Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #433: Telling a Story Through a Trading Card Game

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

Telling a story can be difficult in any medium, but it's especially hard through the medium of a trading card game. In this podcast, I walk through the difficulties and how we overcome them.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is a suggestion from my blog. Someone wanted to have me talk about the challenges of telling a story through a trading card game. I thought that was excellent. In fact, I gave a speech on this and wrote an article about it. So I have a lot to say on the topic. I gave a speech on this and wrote an article about it. So I have a lot to say on the topic. Okay, so what are the challenges? So first, let me talk about the problems of trying to tell a game through a trading card game. Sorry, the problems of trying to tell a story through a trading card game.

So problem number one, that it has to be told through the medium of a trading card game. That one of the things that's challenging is, you know, most storytelling, you have control of the audience. That you know, like, usually when I tell you a story, the main focus of the story is the story. If you're seeing a movie or watching a television show or reading a book, the primary focus of what's going on is the story. That's not true in a trading card game. The primary person in a trading card game is the game.

And so, and it is, you know, the medium by which you have to tell is you have to sort of chop up your story into lots of pieces and mix it up and sell it through packs. And that is a bit challenging. That is definitely something that is a little harder to do. That, you know, for example, there's not a lot of space to tell a story. There's not a lot of tools to tell a story. You know, in a trading card game, I mean, we have elements to do it. We have art. We have different elements to be able to do that.

But it's limited. You know, that if I want, let's say I'm going to write a novel. Nothing I'm doing, every word I'm doing advances the story. Every word I'm telling is making people understand sort of what is going on. Okay? That there's no wasted effort. The same on a movie. Like, every scene, every screen, every ounce of what I'm doing, it's

first and foremost, and really only major point is to tell you a story. In a trading card game, I have lots of other things going on. it is not my fourth thought, like telling a story is secondary if not tertiary

there's a lot of other things going on so for starters, there's a lack of focus like one of the running jokes is how in the past we've told story and people didn't realize it like one of the things that comes up a lot is Mike Turrey and he used to work in R&D. He's still at Wizards. He's not at R&D anymore.

He never understood that Invasion, the set Invasion, was about an invasion. And I'm like, well, if the name can't convey major elements to you, you know, what's going to do that? And so it is definitely a giant challenge that, you know, we have to, we are restrained a lot by the medium by which we have to tell the cards. The problem number one is our medium is not particularly set up for telling stories. At least its primary goal is not telling stories. Okay, problem number two. The story has to be told through the medium of a game. Okay, so the first problem, obviously, is just trading cards in general. But it's even more detailed than that.

So here's, for example, one of the problems. In a trading card game, in this game specifically, we need 50% creatures. In fact, we've been upping. Actually, it's probably a little above 50, now about 55%. Maybe 5% is land, 25% is spells, and 20% is other miscellaneous. That, you know, really when you tell a story,

you'll need so many characters to tell the story. Yes, characters are important to a story, but there's only a limited number of characters. You know, really the things in the game that have the easiest time telling the story are the instants and sorceries, but that's a tiny portion of what we have. Like, most of what we have are creatures, and creatures, like on the art of a creature card, we show you the creature. You know, there's only so many characters in a story, so there's only so far we can use that as a means to tell you. So,

you know, the fact that, like, our primary goal here is to play a game, which means it makes a lot, there's a lot of ideas of dictation of what we have to do. There's a lot of things that guide our decision making that, because they're not story, because they're a game,

that really throw a lot of wrinkles in trying to tell a story. Because, you know, let's say you said to me, okay, you've got to tell a story through a trading card game, but you can make whatever game you want so you would tell the best story possible. You know, I would tell a story that had lots of, you know, spells that I could show story moments on. But we don't have that. Because of the game, we have a lot less of that.

Okay, problem number three. Magic sets are non-linear. Well, what do I mean by that? Well, if you go to see a movie, the beginning of the movie is before the middle of the movie, and the middle of the movie is before the end of the movie. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like Annie Hall

or Pulp Fiction. I mean, movies occasionally play around linearity. But as a general rule of thumb, when you tell a story through most mediums, there's a sequentiality that like you're going to read part one before part two, before part three, before part four. That I know the order of which things are happening. I'm telling the story in the order it happens. But the problem for us is we don't control what pieces people get or what order they get

them. So let's say, for example, we chop up a story and put it on cards. The very first thing you might get is the end of the story. The climax of the story might be the very first thing you see. And non-linearity, there's a bunch of problems. One of the problems is just telling a story non-linearly is tricky. Not impossible, obviously. Like I said, there are movies and things that aren't always linear.

There are means and ways, but when something like Pulp Fiction or Annie Hall, they are very clearly, they get to pick the order. They do control what order you see things in. And they do, there's a lot of framework set up that happens in those kind of stories where you're not just thrown to the wolves.

It's not like, I'm going to take the pieces of the story and put them in a hat and you pick one out. But that is essentially what we do. We do not control the story. So, number one is there's just what happens, sequentiality. But there also is it's hard to have twists and turns when, like, it's hard to be surprising.

It's a lot harder to have surprises when you don't know when someone's going to see something. Like, the climax of the story could be seen as the very first thing about the story. So not controlling how you see the story really has huge implications of telling you the story and of you understanding the story. You know, if I took even famous stories that you know, but I had chopped them up first,

would you understand? You know, I mean, if you didn't already know the story, would you be able to tell the story? You know, if the first thing you see in The Wizard of Oz is Dorothy throwing water on the witch, and the second thing you see is finding the tinsman. And then the third thing you see is the wizard going away in a balloon. And the fourth thing you see is, you know, Dorothy at home with a cyclone. Like, do you understand that story? Does that story make any sense to you? You know, and that, so the lack of linearity is a huge problem.

And the number four problem we have is the nature of our game is we're constantly changing worlds. We don't have one setting. We're always in a different setting. And so we don't have continuity of place as a means to help. Like, let's say we always told the story in the same place. Well, then at least you start to learn about certain places. It would be, like,

sometimes you can use your scenery as a means to help convey things. But we have none of that because we keep changing our setting. We keep going to different worlds. And why do we do that? Well, once again, because the game requires it. The game is a game about exploration. So really, we need to keep going to different places.

Okay, so those are the four major problems. That we're at the mercy of a trading card game as our genre of storytelling. We have a game to make, you know, more so than we have a story to tell. We have a game to make, And so we have that limit. We don't tell things linearly, or at least people don't see our story linearly, because of the nature by which they get the cards and how it's played. And we are constantly changing worlds. Our worlds aren't staying the same.

We don't have the same place. Okay. Now that, I will tell you, is quite a challenge. Those are some major, major challenges we have to work through. Luckily, we have some solutions, which I'm going to talk to you today. Okay, number one is we use all the pieces of the card.

Okay, so if you look at a magic card, there are the following things you can help convey stuff with. There's the name. There's the mana cost. There's the creature type. There's the card type, the stuff with. There's the name. There's the mana cost. There's the creature type. There's the card type, the creature type. There's the art. There's the rules text. There's power and toughness. There's flavor text. There's card frame. You know, there's a lot of different means, a lot of different parts of the card. And so one of the first things we

realized is you really have to use every element of the card to try to convey your story. So let's walk through these. Your name. Okay, well the name can be very, you know, you can use the name to sort of describe what something is or give the context of what something is in the story. So the name is very important. The mana cost. Well, sometimes we get very creative in our mana cost. Or like with the Eldrazi, we use generic mana cost on a lot of them. You have to, or the guilds of Ravnica always use on the major cards two colors.

The mana cost sometimes can convey elements of the card. The card type. Or the creature type. There's a lot of flavor in the creature type. What kind of creature is it? We can tell you that. Sometimes with the card type, with super types and stuff, sometimes we can convey stuff there.

The art. The art, we have a lot of memes that can say. In fact, one of the probably most important tools to convey story is the art. The rules text. We can art. The rules text. You know, we can definitely use the rules text. You know, like when you're trying to convey something, you can, you know, a lot of times I've talked about top-down design where the way the card works,

the rules text can convey information and story information to you. Power and toughness. You know, sometimes, you know, we can convey how huge something is or small something is or if there's something weird about it, we can sometimes convey weird things to the power and toughness. Flavor text. That's another huge one. That's actually the only place we traditionally get to tell stories. The hand-me-up there is we have to tell them in very small bites. We don't have a lot of space in flavor text. And then the frame. We started being much more willing, like take the Nix frame in Theros where we're trying to convey that this represents a hand

of the gods. So let's do something in the frame treatment that sort of connects you to the gods, that there's a connection between these cards and the gods. But the key there is, you know, when you have challenges to storytelling, well, one of the first things you might want to do is look at your tools. And so one of the things we've done is we've found ways, you know, part of making use of our medium is figuring out all the tools in our medium. And we, you know, one of the things that's really important is whenever you're trying to convey something, look at the tools and try to figure out how to do that. Like I said, the using minus one minus one counters in certain worlds conveys a tone, you know, having certain mechanics conveys

a tone, naming conventions and flavor text conventions and, you know, sometimes just in how we use, you know, how big or small things are, how they are in conjunction with one another, you know, what colors we put things in, you know, each one of those, you know, like I said, if I want to convey something to you, I have to figure put things in, you know, each one of those, you know, like I said, if I want to convey something to you, I have to figure out, like, there's challenges to a trading card game, but okay, being that that's our medium, you know, let's, let's use it for every, every, every element that we can, and that one of the things we always look for is, okay, I need to convey something, what, what about the card can help me convey that?

And I look at, for example, in Kaladesh, our story involved technology and artifacts and we wanted to shape the world to help set the setting for the story we were doing. How we chose it, the kind of cards we made, the kind of feel we made in the cards. Likewise Shadows Over Innistrad, the story was about the people of the world going mad and so we used that, we used all the different things at our disposal to help convey that. We used MELD technology to show the creatures coming together.

Wherever we could we find places and find technologies to be able to convey the story we need to do. Okay, solution number two is resonance. And I've done a whole podcast on resonance, but I'll do the shorter version here. Resonance says that your audience comes to your game with knowledge they already have. And so one of the things that we can use to our advantage is, if I'm trying to tell you a story, well, one of the ways to do that is to use information the audience knows. When we were doing Innishrod, we were telling a story,

but we were telling a story with tropes that people were aware of. You know, how do I tell you what the vampires are like, or what the werewolves are like, or what the zombies do I tell you what the vampires are like or what the werewolves are like or what the zombies are like or what the spirits are like is I take advantage of you being aware of those things and then I play into space so you go, okay, I get it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I know what a werewolf is. These are werewolves. I bring to the table my pre-existing knowledge of werewolves. And so one of the things we definitely take advantage of is saying, okay, let's play into known things. Like, we could have filled Innistrad

with all sorts of unique horrors you've never seen before. But by filling it with horrors that you knew, by focusing on sort of monsters that had a built-in flavor already, we helped jumpstart you getting into Innistrad and understanding the role of Innistrad. Like, Innistrad was about the humans in Plight. Well, how do I understand humans in Plight? Have you seen a monster movie? Have you seen any kind of horror movie?

Like, humans in Plight are the key element of what those movies are about most of the time. And so, by playing our story into themes that you understand, Like, humans and plight are the key element of what those movies are about most of the time. And so by playing our story into themes that you understand, we make it easier for you to piece it together. And that one of the things that we... We do not have the luxury of many other storytelling mediums. We have a lot of constraints. But, you know, we do have the ability to take advantage of other mediums that told the story and use the tropes of those mediums in our medium.

That if I'm going to tell you a horror story, I'm going to go look at horror stories and figure out elements that I can tell you that you get to recognize quickly. Now, connected to that is archetypes. So archetypes are kind of an offshoot of resonance. What archetypes say is, so if you study story or Joseph Campbell or people that talk about the creation of story, what you will find is humans like certain kinds of story and just tell the same stories again and again and again. That there are certain kinds of stories that resonate

with an audience. And there's certain kinds of characters that resonate with an audience. So these are archetypal story concepts and archetypal characters. So one of the things that we take advantage of is saying, hey, we know that we're advantage of is saying hey, we know that we're going to have a challenge introducing things about characters introducing things about the story

let's use archetypal things to knowledge, like for example when we were building the Weatherlight Saga one of the things we did is we very much said, okay let's take advantage of some of these archetypes, so for example Karn is what we call the gentle giant. You know, it's a story of somebody who's powerful and who has great strength,

but is the gentlest person you've met. You know, there's a big telling of big guys, you know, who would normally have, usually the gentle giant, it's a big guy that looks very intimidating, but has a gentle name like you know the strong man in the circus named Tiny you know that kind of thing

and we knew when we were making our thing that if we made the characters kind of connected to things you knew like Gerard was definitely playing into the roguish the Han Solo

it's kind of rogue character where someone who sort of doesn't you know that doesn't quite do what they're told. You know, the, Tongarth was the proud warrior, you know, Worf and such, the sort of like, I am proud of who I am and my heritage and my, that I am inherently a warrior and I will, you know, I have this great pride, but I'm a fighter in my core. And by doing that, by using archetypal things, we just get people to,

we shortcut our storytelling process. That if you see Chandra and she's a pyromancer, you know, she's hot-headed. You know, she is prone to, like, she is fitting a certain archetype. And, you know, while it might have been fun, like, ooh, let's do the pyromancer that's really emotionally detached. Like, well, that's a lot harder to sell. That's a lot harder, I mean, also doesn't match your colors, but, you know what I'm saying, that we sort of played into the archetypes because we want people to be able to quickly identify

and relate to people. And a big part when you have a challenge, I mean, both resonance and archetypes are all about saying, we need to ease people into understanding. We need to front load information. And so the idea is, you use things people understand

so that they grasp it easier. Sorry. Okay. Solution number four. Make use of environment. So one of the things that Magic does really well is we're really good at showing environments. Magic the game is all about exploring environments. So we get to show you lands and we get to

show you inhabitants of the world and we get to show you all sorts of cosmology type things. And so one of the things we've learned is if you make your environment part of your story, if you tell stories that allow your environment to reflect what your story is, like it's not a mistake that the Kaladesh, that the story of Kaladesh takes place in Kaladesh. Or the story of Shadows of Innistrad takes place in Shadows of Innistrad. You know, we told a Greek mythology-type story in Theros.

We told a horror story in Innistrad. You know, whenever we go to a world, we figure out how does that world reinforce, and we play to the strengths. So, for example, I'll take Shadows of Innistrad. We wanted to have a story about Nahiri luring Emrakul to the plane.

Well, what's the impact of luring Emrakul there? Well, it's making the place go crazy, right? And that's environmental. That was something we could do well. That plays to our strengths. By making sure there's an environmental element of the story, by making sure that part of learning about the story is learning about the environment, we play to what magic does well. That magic is all about exploring new worlds. And so

if the new world, like, one of the things is, we need every facet of our world to reflect upon the story. So we pick stories in which the world plays a big part in the stories. You know, we talk about that our stories have an environmental component to it.

That, you know, Shadows of Innistrad, you know, clearly the world is going mad. Battle for Zendikar, the world is under attack. And that even in original Zendikar, that the world itself, the land, was creating conflict. Now, we slowly learned why the world was reacting the way it does

because of the Eldrazi trapped inside it, but that the world was, the way it does because of the Eldrazi trap inside it, but that the world was like, the land itself, the world itself was almost the antagonist in Zendikar. That the people were kind of fighting the world. So that we give the world a feeling and a substance, and then at some level, the world is inherently a character in our story.

It plays a role in our story. That we're telling the kinds of stories, you know, you take something like Tons of Tarkir, where, like, at its core, it was a story about the shaping of the world and how the world itself changes. That the big, you know, switching of the story is the switching of the world. That Sarkhan makes a choice, saves Ugin, and because of it, the ramifications of saving Ugin affects the world at large. That is not just like he changes something that's an environmental change that we can see.

And that is super important. Okay, solution number five, planeswalkers. Well, if you have a story that takes place on many different worlds, perhaps you want characters that can walk between worlds. You know characters that can walk between worlds. You know, that can walk between the planes. Now, if you notice, before planeswalkers were a regular storytelling, like in the Weatherlight Saga, we came to the same conclusion just using,

that we said, okay, well, we need to travel from world to world. We need a consistent cast. That if we constantly change our cast, it becomes harder to tell the stories. If for no other reason, you have to keep learning who the characters are. But if we sort of have a constant cast, you know, once you learn who Chandra is, when you see Chandra, you're like, oh, it's Chandra. I haven't learned who she is.

I know who she is. I don't need to relearn her. And this took us a while to learn the idea that if we want people to follow our story, part of it is don't make them keep relearning from scratch. And a big part of that is a continuity of character. I mean, planeswalkers being the big thing.

And one of the things we did, so in Time Spiral, early on, you know, planeswalkers were very, very powerful to the point of almost being gods. You go back to the days of Ursa and stuff. And so during Time Spiral, we did something in the story called The Mending, where due to a bunch of shenanigans, the multiverse was about to die, to just be destroyed. And all the planeswalkers had to give up their spark to heal the multiverse. And then, once it was healed, it sort of redistributed the sparks, but in a different way.

And the characters were, you know, a lot less powerful. They weren't gods anymore. They had power, and they could travel between worlds. And they all had inherently some magical abilities, but on a much lower scale. And then, that allowed us to sort of make these

characters be our protagonists. You know, we started by introducing Valoran 5, which was Ajani, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Garak. But over time, we've built more characters. And obviously right now, we have the Gatewatch, who's, you know, definitely we're following their story. So it allows us to have the continuity of character where we don't have a lot of other continuity. We change worlds all the time. We change cards all the time. It allows us to have some continuity.

Next, the color pie. So the color pie is an awesome thing. I've done obviously podcasts and plenty on the color pie. The reason the color pie is valuable in this case is that the color pie is something that the color pie is valuable in this case is that the color pie is something that's in Demetor game. And I talk about wanting to have constancy, that you want to have continuity. Well, the color pie is another kind of continuity. Now, when you come to Magic, you have to learn the color pie. Although I would argue that a lot of the color pie is inherently natural,

would argue that a lot of the color pie is inherently natural, that a lot of the color pie does things that you already understand, that, you know, when I say white magic or black magic or even, you know, talking about green or red or blue, that there's a lot of stuff inherent there, that there's a decent amount of resonance built into the color pie. But beyond that, that when I, when I, when you learn about the color pie, you learn about certain traits. That now, now that you understand the color pie, and we do a lot of things to train you about the color pie. You know, Ravnica is a good example. And note that when we go to Ravnica, you know, the guilds, the guilds would have been, like, the story we were trying to tell there could have been a very complex story.

We're introducing you to ten different guilds. It's a city world with ten factions. That's a lot of factions. But because we had the color wheel, we could shortcut that education. That when I say to you, oh, it's a faction that is red and black, you're like, oh, they're probably pretty dangerous. You know, because you understand red and black. Or if I say white and blue, you're like, oh, they're probably pretty dangerous, you know, because you understand red and black.

Or if I say white and blue, you're like, okay, you know, and I say, oh, they're the rules makers. Well, of course, white, blue, the rules makers, that makes total sense. And that by using the color as an education tool and then us constantly reusing it, that the color pie is a constant in magic storytelling. That characters fall in certain colors and color combinations and that, you know, let's say I introduce a planeswalker to you and you're looking at the card.

So, for example, the first time we showed you Vraska. Now, you have things like the art to help you. You know, she's a Gorgon. That helps a lot. But also, she's black and green. That is telling you something. Now, if we had showed you to her and she was white-blue, you'd respond to her very different than her being black-green. And that is one of the powers of the color wheel. It's one of the powers

of using it as a means. Like, one of the things that we need to be able to tell our stories is make sure that we can convey things as quickly and as easily as possible. Because once again, we don't control the order you see the story. That, you know, we have to make it very easy for you to piece it together. Now part of that is archetypes. Part of that is telling you stories that you know and character types that you know. But another big part is using continuity within the game.

And the color wheel, like in some level, I feel like the color wheel is a storytelling device that we've introduced and then we constantly use. And then once you become versed in it, the game is all about

the color wheel. It's hard not to learn the color wheel. If you stay at all imbued in the game, it's something that we can convey a lot of information with. Card frame and mana cost are such a big part of the game that we can, it's one of the things

we can teach with. So we're good at teaching color pie, so we do. It enhances the game, so it's valuable there. And then we can use that as a further way to shortcut to tell you stories. Okay, the final piece is telling stories through the gameplay. Innistrad is a good example here

where I wanted you to, or maybe Scarface and Mirrodin is a great sense. Okay, I'm introducing you to the Phyrexians. You've never met, well, we hadn't seen the Phyrexians in a long time. Maybe you're a long time player, you knew the Phyrexians, but I needed to convey the Phyrexians to you. They were invading Mirrodin. How did I do that? Well, we

worked really hard to give elements to them. Like, okay, they infect things. There's a mechanic called infect, and they're putting minus one, minus one counters on things. They're putting poison counters on players. And they proliferate. We have a mechanic that spreads those counters.

You know? And so if we're trying to convey to you the sense of this is like a living disease that just infects worlds, okay, well we're starting to tell you that. We're showing you through the choice of our words and through the gameplay itself. That as you watch them infect things and it spreads, you're like, oh, I get how they're a disease. I get how they work i'm watching them doing it as i play the game i am living through the means by which they are doing it and that makes it a lot easier to understand the essence of what kind of story we're trying

to tell that the gameplay that i mean it's very easy to say hey we're going to tell you information and the names and show it to you the art and show it to you in to say, hey, we're going to tell you information in the names and show it to you in the art and show it to you in the flavor text. You know, we're going to tell you all we can through the actual creative mediums we have. But another big part of it is the fact that you're playing the game. Hey, there's the negative that the game brings with it a lot of requirements that aren't necessarily key to what the storytelling wants. It does say, hey, I get to make you feel something. You're going to have an experience.

And the game, people are going to feel away from playing the game. Well, let's tie that in. Let's make those feelings. Let's make that emotion. Let's make those actions. Let's make that gameplay tie directly into the story we're trying to tell.

So when we're doing an invasion of the Phyrexians on Mirrodin, well, if you watch the gameplay and you, when you play the Phyrexians, are doing that, it makes it much easier to understand. And that was true in Innishrod when I was trying to convey the monsters. That was true in Khans. I mean, every level, we try to find places where we convey that. Even Kaladesh right now, and you'll see an Amonkhet. There's very much a story we're going to tell

in Amonkhet that is based upon as you play, things you feel, things you learn, things you see, that conveys itself toward it. So, I'm almost at work here. I did that to racial school today, so old school

actually driving to work on Drive to Work. But anyway, so like I said, there's a lot of challenges in telling the story. We are a trading card. And we are a trading card game. So not only are we told through trading cards, we are told through a game. And there's a lot of things we have to do to make trading cards work and a game work. There's a non-linearity to our storytelling that we don't control what order the players see things in. And we're constantly changing our setting. We're constantly going to new worlds because we're a

game about exploration. How do we overcome all that? Once again, we use all parts of the trading card game. The name, the mana cost, the creature type, the card type, the art, the rules text, the power toughness, the flavor text, the card frame. We make use of resonance, playing into things people know. We make use of archetypes, playing into things people know. We make use of resonance playing into things people know. We make use of archetypes playing into things people know. We make use of the environment and have an environmental element to our storytelling and mirror what we're telling in the environmental story that we're telling. We have planeswalkers that can cross between, so we have characters that provide continuity. We have the color pie that provides continuity, that teaches players the means by which we tell the story so that you can pick up faster when we're trying to tell something to you.

And we have gameplay itself. While the game is a handicap in some ways, it's also a tool in another. And so, my friends, that is how we tell a story in a trading card game. It is not an easy task. There are a lot of challenges. And as someone who's told the story in many, many mediums, I think trading cards are the most difficult medium I've ever told a story in. But the cool thing is it's a neat challenge. I really do enjoy the kind of stories that we tell and I enjoy the challenge of trying to tell stories in a different way. So I hope you guys

enjoy it too. And like I said, you know, we're constantly sort of changing some of the elements of how we do it, but this is the nuts and bolts of how we tell stories. So anyway, I'm now actually at work.

I'm not at Rachel's school. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic and magic story.

See you next time.