2/16/18 Episode 511: Twenty Lessons, Part 17--Less Is More

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, guys. So today is the seventeenth in my series of Twenty Lessons, Twenty Podcasts. And so I did a talk at GDC back in 2016, in it I talked about twenty lessons I learned during the twenty years I had of making Magic, and I’ve been doing a podcast on each lesson, so we’re up to number seventeen, you don’t have to change much to change everything.

So, I always start this by talking about a Magic example. So this one talks about the creation of Ravnica. So what happened was, we—for many years Magic would just make themes—the themes would be like, just—we would make two mechanics. And then we eventually got to a set called Invasion, where we’re like, what if there’s a theme? What if there’s a theme to the set? Rather than just, oh, it’s these two mechanics that may or may not be connected, what if there was an actual theme and the mechanics all connected to the theme?

And Invasion’s theme was multicolor. And it went over really well. So then we did Odyssey and its theme was the graveyard. And we did Onslaught and its theme was tribal. And we did Mirrodin and its theme was artifacts. And we did Champions of Kamigawa  and its theme was a top-down Japanese flavor.

So anyway, we eventually get to Ravnica. And Ravnica, the idea was, enough time had gone by that we wanted to do a multicolor theme again. But this was the first time we’d ever repeated a theme. And so my goal was, I wanted to both do the theme but be as different from the last set that did the theme as that.

So the previous set that had done the theme was Invasion. So Invasion’s multicolor theme really was, like, “Play lots of colors.” Introduced the domain mechanic, where the more basic land types you have, the larger the effects were. And it just did a lot to encourage you to play a lot of different colors.

So I started Ravnica literally by saying, “How can I do a multicolor set that’s as far away from Invasion as I can get?” And so the idea was, well, Invasion was “Play lots of colors.” So what if Ravnica was “Play few colors”?

Now, obviously it was a multicolor set. So monocolor is not multicolor. So the theme couldn’t be “Play moncolor,” then it’s not a multicolor set. So I’m like, okay. What’s the smallest multicolor theme we can have? Two color.

And so basically, the set started with the real simple of, instead of playing five-color, play two-color. Invasion pushed you toward playing four and five colors, okay, well this set will push you toward playing two colors. That’s where I started.

And obviously for those that know Ravnica, I mean, from that we got the idea of, “Let’s represent all the ten two-color pairs equally,” which led us to the idea of representing them flavorfully, which led to the guilds, which led to the model of—you know, the block had 4-3-3, four guilds then three guilds then three guilds, so not every set had every guild in it.

So a lot stuff came out, but it really came out of a very simple premise. Which is just, “Okay, let’s push toward two-color.” And the interesting thing about it is, nobody would confuse Invasion with Ravnica. Yes, they both have a strong multicolor theme. They both have lots of multicolor cards. But the sets ended up having really, really different feels to them.

And the point was, it wasn’t as if I had really changed much. I really changed one tiny aspect. Now, it was an important aspect, but the point is, changing that one thing changed so much about the identity of the sets.

And the lesson I really learned there, and the lesson I’m talking about in this thing is, it gets to a metaphor that I use. So I’ll now segue into my metaphor. So my metaphor is, I often—my wife Lora is a very good cook. And Lora, most oftentime Lora will cook. I do some cooking. The joke is that I’m her sous-chef, I’m more likely to like, brown the meat or prepare the sauce or something. But I am not—of my wife and myself, I am the less culinary-skilled person.

So usually as the sous-chef, if you will, I prepare the things that go along with the meal. So one of my jobs is to prepare “the vegetables”. So “the vegetables” is, we have frozen vegetables, and we make a boiling pot of water, and we put the vegetables in the water. It’s not real complicated, why it’s really well-suited for me.

So anyway, there’s a dynamic that I learned about making peas. So here’s what happens every time I make peas. Make peas with the world. Okay, so. What will happen is, I’ll boil the water. And then, I get out the bag of frozen peas. And I put some peas in the pot. And then I look in the pot, I’m like, “Ohh, that doesn’t seem like a lot of peas.” So I put more peas in the pot. And then I’ll go, “Well, nah, it still doesn’t look like a lot of peas.” So I’ll put more peas in. And then I’m like, “Ehh, maybe that’s enough peas.” But then I’m like, “Well, but what if I’m misjudging, if I don’t make enough peas then we’ll run out of peas and won’t have peas. Okay, I’ll put more peas, I’ll put more peas in.” And then I’m like, “Ohh, aghh, I probably have enough peas. I probably do. But like, you know, if I err toward too many peas, that’s better than not having enough peas, maybe just to be on the safe side I should add more peas.” And then, and then as I’m ready to put the bag away, I’m like, “Well, [unintelligible],” and I put like another handful of peas.

Okay. And then what happens is, I always make too many peas. I always make too many peas. Which you’d think would influence me to not make as many peas in the future. As if I would learn from my lesson of making too many—but it does not. So I always make too many peas. I always, like—whenever I prepare the peas and put them in the bowl, like, they barely fit in the bowl. And the bowl’s way more than we need. So it’s just too many peas.

So the reason I bring that metaphor up, one is to show embarrassingly how bad I am at making peas. But the real reason to show that is there’s this inclination, there’s this worry that I think people have in game design that “There’s not enough. I haven’t put enough in my game. There needs to be more. My game’s not—it’s missing things.”

And you know, there’s a general thought that has the same sort of philosophy I think I have with my peas, which is this idea of, I’d better err on the side of having more. I don’t want to have not enough. I’d better make sure there’s more. And if I’m not sure, I’ll just put more in.

And the idea essentially is this sort of philosophy of, it’s better to err toward more than err toward less. That I think game designers treat their components like I treat peas. But there’s a problem with that. That is the idea—like, a lot of my lessons are taking things that seem to make sense and realizing they are fundamentally flawed. They don’t make sense.

So the idea here is, “Oh. Why—it’s better for me to err on too much than err on not enough.” And my point today is, no, in this case, in peas, not that big a deal. I waste some peas. But in actual game design, it is a problem. Okay, so why. Why is that a problem? Why is having a little bit more a problem? Okay, let’s run through the many reason this is a problem.

So number one is, complexity. So I talk about this all the time. The goal of your game is to have enough complexity that there’s some richness to it, but not so much that it gets in the way of your game. That it gets in the way of people enjoying your game.

Now, the one of the interesting things is, I happen to work on a very complex game. I work on a game made for gamers, that it is—you know, and we are constantly struggling with complexity. But the baseline of the game I’m talking about is just complex.

Most games do not want to aim at the complexity level of Magic. Magic is an insanely complex game. And even then, you know, Magic we tried really hard to make sure that the base element of the game stays as simple as possible.

But what I’m saying is, when you’re making a new game, that every level of complexity you add to your game becomes a barrier to your game. It becomes a barrier somewhat of playing your game. And that it is very easy to look at some existing examples, you know what I’m saying, and say, “Well, there’s games I love and they are complex,” but you are hurting yourself.

Like, first of all, if your game is successful, if your game becomes something that lasts the tests of time, what normally happens is, you have the opportunity later on for true, true fans of the game, to add extra elements on. That can come later.

But when you’re making a game out of the gate, complexity is a real, real issue. That every time you add something, like—one of the things to think about, here’s my—a day of metaphors is, there’s a great metaphor they talk about in Zen, about how there’s like a Zen master and a student. And the student has—the Zen master gives the student a teacup. And he goes, “Would you like some tea?” And he pours a little bit of tea in the cup. And so then the student, you know, he pours just a little bit in the cup and he gives it to the student, and he goes, “Would you like more tea?” And the student looks in his cup, there’s not much tea in it. So the student goes, “Yes, I would like more tea.” And so he pours—and he keeps pouring until the cup’s overrunning with tea. And then what he says is, there’s a point in which you can’t have more tea. You must drink the tea you have before you can have more tea.

And the idea is, I always like to think of the teacup as sort of the player’s mind. There’s only so much they can grasp. And that when you exceed what they can grasp, all you’re doing is forcing them to exclude things. [NLH—Mark has misunderstood the point of this story.]

Like when you make a game too complex, what you are doing is you are saying to the person playing—either you make them quit, which is not good, or you make them choose things not to care about. And here’s the problem. When they choose things not to care about, you’re not going to get to choose what those are, they’re going to choose. And what that means is, they are changing the nature of your game, often for worse because maybe the things that really matter, they won’t understand. And so maybe the things they choose to ignore are the things that are important.

You know, I talked before in one of my lessons of, make sure the players can find the fun in your game. Well, the more complexity you add, the more you kind of hide your fun, the more chance there is that they go down the wrong path. Or they see the wrong thing. Or they make the wrong assumption. You know. The more the chance that the thing they decide not to do in your game is the thing that’s the most important thing in your game.

That part of guiding someone in your game as a designer is not—is giving them just enough choices that they experience the game as you want them to experience it. It is so—the flaw in the thinking here is that if I give them all these things to explore, they will explore them all and it will make a richer experience. And the true answer is, if you give them too much to explore, they don’t know where to go.

And the idea essentially is, so I’ll borrow a little bit from UI design. Here, jumping around. So UI is User Interface. Is the idea of, “I’m making a video game and I want the player to do something.” And what they’ve discovered is, what they call decision paralysis. Is, if I give you too many options, you just freeze up. That what you want to do is you want to give people a few options.

Like, one of the things for example when the iPhone first premiered, that was a big, that was a crazy idea at the time was, there will be one button. There’s one button. On all the screen there’s one button. So, what do I do? Well, if I’m not sure, I’ll press the one button. You know. If there’s eighteen buttons, well, which button do I press? One button, okay, I’ll press the one button.

And so one of the dangers of just adding too much is that there’s all sorts of sort of dangers of how people interact with their product, how they understand the product. You know. Sort of them learning your product, them having the experience that you want. So extra complexity causes all sorts of problems.

There’s also—I mean, I could do a whole podcast on just the dangers of complexity. I’m sure one day I will because it’s a fine topic. But anyway, it adds complexity. So anyway, it adds complexity. So number one, it adds complexity, that’s a problem.

Number two. It muddies your message. And what I mean by that is, the same—sort of a similar point. If I, like I said, on User Interface, if I give you eighteen buttons, you don’t know what to do, so there’s the confusion factor, but also I don’t know what matters. I don't know what’s important.

Like, one of the things about having sort of some cleanliness to your game is you get to focus on the things that matter. I talk a lot about finding the fun. That you want the audience to find the fun of your game. So part of it is you muddy the message, they don’t know what the fun is. But also, they might not know like—one of the things in general, I talk a lot about aesthetics. I talk a lot about cleanliness, that you want things to feel good and feel right. But you also want a clean and clear message. What is your game about?

So for example, if I say to somebody, “What is your game about?” and they say, “It’s about these four things,” I go, “Well, it’s about one of those things.” You know. Your game can’t be about everything, because if you’re about everything, you’re about nothing.

You know, for example, one of the things they teach you in writing, when you write scripts and stuff, is that you want to be able to sum up what your screenplay is about—usually—and this is true for stories, I guess, I’m just, I was taught how to write screenplays. Is, do you have a one-sentence summary? Do you have a one-paragraph summary? Do you have, like, a two-paragraph summary? And even—you can go shorter than one sentence. You can do, like, what’s—one or two words.

And the idea essentially is, is your idea simple enough that you can condense it down? Because if your idea’s so complex that you can’t condense it down, you start having messaging problems. And one of the big things about games in general, and when you’re making a game, especially the first time someone plays your game, but even before they play the game, when it’s sitting on the shelf or you’re trying to get other people to convince them to play it, that the cleanliness of the message. What is your game about?

Magic, for instance, one of the things I like a lot is, at its core it’s like, it’s about fighting with magic. There are three words. Fighting with magic. Well, that sounds cool. I would like to do magical things and fight with other people, and ooh a magical duel, that sounds fun.

Now, there’s a lot else going on there. But there’s a cleanliness of what the message is and what’s going on. So another thing that when you add in too many components is, you just muddy your message, you make it harder to convey something. Because as you add more things, there’s just—it makes more paralysis, and people have less idea of what you’re doing.

So it is really, really important that when you make something, you—one of the things to think a lot about, that when you make your components and you make your pieces in your game is, that each thing needs to stand on its own. I talk a lot about, in writing there’s this principle that if it can exist without it, it should exist without it. That if you can pull the scene from your movie, and the movie makes perfect sense without your scene, pull it.

Games have the same basic idea, which is, does the game need that element? If you can pull that element out of your game and your game is just as fun, is that element serving its purpose? Is it doing something?

And one of the hardest parts of the creative experience, and this is true in writing, it’s true in game design, is you the person, the creator, fall in love with your creation. You birthed it. It is from you. It is something that really means a great deal to you. And the idea that something you made that is beautiful and wonderful isn’t servicing the purpose of what you’re doing really takes time and energy and growth to learn and understand.

One of the things I talk a lot about in writing is an expression they call “killing your darlings.” And what it means is, part of becoming really good—this is true of any art, I’m just using any writing here, but—is of you understanding the purpose of what you’re doing, and that you don’t fall in love with creations in a vacuum.

Like, a real common thing that happens is, you’re writing a comedy. And you come up with a funny line. It’s a funny line. It’s a funny, funny line. But the problem is, in order to set up the funny line, you need a certain—like there’s a certain conceit to the scene to make the line work.

So, well, okay, in order to set up the line I’ve got to do this. And in order to make that, just—and what you’ll find is, you add a lot of extra stuff to make the joke work. To make the joke fit. And what you realize is, is it worth that? Is that one really good joke worth all the trouble that comes with it?

And in general, when you’re adding components and you’re adding pieces to it, you have to understand the net overall effect. Because what happens is, people often look at the thing in a vacuum. “Oh, that joke is funny! Ooh, that joke is funny. That’s a funny joke.” And what they don’t realize is, well, how much did you add to make that joke work? Did you add a whole scene so you could do the joke? Did you change the element of the character arc? Did you have to tweak something to justify it to make it work?

And so a lot of times, when you add a component, you can’t just judge that component in a vacuum. You have to judge that component in the larger picture of, well, what does it mean to have that component? What am I sacrificing to have that component? How does it affect other things around it? It doesn’t live in a vacuum. No piece lives in a vacuum. And so when you’re judging and evaluating things, you can’t look at it by itself. It can’t just be, “Oh…”

And here’s a really common mistake novice game designers make. Is they put an element in their game, and they have a game with it in which that element is wonderful. Oh, it’s so much fun. And then what they say is, oh, well I’ve played with this element, and it is a lot of—it really is enjoyable. It really made the game more fun. And what they miss is that you tend to focus on the thing you see. And you don’t focus on the thing you don’t see.

So sometimes, for example, you’ll make a component. And when the component gets used, oh, it’s a thing of beauty. The thing is so fun. But when it’s not used, its absence causes problems. Or the things you have to do to try to do it, and sometimes not do it, make for unfun games.

Like one of the things to do in playtesting is, it’s easy to figure out when something is fun because you’re doing it. That’s easy to figure out. It’s easy to figure out when something is not fun because you’re doing it, because oh look, I’m doing this, it’s not fun. One of the hardest things to understand is, when something is not fun because of the absence of something. That here is this thing that is not there, but because I’m trying to get toward it or I’m aiming at it or I know I need to care about it, that it is warping how the rest of the game is played.

And that’s something that, in Magic design we do a lot, where I’m trying to add a new element. You know, one of the things about designing a game that keeps changing itself is, okay, now you’re going to care about Thing X.

And the thing you have to figure out is, what happens to a game in which I care about Thing X but don’t get Thing X? Right? Like, it’s very easy to think about Game X where I get Game X—I try to make Thing X happen and I made Thing X happen, yay!

Okay. Is it fun to try? That’s an important thing with any component. Is the act of not getting it but trying to get it fun? Is the fact that there’s this dangled carrot—if I don’t get the carrot, am I having a good time? And that’s a really big red flag. If there’s a thing that getting it is fun, but trying to get is unfun, that is a big problem. So be aware of that.

Okay. Next is—oh, so—and this one has to do—this is one of those things that it’s a long term problem but it’s something to think about, which is, if I use stuff here that I don’t need to, I don’t get to use it later. This comes up in my work all the time. Now, I’m also making a game where we keep making the game. That one of the things that I have to worry about is, if I overstuff a set, if I put extra stuff in a set, meaning I exceed beyond what I’m capable of doing, then I’m just causing problems for myself.

So for example, the metaphor I will use here is, I have a friend, and I want to get them a gift. It’s their birthday. I find something awesome. An awesome gift. They’re gonna love the gift. Now, I then find a second gift. Oh, they’re really gonna love that gift. So, I could just give them both things.

Or I could give them one of them and save the other one and give it to them for the holidays, or their next birthday—like, sort of giving them both gifts causes all sorts of problems. Not that it won’t make them happy. Maybe they’ll really like both gifts. But A. It makes the next gift-buying harder, I’ve made a harder bar to clear. And I have to find another thing. I had a thing. You know. Would they have been happy with the one thing and not the second thing? If the answer’s yes, it’s sort of like, well, maybe I don’t need to give them the second thing. You know. And, the other interesting thing is, when we talk about happiness, people want to think of it as a scale. Like it’s linear in that—the more happiness the better. But this is actually not how humans function.

So the way that humans function is, there is a threshold. If I make you two times as happy, that doesn’t mean you’re—if I give you two times as many things to be happy about, that doesn’t mean I make you twice as happy. What happens essentially is, the first thing—like, let’s say I give you a gift that you love. I’m going to go up a certain level. The second thing, because it’s—like, you’re already happy. Like, my ability to make you happier goes down once I’ve made you happy in the first place. It is not as if two things make you twice as happy. So there’s sort of like—every level just makes you a little bit happier.

And when you’re talking about happiness in game design, there’s a threshold that I care about. Which is, did I make you happy? I don’t care—once you’re happy, once I’ve made you happy, you want to be careful not to say, “Well, I want to have three increments—like, I want to exceed the happiness quotient by X amount more.”

And the answer is, once you make them happy, once you reach the point where they enjoy your game, anything else you’re doing to them, even if you’re sort of slowly incrementing up their happiness, are you really doing yourself a favor? All you’re doing is sort of raising expectations and you’re not necessarily making them that much happier.

That for example, I’ll use my friend’s gift thing. So let’s say I find a gift they love. I find a second gift they love. And then finding a third gift is really hard. So let’s walk through the experiences we have here. Experience one is, so let’s say it’s their birthday and then the holidays. You get them two gifts a year.

So it’s their birthday. You get them Gift 1. Oh, they love it. They love it, they’re so happy. Come the holidays, you give them Gift 2. Oh, they love that too! They’re so happy. And in general, they had an awesome year. They had a really great year. So happy.

Okay. Version two. I give them gift one at their birthday. Oh, they’re happy! Then I give them gift two, they’re happier! Okay. Then come the holidays, I give them a gift that’s not particularly great. And they’re like, “Oh, oh, thank you very much.” So now I—their birthday, they were a little bit happier in Version B than Version A. But in Version B, they weren’t happy at the holidays. You didn’t give them a gift they particularly liked.

So it’s kind of like, they were happy, and a little extra happy, and not happy. Vs. happy and happy. So which of those two experiences is a better experience? Clearly the [second] one. You just—you made two happy experiences instead of one slightly happier experience and one not happy experience.

So one of the things of using extra pieces and stuff is, it’s a resource. Every piece you use in the game is a resource. Now, I understand if you’re making a game that’s it, and there’s never anything else, but I will say this about success of games, you never know where things are going

Like, one of the things is, Richard obviously knew there was a chance that the game could be popular, but Richard had no idea that Magic would become what it did. I mean, it was a runaway crazy phenomenon success. That doesn’t happen normally. But the point is, Richard didn’t know. Richard had an amazing game. He thought he had an amazing game. He thought some people would really, really like it. He still had no idea that it would be what it became.

And the point there is, nobody does. You’re not going to make a game and go, “Oh, well, this is the next thing. This is the next hot phenomenon…” No one knows that. I mean, even if you’re super proud of your game and you have a lot of faith in your game, there’s so many factors that contribute to that. You don’t know. So one of the things is, any game could hit the jackpot. And if that’s the case, there’s a good chance that you will need more for the game. So the idea is, “I just want to spend everything” is wrong.

Okay, but wait a minute, some of you might be saying, “But I don’t want to undershoot. I don’t want to not excite people.” You know. And there’s this big fear of like, “Well, (???) make a game, people go, ‘yawn,’ and I was holding stuff in the tank, that seems wrong.”

So--yes. There is—and this is why you playtest. One of the reasons is, you want to make sure there’s enough stuff there that people get excited. I’m not saying hold back things to the point where your game isn’t exciting. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is, do your due diligence, do your playtesting, work with people, and figure out what makes them happy.

Now, sometimes there’s a combination of things that make them happy. I am not saying today, never ever have multiple components or never ever, you know—what I’m saying is, be judicious in how you use your components. Everything in your game has to sort of pass its own test and its own muster, and has to be—its element in the game is additive, making the game better, and in a way that’s not an embarrassment of riches.

Now, like I said, most games, the problems I see is not there’s so many awesome things, how do you fit them all in, to be honest. Mostly what I see is, some cool things and some things that are filling space and not really doing anything.

Like, for example, I haven’t looked at tons of novice designs, I’ve had a few opportunities in my job, and the one common thing I tend to see on novice designers is they—because they don’t have enough confidence in the game, they overcommit and put more in under the guise that more is better. Which I’m saying today it is not.

And usually what it is—and this is me sort of getting on the note about playtesting here today again, is, the goal of your game is to understand—I mean the goal of you the game designer is, you want to understand the game you are making. You want to know what makes it tick, you want to know what makes it exciting, you want to know what makes it fun.

And the reason all of this is so important is, so here is a new metaphor. We’ll use Jenga. Think of your game as a Jenga game. I mean not like you’re making Jenga. Metaphorically it’s a game of Jenga. And what I will say to you is, so there’s a point when you play Jenga—so Jenga, for those that might not know, is a game in which you stack—you have little wooden, like, planks if you will, that are longer than they are wide, and you put three down—they’re thick, they’re about an inch thick, and they’re about three inches long and an inch wide. And then you put them down three at a time, and you criss-cros them to make this tower.

And the idea is, on your turn, you remove a piece of the tower. And then you put it on top. And the idea is, it gets harder and harder to find pieces—you know, because you don’t want the thing to topple. So what I want to say today is, your game is like a game of Jenga. And your goal is, keep removing things until it collapses, and then put that last piece back in.

Your goal essentially is, you want to be a perfect Jenga player. You don’t want anything in your game that could be taken out and the game not collapse. And that part of why you playtest and why you do all the work that you do is to understand what the element of your games are doing. What purposes they serve.

And that when you do that, it allows you to have a better sense of what can and can’t go in and go out. And, by the way. One of the things when you do playtesting, try removing things from your game. Try saying, “Okay, we’re going to play the game again, but take out Component X. What happens?”

And one of two things will happen. Either, wow, the game doesn’t work, and that tells you, you know what? Component X is important. Or it works just fine and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t need Component X.” And both of those are really valuable. So, I mean—another big lesson of today is, part of understanding your game is playing your game and really knowing it.

Okay. Next. So the other thing, by the way, in the lesson is, I mean this lesson actually—whether you are a new person making a new game or a person adding onto a game, the lessons are a little bit different. I’ve been talking a lot about the new person lesson. So—should I continue with it? Let me continue with that, before I end I will make the point for the more advanced person

Okay. Other things—so one of the things I said in the talk is, a lot of people ask the question to themselves, “How much do I need to add?” And what I said is, change that thought process. Ask yourself how little I need to add. Because one of the things that’s key to it is, you don’t need much, usually, to have the feel you’re getting. So let’s look—I did a series of podcasts called Ten Things Every Game Needs. I’m going to talk about a few of the things from that right now.

So, problems I see designers having: Too many goals. A goal wants to be clean and clear and crisp. How do I win the game? Do Thing X. Now, I’m not saying you can’t have alternative win conditions. I’m not saying there can’t be other ways to win. But you want to make sure in your basic game that it’s clean and clear what you’re trying to do. Usually what that means is you want one simple straightforward goal.

Maybe there’s other goals you learn along the way, or maybe the game opens up goals through gameplay, but you want to make sure you have too many goals. Too many goals makes people not sure what they’re trying to do, and that makes them A. Not find your fun, and B. Get lost within your game, which is a big problem.

Next. Rules. You can have too many rules. This tends to fall in a couple camps. One is a complexity issue, your audience doesn’t understand everything. But more than that, the more rules you have, the more rules interaction issues you have. And a lot of game complexity comes from rules interaction. “Oh, well, I do Thing A and Thing B. How does Thing A and Thing B work together?” The more rules you have, the more you have to address all the interconnectivity of the rules.

So be very careful in writing your rules. Make sure your rules are providing you (???)—they’re providing something that the game needs.  And once again, in your playtesting, you can try taking rules out. “Okay, what if I didn’t have that rule?”

A big problem that I find with rules comes from flavor, which comes from people trying to match flavor with rules. And that one of the things you often can do when trying to match flavor is, try to get the big picture, have the general sense of the flavor, without necessarily getting every nuance of the flavor. Sometimes when you sort of make lots of little rules to sort of be perfectly accurate flavorwise, you end up muddying and mucking up your game and making it harder for people to sort of, not only play, but to even understand—like, this idea that I’m matching the top-down so close that it makes it better is not necessarily so. A lot of the ways people connect to things is through a general sense of things, so being super exact doesn’t always have the effect you want. And it usually causes lots of problems/

Okay. Too many interactions. Interaction is good. You want players to interact with one another. But, too much anything is a problem. If I’m interacting with you constantly, you know, and you never get a moment’s breath or get to do something by yourself or get, you know, your own time to shine, yeah, you want an interaction. But that doesn’t mean every moment and every time you want the interaction. That sometimes you want moments where people can prepare by themselves or do something on their own.

At some point it should interact, and I’m not saying—clearly you want to interact since it’s one of the ten things, but you can overdo an interaction. You can make it such that people can’t move without the moves of others, and it can cause paralysis where kind of nothing happens because everyone’s kind of waiting for everyone else to do something.

You can have too much strategy. And what I mean by that is, sometimes what people add in is they want a lot of things to think about. But one of the problems in general is if you have too many hooks. If you have too many things for people to sort of look at, it can lead people astray.

Like, one of the problems we have in Magic is, if I put a card into a set, and that card has nothing to do with the set. There’s a problem, where it’s the first card people open. It’s the first card people draft. And all of a sudden, they think that’s what it’s about. And when that’s not what it’s about, it misleads them and (???) them down the wrong path.

It’s one of the reasons for example when we preview cards of upcoming sets, we have to be very careful what we preview. Because we don’t want to preview an outlier. We want to preview something that is really endemic of what the game’s going to be. And if you don’t do that you can cause yourself problems.

In general by the way, a line you’ll hear me say a lot is “focus on the fun.” Understand what makes your game fun. What makes it tick? What makes it unique? What makes it something that people haven’t done before? You know. Where is a thing that makes you smile when you do it? And that a lot of my lessons today is making sure you don’t bury it under stuff that are just gonna hide it.

Remember, more is not always—more can be less. That sometimes when you add things to a project—like the gifts thing. That giving the second gift might not overall increase the experience. And you have to keep that in mind.

Okay, so let me now move on. A lot of what I was talking about today was the beginning designer, right? You are making your very first game. So let me talk a little bit about the designer that’s making more for their game. You already have a game, you’re adding on to your game. And this lesson is equally important but has a slightly different aspect to it. So let me talk about that.

And what that is is, a lot of times when you’re trying to sort of make something new for your game, there’s this idea of, “I don’t want to do what we’ve done before. I want to make something brand new and different.”

But as a guy who for 20+ years, 22 years so far, has been doing this, what I’ve discovered is, most of what you’re doing when you’re making a new version of something is just recreating the old thing. Magic is a fun game. A lot of my job is not making a brand new thing, a lot of my job is just recreating Magic many times. And that you want to understand what makes it click so that you can capture that sense and that a lot, a lot a lot of what we do is not trying to make Magic different. It’s trying to make Magic the same.

And that what this lesson is saying is, is just like the novice puts in too many pieces, the more advanced designer sometimes will move things farther away than they need. And once again, not how much do I need to add, how little do I need to add?

And I use Ravnica as a good example because in some ways, Ravnica and invasion aren’t that different. You know. There’s a lot of things you do when you do multicolor cards. For example, you lean on cycles. You lean on—you know, to try to make it simple there’s a lot of Chinese menu—there’s a lot of ways you design multicolor cards that are just similar no matter what set you’re designing them in.

And in many, many ways, Invasion and Ravnica have a lot of similarity. And the idea was, when I was trying to find a difference to define Ravnica, my goal wasn’t, at every level, at every time I could do something, do it different. In fact, a lot of times, hey, I did something, I learned a theme, I learned from it, a lot of those lessons you want to use again.

So how do I make a good multicolor set? Well, there’s some things that just make a good multicolor set. And the idea there is, you don’t want to—sort of for the sake of just being different, not give yourself the tools you need.

So make sure you understand the tools you need and use those tools. And here’s the key to the lesson is, if you change just a tiny percentage of your game, the fact that people have to interact with that tiny percentage. You know. And you can (???) a lot, makes it different.

Like for example, when we were originally playing around with Zendikar, we put in a mechanic called landfall that cares about when you play a land. And a land, for those—assume most of you guys know Magic, listening to me, but land’s a resource you use to drive stuff.

And all of a sudden we made it such that this thing that you often dreaded in late game—normally in Magic in late game you don’t want to draw a land. You have enough land. You want to draw spells that you can do something with.

And when we made it such that there were times where, late in the game you wanted to draw a land. That never happens. And most of what we were doing in Zendikar was normal Magic. It wasn’t particularly far away. But we just added this one little thing, like, “Let’s just—let’s care about lands in a way we haven’t before.” And that just made all the difference. It felt—you know what I’m saying?

That it is—you really have to resist the urge—like, when you’re trying to make something new and different, newness comes—that you get so much benefit from a little bit of newness. And that’s a lot of what I want to say today is sort of, you know, since today’s the day of metaphors, I have a cake. I’m making a cake. Most of what makes the cake the cake is the cake. But the things people sort of focus on tends to be the decorations and the icing. The icing makes it sweet.

And the idea is that if I’m going to make two different cakes, that, you know what? Most—I can take the exact same cake and dress it up differently and put different icing on it and put different decorations on it, and really sell you as this being a different cake…

Like, my wife and I for example. Lora and I like throwing parties. That is one of our favorite things to do. And often in our parties, when appropriate, we’ll get a cake. We have a woman that we know at a local bakery that does awesome cakes, and she will decorate things and make them real cool and real fun.

And what we’ve discovered is, we tend to get the same cake. The cake we get is half vanilla, half chocolate. Vanilla one side—we tend to get a sheet cake. Vanilla one side, chocolate on the other, and that we experimented for a little while trying different kinds of cakes, and what we found was, no no, you know what? These are the cakes people like. This is what makes the people happy. It’s pretty straightforward, look, vanilla and chocolate are the basic cakes you could ask for. Some people like vanilla, some like chocolate, provide them both, give them a little bit of choice, and people are always happy with the cake.

And so really what we do when we make the cake, we’re not changing the cake of the cake. We’re changing the dressing of the cake. Well, if it’s our Super Bowl party and we make it into a football field, okay, that’s a real different animal, or let’s say it’s one of my kids’ birthday parties. You know, it’s Adam’s birthday party and  have a video game theme, so I turn it into a Switch. You know. Or some video game thing. And the point is, the cake tastes the same. It tastes the same. But one being a football field and the other being a Switch, wow, that’s just a different experience. And that really feels different.

In the games there’s a lot of the same thing. I mean I don’t want to use the icing—I’m not trying to say it’s just about dressing. It’s just about flavor and stuff. It’s more than that.  You do want to have some mechanical differences. But you don’t need to have a lot of mechanical differences. You really don’t.

Like I said. Ravnica pretty much took one premise, one premise, and everything came out of that premise. All I was trying to is be a multicolor set that lets you play less colors. That was really my goal the whole time, and from that everything sprang up from it. And then as I made things, and other people made things, and we worked off it, we just kept extrapolating, but it was always off that one premise.

And so what I will say to you is, if you’re working on something, let’s say you’re trying to make your—you know, an additive element to a game that already exists. The key here, and this is true for parties, for cakes, whatever—focus. It’s about something. It’s not about a lot of things, it’s about one thing.

And so pick that one thing, make it matter, put the focus on it, you know, pick mechanics that matter, and what you will find is, having that one theme to it, that one emphasis will really set it apart and make it something that is cool.

And what you will find is, when you have that as your bullseye, when you have one idea that you’re pushing toward, it will stir other things. “Oh, it wants to be this. Okay, well if I do that…” And what you’ll find is, you will make a lot of organic changes that come out of having a singular theme. And so when changing things, you don’t have to change much to change a lot. (???) actual is—“You don’t have to change much to change everything” is my actual quote.

So anyway, I am driving up to work. So the takeaway today, if you’re a young designer designing your first game, you don’t need to overrun your game with lots of things. And on some level it’s the same lesson which is, figure out what your game’s about, find the fun, find the essence, find the core, focus on the core. Make it be what it’s supposed to be. Lose extraneous things. You don’t need extraneous things.

And do playtests. Take things out. If the playtests go well after you’ve taken them out then maybe it doesn’t need to be there. You know. That what a lot of what I’m saying today is, it has to do with how you think about the game, how you build your game, how you make your game, and then, as you iterate it, stress test all the pieces, all the components.

And what you will find is, there’s some components that aren’t carrying their weight. And if they’re not carrying their weight, less is more. You know what I’m saying? That having a cleanliness to your design is going to lead to overall better games. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions to that, but as a general rule of thumb, being simpler, being more elegant, being more focused will make for a better experience. Regardless of whether it’s the very first game you ever made or an expansion to a game that’s 25 years old. So anyway, guys, I’m now at work, So we know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. Oh, (???) traffic, you guys got a little extra.

So anyway, instead of talking Magic and game design, it’s time for me to make Magic. I’ll see you guys next time.