audience the ability to figure things out, to see things, that you give them the clues. So that when you pay it off later—that even whether they figure it out or don’t figure it out, they feel as if there is the ability to figure it out.

Okay. Here’s a different example. In teaching. One of the things they talk about when you teach kids is, what you want to do is, you need for the kids to figure it out on their own terms. That if I just say to you, oh, here’s why math is important, kids go, well, yawn, math. But if I find a situation or a reason where using this actually solves a real-life problem. You might actually encompass this in life. This might be something—people sit up, because they’re like, oh, this might actually affect me. This thing I’m learning might be something I might actually use.

And it is a very effective teaching tool. What good teachers do is they find a way to make what they’re teaching valuable to the person who’s receiving it. Because if I just say, hey, look at this principle, you might go, “Ehh,” but if I go no no no, imagine you’re older and you’re doing Thing X or Thing Y.

Or, another thing that’s very common for teachers is that they will take things and put it in—like, one of the things is I had a teacher, a math teacher who, his word problem was, he would always try to take them and put them in the context—I’m sorry, not a—well, it was a physics, it wasn’t math. It was physics. Although one would argue that physics is math.

And one of the things he did that was fun is, like one of the ones I’ll never forget is, he did a problem where Wile E. Coyote was trying to catch the Road Runner, and basically the question was, like, at what speed does Wile E. Coyote hit the cliff or whatever. Because he was doing whatever shenanigans Wile E. Coyote does. But he took something in which it gave it some contextual thing, and all of a sudden, like, I loved Wile E. Coyote. I’m a big fan of Wile E. Coyote. And like, it just—all of a sudden it had some context to it that it didn’t mean before.

And that when you’re teaching, that’s important. You want to give contextual things, and that once again. When it’s personal. Whether or not it’s something that players can see how it affects their lives, or it’s attaching to some creative thing, some IP or something that means something to them, that when it’s something that’s just not dry, but connects personally to the player—I’m sorry, to the student, teaching, it means more to the student and the student is more invested in learning.

Another example of this would be in newspapers. So let’s say there’s an event around the world that happens. Let’s say some horrible thing happens in London. Okay, you’re—I’m here in Seattle, Washington. Well, what does Seattle, Washington do? They try to find a way that that story affected somebody who lives in Seattle.

Why? Why do they do that? Because the answer is that it’s more personal—like for example, let’s say someone from Seattle was vacationing there. And then they were caught up in the middle of whatever happened. The reason that’s important is, then you go, ooh. I could have been vacationing there. Wow, I could have been the person from Seattle who’s visiting London. It makes a story personal.

And that when you make the story personal, people get more invested in it. You know. And that one of the things they teach you when you study journalism is that you want to find a way to make the story have relevance for the reader. And find the angle where it becomes a universal thing.

Even if you’re writing a story, by the way, and you’re not using the local, you’re also trying to find, okay, what is this story about, and why would the average person care about the story? What about this story speaks to people?

So like the reason I’m giving you a lot of different things is I’m just trying to hit the same point but showing you a different means by different things that—when somebody approaches a problem, whether it’s a puzzle or a classroom lesson or reading the newspaper, or reading a story, or playing your game.

Whenever somebody is doing something, that if you can find a way to involve them in it—now a big part of today’s story is the idea from a game standpoint is, the way you do that is, you find cool things, build cool things, build the tools for them to use. You know what I’m saying? Once again, you’re going to make neat choices for them to make. You’re going to find cool details for them to discover. You’re going to build cool customization for them to play into.

But you’re going to do it in such a way that it’s something that they get invested in. That they—that the more you make it something that they discover, the  more that’s something that they take ownership in, the more personal it is to them. The more—and like I said. You know, in some ways my twenty lessons are going to keep repeating some basic things again and again.

And the core lesson is, humans are going to act like humans. How do you take your game and maximize what humans want? And I cannot stress enough. And this is not in a bad way—look. You see the world through your eyes. You listen to the world through your ears. That your experience is how the world is shaped.

And yes, there’s other people with other experiences, and yes you should learn those, but in the end it is your own experiences, it is your own personal touch on the world that is the most important to you because it’s what you know. And that when you take something, people are always going to prioritize things in which they feel there’s a personal investment. Things that—you know, when you initiate something, that just means more to you because of that.

Well, if we know that—as game designers we know that. That if people initiate things it means more to them. That the answer then is, let them initiate it. Let them find things. You know. You want to put things where they’re going to find them—I mean, you have to be careful. I mean, I have another lesson all about, make sure people—don’t hide your fun. But the point is, make sure that you give them the opportunity to—I mean, put it where they’ll find it, but make sure that people have the opportunity to find the things they need to find.

And that, you know, for example, I’ll just take one example. Details. I talk about details. Let’s say I do something really cool. I want to make sure people have the opportunity to find it. But if I tell you I did something, if I say, hey, look at this cool detail, vs. you finding the detail, there’s a world of diferencec.

Because when you tell them there’s a detail, they’re like, oh, okay, but when they find it, they’re like, oh, did anybody else see this? I found this thing. You know. And there’s this strong—in the end, like the thing I keep talking about is, players are going to sit down and play your game, and at the end of every game, they’re going to ask themselves, do I want to play this again?

And obviously, each time it gets easier for them to say yes, but there’s always that decision at the end of the game whether or not they want to play the game again. And believe it or not, one of the biggest factors of them choosing to play the game again is whether or not it spoke to them.

I mean, yes, was it fun, was it exciting, did they have a good time, all that matters. But one of the big pieces is that in general, people judge things based on how it makes them feel. I talked about this a lot, that we are intellectual creatures, but in the end our decision-making’s boiled down to emotions most of the time. That most of the time, we sort of say, hey, I had an activity, I did something, do I like how this activity made me feel? And, did this activity make me feel smart? Did it make me feel clever? Did it make me feel happy? Did it make me—you know did I get to feel good about myself when I did it?

Or, just did I feel good when I did it? You know, I don’t even necessarily have to feel good about myself, but that always helps. But also just—how did I feel? Did it do something for me? And when I can say, hey, this helped me, or spoke to me, or connected with me, or in any way where I just found some personal connection, I am so much more likely to say yes, (???) me again. Yes I’ll play again.

And that a lot of what today is saying is that you’re going to do cool things. You’re going to make cool things. I keep talking about all these different kind of cool things you can do. The lesson of today is, do those cool things, but then think about this. That if your audience discovers the cool thing, if they’re the agent, if they have agency, that the cool thing wasn’t something you showed them, the cool thing was something that they found, that’s so much more potent, that’s so much more powerful. And that just increases the chances of them saying, ooh, I definitely want to play this game again. And so, lesson number ten, leave room for the players to explore.

Anyway, like I said, I tried something a little different this time, I’m hoping—I like feedback as always, I like the idea—I’m seeing if you guys like this, of approaching this problem through a couple different fields to show you the same basic problem but how different fields approach it. Hope you guys liked that, I was just trying to, I don't know, do something a little different with this, so as always I appreciate feedback because it is through your feedback that I get better. And I do more of what you guys want me to.

So anyway, I am now pulling up to Rachel’s school, so we all know what that means, you know this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. So I’ll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.