Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1202: Psychology

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

I gained a love of games from my father and a love of psychology from my mother. This podcast talks about how my interest in psychology has impacted me as a Magic designer.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I brought my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay today's topic is Psychology So I talked about um I did a podcast of meeting my dad and then when my dad died I did a podcast about my death after he died and I talked about how my dad imbued in me a love of games and I talked about how my dad imbued in me a love of games. Well, I had another parent, my mother, which you guys met in Meet My Mother. My mom imbued in me a love of writing and of psychology.

So my mom, she's retired now, but she was a clinical psychologist. She focused on adolescence. But I really from her got this love of psychology, of how do people tick? How do people work? And if you actually look through a lot of my works, for example, I talked about a play I did.

My favorite play I did in college was a play called Lego My Ego, where the idea is this character is trying to make a decision decision and all his emotions are meeting to help make the decision. This is years before inside out. Or for example, the mass market media game that I keep trying to make called mood swings where you're playing emotions. Like I clearly there's a through line. I really enjoy psychology. So the point of today's podcast is to talk about how my love of psychology

Has influenced my game design which in turn is influenced magic. So the the through line is Talking about how psychology has affected the design of magic Okay, so first and foremost, let's set up a little bit. So back in 1995 I get hired into R&D. When I was hired, most of the members in R&D were members of what we call the East Coast Play Thefters, meaning they were original alpha play testers with Richard, Scaffolius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty,

and he met them at the University of Pennsylvania in the math department. They were math people. The way I like to say it when I got to R&D was I was a word guy surrounded by numbers people. And another big thing that I brought with me was this idea of the importance of psychology. A lot of the thought presses at the time, there's a lot of focus on like balancing things and such. And my big thing, like one of the things you look at my sort of my tenure in Magic R&D

is I really been a champion of psychology. In some ways, if you look my through line of my influence, it's really trying to say the importance of psychology. So there's a bunch of ways I've done that. That is my topic. So first and foremost, when I went to school I studied communications at the Boston at Boston University in the College of Communications. One of the things that I learned about, so there are like four sections to the school, one of the things that I learned about so there are I don't like four sections to the school one of the areas is advertising and So when you're in the school, even though I studied what was called broadcast and film at the time movies and TV

Even though that's what I was my major. I still had to take classes in advertising and in advertising They have a thing they call the psychographic. The idea is if I'm going to sell something to somebody, I need to know why they want it. Why does the end consumer need this particular product? And that idea really stuck with me. So much so, so basically the story is we're in a meeting one day and I'm pitching this like giant creature. And I'm trying to explain why we put shit with this giant creature on the set. So I'm just like, okay, so I go,

imagine there's a guy named Timmy. And Timmy, when he opens up this pack, his eyes go wide. He sees this giant creature because to Timmy, there's nothing more exciting than playing the giant creature, the visceral thrill. You know, and I started to realize that at the time, R&D was very focused on what we referred to at the time as the tournament player.

There was a lot of push. We were on the Cuspus starting the Pro Tour. There was sanction play. There's a lot of focus on more serious play of magic. But my point at the time in the moment was, hey, that's not everybody. There's lots of different people who play magic, and they want different things and are motivated by different things. And so I named, I just named the part I'm talking about. So Timmy, later become Timmy and Tammy. But the idea was Timmy was me just explaining,

look, there's people that want to experience things, that there's a visceral thrill to playing magic. And whether or not it's just the joy of hanging with friends or playing giant creatures or just having stories, there's an idea that I would later coin. I wrote an article, I think I did a podcast on it called Narrative Equity. The idea of Narrative Equity is that players,

whenever you're playing a game, a lot of the idea of game playing in general is the sense that I want to experience things and learn skills that will be useful in the real world, I'm playing them in a safe environment right that I have to make tough decisions to do whatever I have to learn how to think critically but if I lose oh whatever the game that there's no great harm that comes to me in real life when you lose well there's real consequences but in a game there's not consequences and so it allows you to sort of test your mettle, right?

So the idea that I wanted for Timmy and Tammy was to explain that there are people that really like experiencing things, that like big visceral, like things that maybe it's not as easy to get in their life. And the idea of narrative equity is that when you walk out of a game, you walk away with tangible things.

You can learn skills, you can do all that. But one of the things that you walk away with is the idea of these stories. Something happened, I lived it, I experienced it, and now I get to share that experience for the rest of my life. I have a story to tell. And a lot of my favorite stories

that come from playing Magic is just like some glorious moment happened that's the story that I get to tell for the rest of time. You know, the time that I did 26,000 damage in a game and gained 55,000 life. That's a fun story, you know, or, or, or just, like I said, a lot of the stories that I really enjoy are just, it shows something about the experience I have and all players enjoyed that. And once again, when I talk about different psychographics, it's not that only that psychographic enjoys that thing.

They just prioritize that thing because that's what matters most to them. So Timmy and Tammy, they really want that experience. And so it is really fun to sort of have things happen. Like everybody wants to win, that's the goal of the game. But in the end, it's not, winning is not the end all for Timmy or Tammy. Timmy or Tammy wants that, the visceral feel,

the big thing, something to go on. Like there's different, the other thing about psychographics is, and I did a whole podcast on psychographics, the idea of experiencing things, there's different things you experience and there's different ways, there's different kinds of Timmy's and Tammy's.

But anyway, I coined the term. I got play. I got R&D thinking about that. A couple of months later, I realized that there was another player that we hadn't talked about, which was me, by the way, was Johnny later, Johnny and Jenny. The idea of someone who wants to express something, right? That I, I want to use the game to show something about me. For example, back in the day, I loved, I was a very wacky deck builder. I loved building

decks in such a way that the opponent had no idea how I was going to win. That when I won, they go, wow, I didn't see that. I love to win in unexpected ways. And my friends actually had fun borrowing my decks and playing them, because they were just fun to play. And a lot of that what I realized is I really was trying to say something about myself, show something about myself.

And that's something that Magic also does really well, that it lets people sort of demonstrate who they are. And that expression is important. And a lot of the Magic deck building and a lot of the means you play or the cards you choose or which versions the card you do There's lots of ways to express yourself and that is the core of Johnny and Jenny The tournament player would later get named spike not by me Timmy and Timmy

Slash Tammy Johnny's flesh and we're all names I came up with but a spike actually somebody on the brand team was like writing up a document based on the stuff I'd said and they needed a name so they just came up with a name so they called him Spike. And then that caught on. Anyway, I think the psychographics were an important part of the following psychological thing that I really try to drill home which is you want to design each card for the audience member that it's for

That the goal of game design is like I think early on a lot of R&D philosophy was like We're just gonna throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and you know different people like different things And I was sort of like we can be more exact than that We don't have to throw random spaghetti at the wall. We can go. Oh, well, we know there's this type of player Let's make cards for them. There's this type of play. Let's make cards for them that we can really figure out who exists so that we can tailor things. So one of my examples was there's a card called molten century, three in a red, you flip a coin and it makes a token. Either it makes a five, two token with haste or a 2-5 token with defender

Now this is a perfect example of a mistake that could get made when you're not properly understanding your audience Okay Coin flipping is fun. There's an audience that likes to coin flip that audience is Timmy and Tammy. Why? that likes the coin flip. That audience is Timmy and Tammy. Why? High variance. Yay, weird things can happen. I don't know the outcome.

That I'm in it for the exciting moment. But, notice that the choices of five, two haste and a two, five defender are very, like neither one of those is bad. It's conditional whether it's good or bad. In certain conditions, you'll want the five, two. In certain conditions, you'll want the five two. In certain conditions, you'll want the two five. That kind of choice is a very spiky choice.

Spike likes the idea of, Spike really enjoys options. Because what Spike wants to say is, hey, the better player will figure out more of the time how to optimize the choice. And Spike's always looking for optimizing choices. So what we did is we took an input that's super Timmy and an output that's super Spike.

Here's the problem. Timmy likes coin flips for the variance. They want high excitement. So a good coin flip card, you actually want the end result to have a little more variance between them. You want like kind of what you want is, hey, if I get lucky, I get more than I should for what I paid.

But if I get unlucky, I get less than what you like. Like that you're really taking a risk that there's something that part of the the this on this, that there's some excitement there. What spike likes spike likes really interesting choices, but Spike doesn't like randomness. Spike doesn't like, well, there is an interesting choice to make, but it's out of my hands. I don't get to make it. So we made a car that was kind of for no one. We made a car that had some appeal to Timmy and Tammy, but then made it very Spikey. And then some appeal to Spike, but then made it very Timmyy. And then some appeals to spike, but it made it very

tinny Tammy. So like it sort of didn't, it didn't pick its lane. It didn't know what it was for. And that, that is a very important of, of the psychology of the thing that I was trying to sort of get through was, Hey, if we're going to design for our players, let's understand them. And not just let's understand them, what motivates them? Why, why do they like it? And then that's a lot of sort of getting in the heads of what exactly do they like? What does Timmy and Tammy like?

What does Johnny and Jenny like? What does Spike like? Like the idea that Spike really likes choice because choice allows optimization. Oh, let's understand, you know, Spike is all about proving themselves. So the more you give them mechanics that the better player will play more efficiently,

you know, the more they like it. Like one of the best Spike cards ever was fact or fiction where you have to divide up into two piles and then pick. And the idea is there's lots of choice and decision. Being good at factor fiction is just really tricky. The better player you are, the better you are at it. And that's really cool. Okay.

The other thing, well, there's many things. The next thing when I got to Wizards was, it turns out that Richard Garfield did stick some psychology in the game. It was called the color pie. So the five colors each had a philosophy. They had ethos. They cared about something there and that their philosophy led to strengths and weaknesses. It was just it is led to strengths and weaknesses. It was just, it is, it is the psychology of the game of magic, the core of the psychology. And I was instantly drawn. And I think that Richard had a really good intuitive sense. The colors, the philosophies baked into the basic game are amazing. But one of the problems I found when I got there was a lot of

alpha was Richard would introduce things and then people would extrapolate off them. And that I found that I was the person that really was enamored with the color pie. That other people there, let's make the cards we want to make. And I remember like fifth edition they wanted to put desert twister in. And I remember like fifth edition they wanted to put Desert Twister in and I was like that's not what green does it underlines green's weakness and a giant fight. By the way it ended up going into fifth edition mostly because there wasn't other good options for green cards. But it really was me like laying the groundwork for hey guys that color pie matters, it's important, and it should dictate things we do and don't do.

That magic is a better game when white means something and represents something. And my fear was, without care, we keep making cards. It would just bleed away. That you know, in order for the color to care, we really need to be vigilant about it. And so one of the things that I did was I became a champion of the color to care, we really need to be vigilant about it. And so one of the things that I did was I became a champion of the color pie. Now there's a period of time where I was the champion of the color pie, but eventually we got to the council of colors, which I'm very happy with, which is now there's an entire team. It's not just on my shoulders. There's a whole team

and it's really, really great. I love having, I love investing in the idea that there is a team and there's people dedicated to it. It just really strengthens the importance of it and we've solidified into the process that there's people paying attention to that and I think that's super important like it's another big nod that I that I give psychology my love of psychology really made me embrace the color pie and protect the color pie. Okay. Next, another big, uh, philosophy thing. So one of the, I told a story about how I went to a creative writing class and the teacher said, everybody has a theme.

So if you're a writer, understand your theme. Um, I think my theme as a designer, as a game designer, uh, so I, I did a talk at, uh, the game developer conference back in 2016, the GDC. So I did a talk at the game developer conference back in 2016 the GDC and I did 20 lessons for 20 years 20 lessons. The very first lesson which is my core lesson is don't fight human nature. That a lot of my belief that sort of the core of my game design philosophy is tying it directly into psychology. The idea is people are going to function in a certain way, that our brains just work in a certain way,

and that your game could play into that, to play into human nature, or it could fight against human nature. And I just feel like fighting human nature is most often a losing task. My example is we were making suspend in time spiral. And the idea of suspend is it's an alternate cost, it's cheaper. But if you pay the cheaper cost, you have to exile the card for n turns,

some number of turns that it tells you. And then every turn you put that many time counters on it, every turn at upkeep you remove a time counter, when you remove the last counter it enters the battlefield. So people would do that, they take their creatures, they exile it, wait four turns, and then as soon as they enter the battlefield they'd attack with it. Now technically the card doesn't get cast until it, you know, after the fourth turn or whatever it casts the card. Well we have a rule about when you cast creatures they have some extinguishing, they can't attack the until it you know after the fourth turn or whatever it casts the card well we have a rule but when you cast creatures they have

summoning sickness they can't attack the turn you know and so we would try to do all these things to remind you hey remember you're casting the creatures got summoning sickness and we do a lot of things to try to remind people but no matter what we did they kept attacking with the creature so finally we said okay they just want to attack with the creature fine fine fine well add haste let them do it let's just let the mechanic do the thing they want to do. Um, and it's funny. So, um, Eric Lauer, who became head developer after time spiral, like, I don't know, a waste after time spiral. I remember he always hated to suspend because Eric is a very logical person.

And the idea that we did something, because we were sort of following the psychology of the players versus just the logic of it, drove him that. Eric and I would butt heads all the time. It was very classic left brain versus right brain. That he was super logical. So he wanted everything set up super logical. But I was very psychological.

And I would say, oh, well, look, people don't want to do that. And a lot of my guiding principles has been, like one of the big ideas, like in my talk I talk about is, you want to make the fun part of the game, the correct strategy to win, right? You want to figure out what's fun and then make sure that's the right way to win.

For example, there's a mechanic I made in Unhinged called gotcha, where if your opponent does the wrong thing and you say gotcha, you can get your card back. And some of it's talking or laughing or touching things. And the problem was the correct way to play against gotcha is to clamp down, talking stop laughing stop enjoying what you're doing just don't do anything and like that's not that's not fun right and there's a big lesson on that I players will do what the game

incentivize them to do but you want them to enjoy the game so you got to incentivize them to do what inherently is fun for them. And that has been a very, like, that truism, the idea of, you know, like there's a thing I, in Hollywood, I worked in Hollywood, every once in a while I'd work on something where we got an animal wrangler. And the idea is whenever there's an animal on a Hollywood set There's somebody that who usually owns the animal but at least trains the animal Who is with them the trainer and the idea is the trainer talks to the people with the script things Okay What do you need the animal to do and a lot of animal wrangling is just understanding your animal?

So that you mean there are certain animals that are trainable you can train a dog for example But a lot like just say you want a spider to crawl across the screen for example So you get a sprite a spider wrangler you're not going okay when I say action spider walk across right you have to figure out What how do I make the spider do what the spider wants to do? Oh, well the spider likes sugar or whatever so you can make a little sugar line So it'll follow the sugar line like you can do things so that it'll do and a lot of that as how I think human nature which is players will push in certain directions um you want to sort of put your things in the directions we know players will go um

so for another example this is in again in my college communications one of the classes that they required us to take, it was a required course, was called Aesthetics. And the idea of aesthetics is you studied, the way I like to say it is the science of subjectivity. And what it meant is, okay, let's learn how the senses work. How do you see things and hear things and touch things and taste things and feel things? How does the brain actually work? And you

start learning like there's just things the brain likes. The brain likes symmetry. The brain likes patterns. And there's just things that are how the brain works because a lot of the idea of communications is, hey if I want to make content that's gonna make the players happy, I need to understand what makes them happy. Kind of like the psychic graphics. You want to sell something to you? I got to know why you like it. So for example, one of the rules I made many years ago is the four in one rule.

And that is if you have a cycle, you cannot have four of the cards do something and not have the fifth card also do it. You can have a cycle where it's three, one and one or three and two or two, two, one or one, one, one, one. You can do things where you mix up what's going on. But if four of them do it, the fifth one has to do it. Pattern completion is so, so strong in the human brain that if you just make the, the whisp of a pattern, people want to complete the pattern.

And we see that all the time. If read my blog regularly like people like oh you made card a B and C when are you finishing the cycle even though it wasn't a cycle but they can you know you can connect the dots so people want to see it as a cycle and then I'm not pooing that like people will see those patterns you got and you have to lean into that. Another real important sort of moment psychological realization I had was we were making a Zendikar. So the Zendikar was all about I wanted to do a land focus set. I thought there was a lot of mechanics in land. I think I called it lands of Belusa was my nickname. And it I was I more, let's just say I was more passionate with the idea than

the rest of R&D. And so when we finally got it on the schedule, I got Randy Buehler, my boss at the time, put it on the schedule. Bill Rose, who was the head designer, I think at the time, said to me, goes, look, Mark, I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of faith in this idea, but I have faith in you. So here's what I'm going to do. Get your team. I'll give you three months. Make stuff. And then in three months, we're going to see it. And like, if you prove to me it's there, okay, fine. We'll do it. But if it ends three months, I can't see it. We're going to change. We'll change the theme. And so my for four, for three months, we worked on land mechanics. We made like 40 land mechanics. And one of the areas we messed around with for a while

was the idea of the land drop as a resource. Oh, instead of dropping land, you could enhance the spell or make it better or creature has an activation. But what ended up happening was, once again, we incentivized people to do stuff that wasn't good for them. People would do the thing we were incentivizing, but they would not play land, and then they

would get man escrowed and have bad games and not win. I don't know how many of you even understood why they weren't winning, but they weren't winning. And then we tried inverting it. We're like, okay, what if instead of kind of punishing you for playing a land, what if we rewarded you for playing a land what if we rewarded you for playing a land what if playing a land gave we gave you a cookie play a land we gave a cookie and the response from people was this is awesome I was gonna play lands

anyway thanks for the cookies and it really made me realize the importance of that I think early on indeed because we were so focused on tournament play and competitive play We really got into this idea of tension and like I said a lot of game playing is Like doing real things like learning real skills, and I'm not saying there's not a place for tension in the game Of course there is this is a mental sport and you do want to create interesting decisions, but but that's not all the game can be Part of the game also can be letting people enjoy the things they want to do that's a lot of psychology and and landfall really really like was a major game changer in this idea of

Hey, we can everything doesn't have to be tensioned, everything doesn't have to be making a decision, that it could just be reward people for the things they enjoy doing, and that has been very fruitful space. It really opened up and it's a good example of how, of how it took something that, I mean, that's my big lesson of today, is a lot of the lessons that I've had as a game designer and a lot of the truisms I've learned as a game designer is people are people, humans are humans and that like fundamentally fundamentally what are we're doing? We are trying to create an environment where the player has a good time. A lot of that is it's fun. It gives them good times. Some

of it is gives them challenges. It's not a lot of the cool things are letting people test themselves is you can like, it's okay to have tension is okay to make tough decisions. I don't think you want all that. I think you want a mix of that And it's all it's also okay to like let people be who they are Let you know I want to experience things. I want to express things. I want to prove things Okay Let the game let them do that like if the players want to do something and then that's all kind of They take the crux of all I'm talking about today That there are certain desires that players

have, that people have, and that you as a game designer, a lot of what you are doing is figuring out how to align that. How do I make that happen? And that, like for example, another big shift that's happened in R&D is really embracing the idea of casual play. Early Magic, for example, when I made Unglued back in the 90s, it was seen as like, oh, well there's normal play, that's all the tournaments, and then wacky play and we'll let Mark go whatever, do what you want to do. And over time, the idea that like more people play casually than competitively. Once again, not that we shouldn't

make the game fun for competitive players, we can we do we should, but that a lot of what drives people playing magic is the psychology of it. I mean, this one of the reasons commanders become such a runaway hit. That, you know, there's something super fun about, hey, I can make my thing and do all sorts of weird things and use cards from all over magic and show off what I'm capable of

and create high swing moments. Like in some ways, commander does a really good job of hitting on Timmy Tammy, Johnny Jenny and Spike. For example, Timmy and Tammy, it's high variance, it's a hundred cards, it's one of, like it's, and you're playing cards from throughout Magic, so like crazy big things are going to happen. Stories are going to happen. Moments are going to happen. You are going to experience things and it's social and it's fun and you're laughing with your friends and like it is really meaty for Timmy and Tammy. For the Johnny's and Jimmy's out

there you have access to almost all the cards in magic. You get a commander so you can have you can make a theme and you can make a commander that no one else has picked because there's lots of different commanders and like you really can show who you are. The commander like commander format, the deck building really says, Hey, look at me. And you can do weird and wacky combos. And the nature of having so many different cards means you can really build decks that really show off all sorts of things. And a lot of the goal of commander is finding the route to victory.

There's a very spike component to it is hey I my cards are not showing up in the order that it lacks some of the consistency but there's a lot of skill testing and I got to make it work no matter what comes my way and so like I said commander really hits all the psychographics in a pretty cool way I mean given I will admit the the spike is the least of the three and that's why competitive plays where spike shines, but I think there's a lot of spikiness in in commander. Anyway that is my through line of today. My mom imbued me a love of psychology. I came to Wizards and I really, whether it be making the psych graphics, whether it be championing the color pie, whether

it be really pushing design philosophies, make the fun the right way to win, think of narrative equity, it's okay to reward people for doing the things they want to do. All those sort of through lines, it has been a lot of the evolution of magic and the interesting thing right now is all these things I'm talking about are just ingrained in R&D. Yes there are years of me pushing and pushing in certain directions but we are there now. We have a whole casual play design team. A lot of these lessons I'm saying that that at the time were like lessons we had to learn are ingrained in the way we make magic now and so I like to say

psychology has has won out and game design especially on magic has a lot of psychology running through it so anyway thanks mom thanks mom for viewing me a little psychology it's paid off so anyway guys that is my my podcast for today so I hope you learned hearing about the psychology of magic. But I'm now at work, so we all know what that means, which 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.

Bye bye.