Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1353: Emotional Response

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In this episode, I cover one of the main goals of game design: to create specific emotional responses in the players.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for out there. Drive to work. Okay, today, a complex topic today. Today we're going to talk about emotional response. So one of the big questions in game design is what are you up to? What are you doing? What is the goal of all your work?

And I would argue that game design is a form of art. And what is the purpose of art? but to create responses in people. And I would argue an emotional response in people. That the core of the gameplay experience is that you want the player to experience something, you know, something emotional that is impactful to them. And if you guys know about the psychographics,

that's just sort of saying, hey, there's psychology, what do people want? You know, how do you provide the thing that people want? And different people need different things. that the idea of emotional response is not that everybody necessarily has the same emotional response, but you want to make sure that people, like the ultimate goal is if someone plays a game, you want them that game to evoke something out of them. You don't want to make a game that after the fact you're like, well, I spent time doing it,

but I don't, I have no memory of it, it had no impact on me, that you clearly want it to have an impact. And that, so we're talking about emotional response, what I mean is, I want to to make a situation, to make a game where things happen where it impacts the person playing it. In a way that, like, that is memorable and that is something they wanna share. Like, one of the big things is the reason you do something at all is you gain something from it, right?

That there's a benefit to doing things. And different things that, you know, maybe you exercise because it makes you healthier, you know. And the thing about games is games do a lot, couple things. One is they sort of allow you to experience things in a safe environment that I can test out skills that might be valuable in life but without the consequences that life normally brings along. And it also lets me experience things that I might not easily experience. It allows me to interact with people in a

way maybe it's not easy to interact with them. Like what exactly you get out of games will vary. It's not as if everybody's looking for the same thing. out of games. But what everybody is looking for is that it somehow the experience enriches them in some way, that there's some benefit they get from it. And a lot of sort of the design of game design is trying to evoke that. Now, there's two different levels that I'll talk about. So I want to discuss both these today. So first is what I'll call the layer level of emotional response. And that is, I'm trying to create an experience and I'm want that experience to evoke something for you.

My best example there would be when I was making Ineshrad, original Innesrod, I'm like, okay, we're doing a Gothic horror set. You know what? I want to evoke a little bit of fear out of you. That, you know, the core emotion of the genre we were playing with is fear. And how do I do that? Well, for example, we made double-faced cards that one side is more dangerous than the other side. And so you, you know, the opponent sees the human, for example, and goes, I don't want

that to be a werewolf. And then there's a dynamic setup by which you have some input on whether or not there's a human or a werewolf. And so you and your opponent are playing back and forth. But you're driven by the idea that when that becomes a werewolf, it's going to be, it's bad for you, right? It is scary that one of the two forms is going to probably win the game if it stays in that form too long. Likewise, we played around with morbid. Morbid's a mechanic that cares about things going to the graveyard, things dying. And the idea is normally, for example, if I attack with a creature that I can't win the combat, normally I'm showing that I have a combat trick, right? You have a 3-3 attack with my 2-2. Well, what am I up to? I wouldn't just run my 2-2 into your

3-3. So either I have some sort of answer to that, or, you know, maybe I'm bluffing. But more of it added an extra later to that. It could be, oh, maybe they want it to die. Maybe the goal of attacking is they want me to kill it. And all of a sudden, like, oh, I don't want to do the wrong thing. And, you know, you get these responses where now I'm like, oh, should I not block because I don't want to kill it, which is a very different animal. and that there was a lot of nuance in how we sort of designed the game to evoke the responses we want. Original Theros, for example, was more about an adventure set.

I wanted you to feel, like, I wanted you to level up and feel like you've grown and improved. The idea is that there's a layer that sits on top of the game where I'm like, what are you doing? What's the story we're telling? What kind, you know, what is the experience I'm trying, trying to get across. And that that experience very much is baked in trying to understand what emotional connection, flavoring there is there. You know, that's a little bit different.

So normally when I talk about an emotional response, I'm talking about the deeper emotional response. But I do want to point out that there's a more layered, an emotional response that comes on top of everything where I'm just trying to get you in the moment of what is happening. And I think that's really important because, look, one, One of the things about magic is we are basically, every time we make a magic set, it's a magic set. It plays like magic and there's a certain amount of familiarity and a certain amount of regularity, right? I want you to sort of get what you expect.

You come to play magic because you have certain expectation. I want to meet that expectation. But one of the cool things about magic is we keep putting out different sets. We want those sets to feel different, you know, even though the gameplay, the core of it, like there's a familiarity to it. those, remember way back, I did a series in my early, early days, on communication theory. And it was all about stuff I had learned in communication school when I went to college about the core essence of what makes communication tick. And the three big things is that you

want to do things, you want to make people comfortable, you want to give things people expect, you want to give people surprised, meaning you want to give them things they don't expect, but within the realm of what they do expect. And then you want to give them, completion, meaning you want to sort of set up patterns that you finish. And those things, comfort, surprise, and completion are pretty, are huge drives in why and how people absorb communications. So gameplay in some way, you, the game designer, are, you know, much like any other form of communications, you're trying to evoke something from them. And so those same kind of things apply in game design. So there's a certain amount of comfort. Like, most

magic sets, you wanted to feel like a magic set, right? You wanted to feel like, oh, this feels like magic. And there's a certain amount of, there's a certain amount of repetition. There's some of stuff you do that it's just a matter of, oh, I know magic and this feels like magic. And that's why we make a design skeleton, every common, you know, there's a green giant growth that come in and there's just things that every magic set does. It's just part of what makes magic magic. But, an important part of that is you want to add in some amount of surprise. You want to make sure that even though it feels comfortable and people know that it feels like a game of magic,

you still want to throw a little surprise in there. And so one of the things we try to do is every set has a different feel to it. We'll make you focus mechanically on probably one thing you don't normally focus on. We'll have a flavor that overlayers things. Oh, it's cute animals. Oh, it's 70s horror. Oh, it's weftor. Like, whatever it is, we're laying something.

on top of it to just give you a different feel so that it both feels like magic, but it also feels like not the same magic you've played before. And so a lot of the low-level motion is just sort of paint to sort of make it a little bit different. That every time you play magic, I just want to create different nuances of how it plays. That I want a set to have a feel to it. And that when you play this, they go, oh, this isn't, it doesn't feel exactly like what I just played last week, you know, or two weeks ago or a month ago or whatever, that, you know,

there's something about there's a little bit of nuance. Now, we also do return. Sometimes we'd like go back to where we came from and try to recapture stuff we've done before. So, there's a little bit of that. But a lot of what I'm talking about is that there is an emotional response I want on a low level, which is just, hey, I'm trying to get you the feel of the thing we are playing. And I think that is important. But that is not really the larger emotional response that I'm getting at today, although it's there and it's important. And I do believe that it's something you as a designer, especially something like magic, where we keep doing the same game. I would say if you're not, magic's unique because we keep redoing magic. We keep making more

expansions. I think if you're just making your own game, you do want some emotional response because you want the game to feel like something. And a lot of giving attitude and mood to a game is sort of monitoring the emotions you're evoking out of your gameplay. And there's something really important to say, what are you evoking? How do you evoke it? Like, what are the emotions you want? What is the gameplay that will evoke those emotions? That if I want to scare you, well, there has to be some uncertainty.

That's how you're going to be afraid. If I want to excite you that are, you know, like with Theros, I was trying to get some sense of adventure to it. Well, I need to build an evolution and a track. So there's something you can go along. so you have something to want to achieve to move toward that. And that's a lot of what design wants to do is figure out kind of how you want your player to feel

and then figure out what things you do so the gameplay that they will play reinforces the feel that you want them to have. Okay, but that is about sort of the surface emotional from playing, which is important. I'm actually not trying to diminish that at all. I think you want to make sure when someone's playing your game, that you're enveloping them in the world of the game

and developing them in the feel of the game. And that every game has a distinctly different feel to it. And there's a lot of factors that determine that. But you, the game designer, really want to be tracking that and making sure you understand, okay, when people are playing my game, I understand what I want them to feel, I understand the tools I've available to me, and I'm making use of those tools. And the one last thing I'll stress before I move on to that part here is, I often talk about how you have to put the fun in way of the player, meaning your player can't

hunt for the fun. You need to put the fun of the game such that as they play the game, the place they'll go in the game, they hit the fun without trying to hit the fun. You have to make sure the fun is in the center, so that the chewy center, so that when they're playing the game, they can't help it run across the fun. Same is true for the emotion, that whatever the emotional response you're trying to get, that you have to make sure that what is the... that I'm trying to evoke out of them, how do I evoke those things? Make sure those things

are core to the game experience. It's not like, I want to make a set that can make you afraid, but you have to work to get there. Well, then I'm not making you afraid because you're not going to be. So I have to sort of put the emotional response in the way of what you're doing. I have to sort of force you that the base experience that you're going to experience encounters what I want you to encounter. Okay. But that is, sort of a low-level emotion, really my core today in the motion response is actually the little bit of a deeper sense of emotion. And what I mean by that, let's talk a little bit about the psychographics.

This is Timmy, Tammy, Johnny Jenny, and Spike. So Timmy and Tammy, the idea is they want to experience something. But once again, what is experienced mean? Experience itself is emotion, right? What they want to do, what's important is the reason you play games, or some people play games, is it allows you to experience things that might be harder to experience elsewhere. Maybe impossible to experience or maybe just harder experience. For example, it is... I'll use Indesrod again that seems my go-to today.

One of the things that is fun is... The reason you go see a horror movie is it is fun to be scared in the safe containment of a movie. right it's not fun to be scared in real life that's that's not fun at all that's terrifying um but but if you put yourself in a situation where you know the thing scaring you isn't real i'm watching a movie i'm at a haunted house like i'm putting myself someplace where somebody's going to try to scare me but i intellectually understand that oh okay this is not this is not it's sort of like i'm experienced things but in a safe place yeah i'm afraid

but I'm not really afraid. I'm afraid within the context of this thing that I'm watching. And that allows you, like, it's fun to be afraid when there's not the actual terror accompanying it. Being afraid when you're really honest to God afraid is scary, right? It's not fun. But being afraid in a safe space, we're like, okay, I'm afraid, but I know it's not a real fear. It's kind of a fake fear, right? That is super fun.

And so a lot of what Timmy and Tammy want is they just want the opportunity to experience things. Now, some of that might be the emotions that you're trying to evoke out of them, but there's a lot of other things going on there too. For example, let's say that Timmy and Tammy really like being social. They like interacting with people, but maybe they're not good at interacting with people. Maybe it's hard for them. Maybe they're shy. Maybe there's barriers that is just not that easy to go hang out with people and be social But a game takes away a lot of that pressure

Right that you know there's a reason to be there. There's a purpose. There's a something telling you what to do And then everybody has a role in it that's understood and so it's not as if you're going somewhere the impetus is on you To start conversation or to make things happen, which is very intimidating for somebody. It's more like I'm gonna go and hey, hey, I'm gonna go and hey, with these people and the act of interacting with the game will create responses between people. And so maybe, for example, the Timmy and Tammy, I should stress is what they want to experience varies from Timmy and Tammy to each Timmy and Tammy, that they just want to experience something. And what they want to experience can vary. Like one of the things, for example, is the stereotypical view of Timmy and Tammy is the idea

that they just want to do big, splashy things. Why do you want to do big splashy things? It's fun. It's fun to do big splashy things. You know, it's fun to play a dragon. Like, and there's this sort of, one of the things that's really neat in the game is you just get to do grandiose things. Like, in magic, you're casting magical spells.

You can throw lightning bolts at people. You can summon dragons and mystical creatures. That's kind of cool. You know, normal everyday life, you can't do that. And that's another thing that games can provide for you is allow you access to something that you just don't do. Well, you can't just do magic. in normal life. I can't just summon

fireballs from my hands. But in a game, hey, in this context, I'm a mighty plainswalker. I'm a mage. I can cast spells. I can, you know, I have all this power that's kind of exciting. And like I said, what experience you want varies. But in each

case, what Timmy and Temi fundamentally want is they want to feel something that is not easy for them to feel. Usually it's something that it is something that's really exciting for them or fun for them or something that's cathartic for them, but that it's not something in their everyday normal life is easy to do.

And like I said, it could be something as socialization. It could be more about just having adrenaline rushes. Like when you play a game sometimes, when things happen, sometimes it's really fun to sort of get yourself in a corner and get out of it. And in normal life, you don't want to do that. that's really scary. But in a game, it's like, well, if I lose, I lose the game, the consequences are low. So there's a lot of opportunity in games to have that.

And once again, I'm just sort of walking through, like socialization. I'll use that as an example. Okay, there's a lot of people out there, a lot of Timmy and Tamys, that the socialization is important. They want to interact with their friends in a way that is easy and clean and fun and, you know, something in which there's a support. system to help them. And so a lot of what we do with multiplayer play, Commander especially, is try to think about how do we create these fun moments? How do we create these neat interactions? How do we do things that make players interact with one another? And that's a lot of it.

Like a lot of when we make a game, or make magic, is trying to say, where is there a fun moment? Like, for example, I'll use when I was doing, I was trying to capture a character named Negan, who's one of the bad guys, or the main bad guy. But anyway, I wanted to create a fun game where you're having a mind game with another player. So the way the card works is when Negan comes in play, the person who controls Negan on a piece of paper writes down the name of a creature of target player. And then that player also writes down a name of a creature. Now, the idea is if you write, all the creatures that are ridden are going to be sacrificed. So if you're Neagan, your goal is I want to write down a different creature than they're going to write down.

And if you're the player they target, you want to write down the same name as the Negan player. And right there, we make this fun little interaction. This is a neat little game, which is, okay, you know, you and I both know probably your most dangerous creature. do, does the Negan player write down that to guarantee that they get rid of the most, the biggest threat? Or maybe the Negan player thinks the other player assumes they'll do that and they'll write down their biggest player.

So, if Negan write by the second biggest player, so that way you destroy both creatures. But if the player thinks maybe he's doing that, maybe they catch it. There's this mind game that goes on that's really fun. And that, like, there's little... One of the things you want is you want to create situations where fun circumstances can happen.

Some of it is organic to the game. I do think there's a certain amount of fun of just playing magic. But when designing individual cards or mechanics or themes, you really want to lean into what exactly can make those moments happen. And I do know with a lot of commander design, they're very much thinking about

what's the dynamic of the table. We playtest all of our commander mechanics in commander. We play commander and watch people play and see what people do and go, oh, you know, and one of the things that's a real common playtest thing is, man, I really wanted to do Thing X. It'd be great if I could do Thing X. Ooh, we should change the card so I can do Thing X. And that is a lot of the dynamic of it. But again, you know, what makes Timmy and Tammy happy, and I should keep stressing this,

this is not one singular thing. What they want, the emotional response they're getting varies from player to player. So there's a lot of different things we're trying to do. But trying to create cool moments, trying to create cool interactions, trying to create social moments. That is key. Okay, so let's now go into Johnny and Jenny. So Johnny and Jenny is about self-expression.

Johnny and Jenny is, the game is a way for me to let you know something about me, the other players know something about me. And that what's really important for Johnny and Jenny is the sense of self-expression. Well, how do we do that? There's a lot of different ways

from our end, from a designer end. But one of the big things is we want to get like one of the key elements of a Johnny and Jenny is I want to differentiate myself I want to I want to show you that I'm not like everybody else usually a sense of expression is not about let me explain how I'm just like everybody else no no no expression is about showing different differentiating yourself from others and so a lot of what we want to do there is I love making cards that give players hooks to do interesting things. Like, we want to make cards that give players choices.

Now, some of the time, we make cards that are very straightforward. That's not really for Johnny and Jenny. There's some players that just tell me what to do. I don't want to think too much about it. And we'll make cards that just say, do this. Look for this word, plug this in. You'll have a fun time. But the Johnny's and Jenny's in a world want a little bit more differentiated.

They don't want to just plug in like everybody else. You want to give them cards like, oh, how do I use this? Or how can I do something with this that's a little off the beaten path? And a lot of sort of the Johnny and Jenny designs are more about creating an open-endedness that allows for discovery and exploration. Meaning a lot of the best Johnny and Janning cards, I don't know how they're going to use them. I'm not designing the end state. I'm designing something that has the flexibility that they can go.

fine, cool interactions. And like I said, magic by its very nature is a modular game. A lot of the fun expression is finding combinations and just finding things that you found, you feel like I'm the one to discover this. Even if other people discovered it, it doesn't matter. As long as you're the one that in your own way found it, it was your thing. And a lot of that, like, once again, the key to emotional response is understanding what the response is and then figuring how to do it. I want Johnny and Jenny to be able to find

things that are uniquely their own. Why got to build things that are open-ended that they can sort of latch onto? And the same time, another big thing is we want to make things that capture a wide range of play. For example, some people really enjoy cute things. We want to make sure there's opportunities for cute things. Some people like disturbing. things. Some people like, the other way that self-expression also works is you just want enough variety that people can sort of self-select for what they want. And magic does really well at that, so that it's also something we lean into, meaning I don't want to make every card the same. I want to make cards very different. That the core of designing a magic set is I want

a wide variety of responses so a lot of different people can find the thing they want. As I often say, my goal is not to make everybody love every card. It's an impossible task. My goal is to make sure when I make a set that everybody loves something. And the key to doing that is just having a lot of different, is going, making a wide path of different things. And there's a lot of things we've learned. There's a lot of things that sort of lean into allowing you to have more opportunity. There's certain style effects that people just tend to enjoy a little bit more. And that, some of that is an overlapping, that's a Timmy, Tammy, and a Johnny Jenny thing, but you want to lean there. Okay, so let's talk Spike. So Spike is all about proving something, right?

Spike wants to demonstrate what they are capable of. And so the idea there is that Spike, the Spike wants to show their own self-worth, right? They want to show, look, I have skills, let me demonstrate my skills. And so for that, that's a lot of, you know, we want to make sure that there are skill testing cards. We want to make sure that there are things that there is depth of play to them. And I talk a lot about lenticular design, right? Where the card is exciting to one player, but, you know, strategic in a different way to another player.

I remember I talked about, I did a podcast on Landfall. And I talked about how landfall for the lesson franchise, I just get rewards for things I do. Yay, you know. But for the more experienced players, like, oh, maybe I need. to change my style of play to maximize. Normally, I'll play a land when I get it. But maybe, maybe if I had the right landfall triggers, I want to hold my land so that I could play it at the right time. And all of a sudden, what we've done is we said, well, here's the base strategy, but you're not doing that. And that's what Spikes really like is they find the opportunity

to take things that aren't like they want to recognize that there's things that they could do that are different that give them optimization and advantage. And so we have to build that in. We have to build things where, and once again, like Johnny Jenny, it's not that I need to know how they're going to use it. I need to work in opportunities for, you know,

I need to create things that give them choices. For example, we made a card in invasion, many years ago, fact or fiction, pretty famous card, where you divide the things into two piles and then the opponent has to take it. one. And divvying is really interesting. There's a lot of skill there. Choosing, both of those are really interesting skills. And so one of the neat things about that is trying to get a sense of,

I want to create situations where this card is stronger in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing. You know, that's one of the cool things for spike cards is that the card, how good the card is is dependent upon how good the player is. Obviously, we make cards that are independently strong, and those are great. But you want to have some skill testing cards where the more you know and the more you understand,

the stronger the card becomes. Like people have asked me, for example, what is the most powerful on card? And the answer to my mind is I'm pretty sure it's Richard Garfield PhD. That is the card that you play Mental Magic, where any card can turn any other card with the same mana costs.

Now, that card is good, and I believe any player will get some value out of it, but a good player will get infinite more value out of it. Because a low-level player is just thinking of anything they could cast. A high-level player is thinking up all the different options they have to cast and what is the best of those options. And that makes a really sort of compelling card. But the lesson here is that if I'm trying to design for Timmy or Tammy or, Johnny or Jenny or Spike, it's not just a met, like, it's not just surface level. It's not just, oh, well, Timmy likes big creatures make big creatures. It is more of thinking about what is the end result, like, what is the emotion I'm trying

to evoke, what do I want to get out of them, and what are the things I can do that can do that? And like I said, there's different layers of it. Some things just are inherent. I mean, magic is going to make big creatures and big spells. But the other thing we can keep in mind is, when I'm designing a card for somebody, I can think about what does that person like?

In my GDC talk in 2016, my 20 years 20 lessons talk, I give an example of a card where what we had done was, it was a coin flipping card, but we made both the outcomes roughly even. And the idea is you flip a coin, but these are equal of value. And what we found was that card was, the Timis and Tamys enjoyed the coin flipping, right? Ooh, I don't know what's going to happen. The spikes enjoyed the balance of the fact.

These two effects are very close to each other and are situational. They're very skill testing. The problem was that Timmy and Tamys want the excitement and have to be a lot of the excitement and Having two things that are close to each other just isn't that exciting. It's much more exciting to go, I get this really exciting thing or something's not as good. And then I'm really hoping for that exciting thing. It makes the coin flip have emotion and have passion and like, I'm excited. I need to flip heads because tails is not what I want.

Where for the spikes, the reason you give them two options is you wanted to fill skill testing. But the second you take it out of their control, yeah, this is an interesting decision if I can make the decision. But I'm not making the decision. It's out of my hands. So it's a skill testing opportunity that's not skill testing. I don't get to choose. And so what we did is we took what could be in a really exciting Timmy Tami Tami card.

And by trying to make Spike like it, we made Timmie Tami not like it. And then we made a sort of Spike card that trying to make Timmie and Tammy like it. We may Spike not like it. And so who was that card for? Not for Timmy and Tammy. Not for Spike. We made a card. I mean, I'm not saying no one loves that card, but we sort of made a card where in trying to

to make everybody happy, we made nobody happy. And that's another really important thing, which is part of getting the emotional response is understanding who is the card for? Who is the person you're making that specific card for? Because that, you want to prioritize that person and that emotional response in that design. Is this for Timmy and Tammy? Okay, that's a really different design than I'm designing for Spike. And that's another big important part of it.

The key today, I'm almost at work here, the key. key of today's is that if I want to be successful at game design, the end result is I want to think about what happens when the player steps away from the game. When they think back on the game, what are the things that they carry with them? Was there an exciting moment? Whether there's an interesting choice, whether there's a cool reveal? Like, what are they looking for in the game? And did you give them that opportunity? Because if you did, that's where the memories come from. That's where the narrative comes from. That's where, that's when players go, oh, the reason I play the game is thing X and I got thing X.

And that's a really important thing to remember as a game designer, which is players come to games wanting different things. If you, the designer, understand what it is they want and what they get out of games, if you can then provide that to them and the game gives them the thing they're coming to the game for, that is super compelling. That's what makes a sticky game. That's what makes sort of... Like, one of the things about magic is I come to magic because I want to do thing X, thing Y, thing Z.

If magic continually lets me do thing X, thing Y, thing Z, it becomes my game. It does my thing. I want to experience something. I want to express something. I want to prove something. If it lets me continually do that, if each time I come back and I get to do that,

the game starts in place. empowering me to be what I want and do what I want and feel what I want. And that that is kind of the end result of what you want as a game designer, right? You want people come to a game for something. There's some need they have. And that's why when you look at the psychographic, it's all psychological. It's like, what do they psychologically need? It's why, by the way, Vorthos and Mel are, they're an aesthetic profile.

There's something a little bit different. They're about how you appreciate it. Different talk. But today I'm talking a lot about psychology, because when you're talking an emotional response, what I'm saying is I want the people playing the game to feel the thing that they want to feel. It's another important thing. I'm not the lower level thing where I'm trying to get mooter tone, fine. It's in Estrada, I want you to feel afraid.

That's me setting tone. But what I'm talking about today, the big picture is each person comes to the game. There is an emotional response that they're looking for. Not the same for everybody. and that your job is to make sure your game has the flexibility that they can meet that emotional response that they want. Because if you deliver on that, if you're able to deliver on the thing they come to the game for,

you've got them. They'll come back again and again because the game is giving them the fundamental thing they need. I should also stress, by the way, we often talk about players about how they have one universal need. That's not really true. I like to group people because it's easier to think about them, but it's not as if you're Timmy, Tammy,

you have no Johnny Jenny elements or no spike element. A lot of what the game does is we provide different aspects so that you can lean into what you want. And sometimes one day you want different things than another day. You know, maybe, for example, you had a hard day at work and you're going to play with your friends and you just need a release today. You want to forget about your day.

So maybe the socialness is more high for you today. You just want to, you know, the emotional response, you're looking for today is just joy in a vacuum. I just want to have fun. I want to forget about all my trials of the day. Or maybe a different day, just you went through the whole day and no one really recognized you. Like you really, you want to be a place where you're recognized. Like that that's the point that your emotional response is not necessarily the same day to day. It has a lot to do with where am I at in that day? What's my emotion of that day? What are my needs of that day? And a cool game has the ability to provide different.

things so that you, the player, or various players, but even just one player, have some variety of what you get to experience so that the game can be what you need for it today. And that one of the neat things about a good game is it could be something for you one day and a different thing for you another day depending on what you need. Man, I feel alone, I need friendship. Today is about interacting with other people. In other days, I feel unseen. I want to express myself.

In other days, I feel frustrated. I want to prove myself. that can change from day to day. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is build all these different elements into the game so that people can capture what they want depending on what they need. So I know today's talk was a pretty complex talk.

The thing that's important to me and the reason I really wanted to talk about it today is it's really important to me to understand that as a designer, what am I trying to do fundamentally? And you can get very caught up on the details. You know, I want to, like I want to have my game loop and this and that. But all that stuff, all the tools that you're using, in the end, the real thing you're doing

is you're providing this emotional response to the player that gives them the thing they need. And yes, yes, all those elements are important. And I don't want to dismiss the tools. The tools are very important. But in the end, what you're trying to do is make the players capture the thing they came to the game to have. And if you do that, if your game could be the release they need, you're doing a great service to them and your game becomes something really important

in a very fundamental way. And that's why gaming design is so important to me. We're not just... I mean, we are providing fun to people, but it's more than that. We are giving people emotional responses that they need as an outlet. And that turns people's lives around.

It allows people escape when they need it. It does really important things. And so, anyway, that's what I'm talking about today. So when you design your game, you got to think the end user, and you got to think about the emotional response. Okay, guys? Well, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means.

You're 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 all next time. Bye-bye.