Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #455: Complexity

Episode Date: July 21, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the role complexity plays in game design.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today's column came about because of a conversation I had on my blog. So today I want to talk about complexity. So one of the things I think is misunderstood as I argue with people is a lot of people sort of see different things in complexity. A lot of people think it's like what makes games good and people believe it's what causes problems and I want to talk a little bit about how I see complexity and what complexity means for games. I know a lot of game designers listen up or aspiring game designers. So let me talk about what complexity means and how it applies to your game. Okay, so put it quite basically, complexity to me is a cost. That there is something you gain from using it, but something that you spend by using it.

And so I want to talk a little bit about what that is. So one of the things I talk about when you... There's a couple things you worry about as a game designer. Number one is, will people be able to play my game? I talk about magic's barrier to entry. So barrier to entry is a term I use, which means I don't know how to play my game. I talk about magic's barrier to entry. So barrier to entry is a term I use, which means I don't know how to play. I need to get to the point where I know how to play. How hard is that? How hard is my barrier to entry? And the thing to remember is that,

you know, if your game, like magic, for example, is a game that evolves over time, meaning it's a game that can gain complexity over time. Some games, they are what they are, and, you know, they don't necessarily get more complex. But if your game changes at all, there's this pressure to add things to it. But anyway, the real question is, how easy or hard is it for somebody who doesn't know your game to learn your game? And a lot of people gloss that over. A lot of people are like, well, they'll learn. You know, I have a cool game.

And once they learn it, it's a cool game. And the problem there is that if you, the game designer, aren't thinking about how easy it is for someone who's never played the play. Like, your game exists because there's people that cross over, that get into that. Now, when you add complexity, what you're saying is, I mean, first off, the first cost is you are adding to your barrier to entry. Now, there's a bunch of ways to use complexity that doesn't cause that problem. But you have to always be conscious when you're adding any complexity is, are you making the game harder to learn?

And the thing that I often say to people is, I compare it to writing all the time, which is, is your scene, is your character, is your moment adding to your story? You know, if I'm writing a script and I have this awesome scene, but I'm like, okay, let's say I took that scene out of your movie. Can I understand the movie? Does the movie make sense? And the answer is, yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. I'm like, eh, do you need that scene?

Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. I'm like, eh, do you need that scene? I feel that rules in games are similar, which is if I'm adding something to the game and I go, if I just took that out, how would the game be? Would the game be fun? Would the game be fun without that? Like one of the things we do in Magic all the time

is we always look back and say, is that rule holding its weight? A classic example was in Magic we have a rule or we had a rule called Mana Burn. And the way Mana Burn worked was that there's a whole system to casting spells and the idea was

that if you had magical energy but didn't have anywhere to spend it it could hurt you. And it was added originally to the game because it was flavorful. You know, it's the idea like I have, and there were cards, you know, Richard Garfield made some cards that took advantage of it because it was a rule of the game and he was able to take advantage of it. But I think the reason it exists, to be honest, was he came up with

some cool cards that were very flavorful and said, oh, well, this is just kind of flavorful. But the problem was, it was a rule that you kind of had to learn early on because it could matter, or at least people felt like it could matter. It was the kind of rule that people often learned early on, at least taught early on, because it could be relevant. The problem was, it wasn't often relevant. It didn't come up very much. In fact, the story I tell, I've told the story before, but I'll tell it again.

We were trying to figure out whether or not to keep Manor Burn or get rid of Manor Burn. So we, I said to my designers, we're going to, from the next month, we're going to play all of our design play tests as if Manor Burn doesn't exist. Because I want to see what it's like. What problems does it create? You know, what issues does it have? So a month later, I said, okay, let's talk. What happened?

And what happened is nothing happened. It didn't come up. You know, in one month in all our games of playtesting, the situations where having Man of Burn versus not having Burn didn't happen. And that was a big sign to me that, oh, well, if we can go a whole month through all these different play tests and nothing comes up, hey, that's not a rule that comes up very much. Maybe that's a rule that we don't need to have.

And that is a big thing that when I'm looking at complexity is trying to understand, you know, how often it matters. Does it really matter to the game? And that, you know, so the first big thing about complexity is you always want to check to make sure that, like I like to say, the positive, oh, okay, I didn't get into the positives of added complexity. The positives of complexity is, you know, you're able to add more elements to your game.

So the people that enjoy your game, you know, you can get more facets into it. Sometimes you can use it to add flavor. Sometimes you could use it to just get some nuance to the gameplay. But, and this is important, complexity, it isn't that complexity itself adds value to your game. It is not as if I just make something more complex, it makes for a better game. That is not true.

The idea is there are things you can add to your game that will give extra value, and anything you add to your game overall adds to complexity. But do not equate complexity with value. Value will add complexity, but complexity does not always add value. Whenever I add something to my game, all complexity cares about, seriously, complexity is about how many things does somebody have to keep track

of in order to play the game. And I think a lot of times I talk about complexity in a context of learning the game and that's important. Like I said, whenever you're evaluating your game one of the things you have to evaluate is will people play my game? Especially when your game is new. I have an awesome game. Will people play my game? If there's too much between them getting into the game and the game, then not enough people will play, and your game will probably not make it. Now, once again, there are exceptions. I mean, magic as a perfect exception is, magic is complex. It's not like you can't have a complex game. Magic is very

complex. The issue I have is not that it's not complex, but is the complex spent correctly? Is it doing the right work? And that's the big issue for me, is I'm not anti-complexity. I'm just, I want you to understand that the complexity comes with a cost, and is the cost appropriate?

So, anyway, I spent a lot of time here talking about the beginner, the barrier to entry, and that's important, but that's not the only thing. So here's another cost of complexity that you have to be careful of, is complexity talks about

how many things I have to keep track of. And the way I sort of think of this is, imagine taking any game that you play and just making you care for extra things. Like, for example, I could say, okay, you play a game and here's a new rule I'm going to add on to any game. But if it is exactly on the clock, if it is an even minute, then you get some extra ability. If it's odd, you don't. For example, if it's even, you can't lose the game when it's even. You can only lose the game when it's odd.

You can add that to any game. That if it's even and you're about to lose the game, you can't lose yet. You can't lose until it's odd. Okay. Now, is that making the game any better? It's adding complexity to the game. You now have to sort of track what minute it is and figure out when you're trying to beat somebody, if I, you know, want to make sure that I'm trying to defeat them on an odd minute, does that make the game more fun? Not necessarily, and I'll pretty much go no. One of the issues of complexity is not just the barrier entry issue, but also the issue of how much does a player have to pay attention to? So for this, I'm going to use a little metaphor. And my metaphor is that imagine your player's capacity to,

you know, mental capacity is a cup. And you're pouring them some tea. There's a point at which you fill the cup. And then you can give them no more tea. Any more tea you put in the cup is just spilling other tea out of the cup. And so there's a period in a gameplay where you reach what I'll call max mental capacity, which is, and mind you, different players have different mental capacities,

but let's just take the average mental capacity. There's a point at which the player can't mentally process everything. And then they are forced into what we call short-cutting, meaning they're like, okay, well, I'm going to have to make some assumptions on things because I can't track everything.

I think one of the problems that games can have is they max out the opponent's mental energy and then what ends up happening is that they end up prioritizing what to care about and they care about the things they think are important. Glossing over the things they don't think are important. And really the question is,

ideally you don't want your tea overfilled. You want your player not to be overwhelmed by the issue. Because one of the problems with being overwhelmed is people play games to relax. I mean, people play games for many reasons. But one of the reasons is it's fun. And that, while I think people are willing to sort of push their mental capacities in a game, games are mental,

the goal here is not to exhaust them. The goal here is not to overwhelm them. And the other thing is, if your game has too much stuff, if you overfill their cup, then what happens is they have to figure out where to put their energy, and they might be putting their energy

in the completely wrong place. And what I mean by that is, and so I talk about, you know, make sure where the fun is. Not all things are equally fun. Not all things you can keep track of are equally fun. And that if you're not careful, what you, the game player, want to do is make sure that you understand the experience that you're giving to your players. you don't, once you sort of take away the control, then the players start making choices that you have less control over, and the quality of the game becomes something that, you know, you have

less control over. That what you want is to create experience for the players, and you want, you know, you want to maximize that experience. You're trying to make an awesome play experience for them. But the more you give details, the more you're making them have to sort of choose what to do and not to do. You're giving up some control of that experience. So for example, let's say you're making your game and you have some small thing that they have to keep track of. That's some small part of the game. And let's say that small thing doesn't happen very often. Like in Magic, for example,

you know, one of the things we'll do when we make a set is, one of our rules is, that we try to only make you care about one thing you don't normally care about. That, you know, for example, in any one game, there's lots of, you know, for example, in any one game,

there's lots of, you know, Magic's a pretty complex game already. There's a lot of things we could make you care about. There's a lot of elements and there's a lot of interesting gameplay spaces to go.

But what we don't want to do is say, well, let's care about thing A and B and C and D and E and F that you just would tire the player out. Or, once again, one of two things happens when you overload them

complexity-wise in-game. I mean, obviously, Baron entry problems. Or, once again, one of two things happens when you overload them complexity-wise in-game. I mean, obviously, barrier to entry problems. But, okay, for the players already into your game, that already accepts your game, you either tire them out and you take something which should be fun for them and sort of stress them, or you kind of roll the dice of what they're going to care about. And so, let me take the mana burning devil for magic. Here's a rule we had that said, okay, here's the thing you have to care about. Now, it didn't matter a lot, and it was the kind of thing that, eh, most of the time you

could ignore it, but because it existed, it was something that you had to just, in the back of your brain, care about every once in a while. it existed, it was something that you had to just, in the back of your brain, care about every once in a while. You know, here's another thing that we talk about sometimes is, imagine you make a mechanic that says, every time you do thing X, you get a counter, and if you get so many counters, you lose the game. So, let's say, for example, okay, so I have a rule in the game that says every time you touch your face, you get a counter. If you get 20 or more counters, you lose the game.

Okay, so now part of your game is you've added the am I touching my face part of the game. And so now, as I'm concentrating on other things, I have to constantly say to myself, oh, am I touching my face? Now, it is possible that that could be fun. I mean, the onsets play around in this space a little bit. But as a general rule of thumb is, if the point of the game is I want people to have strategic concentration somewhere, do I want them to have to, like, the things you have to do to keep from touching your face, the kind of energy you have to do is a completely different sort of series of stuff than you might care about, am I attacking the right number of creatures?

And so what happens is you divide their mental energy. You're like, okay, I gotta not touch my face. I have to spend some of my energy doing that. And what that means is that they're spending that energy that they could spend somewhere else there. And the point is, is that something that you want to be the case? I mean, that's the biggest question to ask see are people add something that in a vacuum is fun, in the right situation is cool, but that it doesn't matter enough. That there's not enough focus on it. So that's the next thing to think about with complexity is that complexity sort of forces focus in your game.

is that complexity sort of forces focus in your game. And it depends, for example, one of the big things that will vary about how much people care about something is what is the repercussion of caring about it or not caring about it. You know, if I ignore this rule, what happens? And be aware, when you make your game, players will ignore rules

that they don't think are important. There's already that built into sort of how people play games. That if you have a low-stake rule, like, for example, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons. I did a whole podcast on that. And one of the rules in Dungeons & Dragons has to do with weight, about how much you're carrying. And supposedly, like, if you carry too much,

there's things you have to carry about because, like, you know, there's a real cost to weight. Like, in actual, like, reality, like, if I have to carry too much, it exhausts me. I get heavy, you know. And my movement is slower. And there's a lot of issues. So there's a whole bunch of rules about weight in Dungeon Dragons. But when my friends and I were playing it's like ahhh, it's, you know what, we'll make sure to use common sense, we won't do crazy things, we won't abuse the system, but yeah, we don't want to track everything. That, it just was a rule we didn't, we didn't want to do. And one of the cool

things about it, people in games can put, where they want to put their focus on. But if you... Here's another thing where you can lose control of your players is sometimes, like, either they're going to consciously choose not to care about the rule if there's too many rules, or they're going to subconsciously care. Consciously means, ah, we don't need to worry about that. We're not going to worry about that. And that's players just abandoning going, you know...

Because players have the right, one thing is to remember, and I talked about this when I talk a lot about how when I want you, you know, if you want to become a game designer, what are things you can do? And one of the things I say is, you know, hey, you can experiment with existing games and try different rules and see how it plays. People will do that with your game. That if your game is not as compelling as it can be, people will try different things to make it better. is not as compelling as it can be,

people will try different things to make it better. And so another sort of cost of adding complexity to things is you more encourage people to sort of take the game into their own hands, either by consciously removing things or, when I say subconsciously, look, you can only, you know, once your teacup is full, you can only manage so much. And so people will manage everything they can think to manage. But it's not, it is not,

that's the real thing I'm trying to say is when you add stuff to your game that isn't necessarily adding to the fun of the game, it's just adding to the busyness of the game, you know, that there's a cost to come to that, that I think is not necessarily worth the baggage, worth the weight, if you will, to my, to my weight analogy. You know, the, the other big thing to think about complexity is, now, the positive thing about complexity is that there's nuance and there's strategy. This is another of those inherent balances of game design. Barrier to Entry says, look, I need to keep the game simple so people can learn the game. If the game's too complex, people can't learn the game.

If no one learns the game, I have no players. On the flip side, one of the other things about game is strategy. That you want some sort of depth to your game because you want people to play it more than once. One of the things that will bring people back to the game is people going, oh, there's more to explore, there's more to see. So one of the things that complexity does for you that's a positive thing, or can be a positive thing, is it can add later depth to the game. Once again, caveat is just adding things does not add depth.

So when I talk about this, don't fall in the trap of believing that anything I add just makes the game better. The complexity for the sake of complexity for sure doesn't make the game better. But the reason that you do want to sometimes add complexity is that part of strategic depth, and I did a whole podcast on 10 things every game needs, one of which was strategy, is you want the players to be able to learn over time that in general you want continuity to your games. Not necessarily that the games, the stake of the games continue between them, but the knowledge between them.

That one of the things, like I said, there's two big challenges you as a game designer have. One is when somebody first plays your game, do they, you know, when they first learn it, do they want to play it? And the second is when somebody plays it, do they want to play it again? So here's the delicate balance.

If I make my game too complex, I lose on the barrier to entry. That people go, oh, I just, I can't learn it. I can't get into it. It's too much. If I don't have enough there, players play and go, okay, well, I had fun, but like, I think I've kind of explored the game. There's not much to explore, and they don't want to play again. Okay, so here's, we move into the second part of today's conversation. Okay, so you want some complexity because you want some depth of play, and you want to make sure that players want to play again because there's continuity to the game in that I, the game player, feel like as I play the game, there's some general

skill I'm learning. There are things that I now want to, you know, I, we talk about how there's branches, you know, using a tree metaphor, that gameplay has a lot of decision making, all decision making branches in different directions. And that kind of what you want to do is players explore one aspect, knowing that there's other things to explore. Like one of the things we do in Magic is we, one of the ways to play is drafting, obviously, where you open up the pack and you take cards as you open them. I always used to describe this, people who don't play Magic, as like a football draft,

where you're drafting players for a football team. So you're drafting cards for your deck. And one of the things we try to do is we put a lot of themes in there so that you can explore different themes. And while you're drafting one theme, you can spend a lot of time just drafting one particular theme and get better at that theme. Or you can try drafting different themes over time.

And so there's reasons to keep wanting to come back and draft again. Okay, so the big question is, how can I have the complexity in my game once so that I can find ways to add added depth and strategy and stuff, but that doesn't necessarily

cause my barrier to play to get problematic? Okay, so there's a couple ways to do this. We'll talk about this. It's how to correctly use complexity. Okay, so number one a couple ways to do this. We'll talk about this. How to correctly use complexity. Okay, so number one, I want to introduce a concept that I wrote articles about called lenticular design. So what lenticular design says is, your beginner can't see everything.

The beginning player knows things, but there's certain facets that they can't see until they learn more. And the idea of lenticular design, so what a lenticular card is, the word is, they're the cards that are printed that depending how you look at them, they have different pictures. Sort of what they have is they have ridges on them, and there's different things put on the ridges. So if you look at it from the left, it looks one way,

but if you look at it more from the right, it looks like a different picture. And so what I'm trying to talk about here is that when you make your game, one of the tricks you can do, the first trick you can do is you can figure out what the beginner understands and doesn't understand. And then you can kind of hide your complexity by putting it places where the beginner doesn't think to look. A good example we've learned in magic, for instance, is there are certain effects.

So, for example, in Magic you have creatures, and one of the things we can do is we can have effects that happen when you play the creatures. Normally in Magic, normal creatures, I just play the creature, not the creatures in play. But sometimes we sort of put a spell effect on the creature. So when you cast it, an enter the battlefield effect we call it in the game. But what we've learned when playing with beginners is that the enter the battlefield effects, a beginner doesn't

think about, usually, it's sort of like, it happens. I play this and it's going to happen. And the mindset for a beginner in Magic is it's turn three, I can cast a creature that costs

three, assuming I play three lands, and what do I have to cost three? And then they play it. The more experienced player says, oh, well this creature I could play on the third turn, but it has some utility. Maybe I have something else I can do on the third turn and I'll save this creature, I won't use it right away. And what we discovered was that we could take this thing and that there's a little extra play for the players who understood better how to use it. And that's kind of what lenticular design is, is finding aspects where you can do that, where you can do something that's not going to be noticeable by the beginner because it involves just some nuance of something.

Some, you know, like one of the things you want to do when you play your game with new players is monitor what parts they get and what they don't. There also is value, by the way, actually I don't talk about this much, there is value of playtesting your game with the same people multiple times. Because not only do you want to test beginners and how they feel, you also want to test sort of, does the game have any sort of duration? Is there depth of play? Do your players want to keep coming back to the game?

So another really good thing when you're playtesting a new game is get together a group and have them play it multiple times. Watch what they do as they learn the game. Because there's an interesting balance between um what they sort of first impressions and sort of what they discover as they play it's those later play tests where they discover things that'll help give you idea of how you can build in the lenticular stuff because you'll start to see, oh, they've now recognized thing X, which they didn't before.

Oh, well, that's something that I might be able to play around with, add some complexity to my game, but in a way the beginners aren't going to see. Okay. The next way to add complexity to your game is using resonance. What I mean by that is your audience already has knowledge. I know it's very easy to think of them being a blank slate, but they're not. They're human beings that have done things,

that have interacted with pop culture, and they're people who have experience of things. So another way that you can get complexity in your game is through flavor. And what that means is that if I can take something where my audience already has built-in expectations on it, I can add complexity because even though it is something extra, the fact that the player, like, let's say, for example, um, in Magic,

we have a mechanic called Flying, uh, and Flying is when I attack, um, you know, a Flying creature can only be blocked by another Flying creature, um, and that's one of the easiest rules to learn, because it's like, well, if I had a creature in the air and it flew, could the creature on the ground stop the creature in the air? No, it couldn't. It's flying. So it is such an intuitive mechanic that it really just doesn't it people can pick it up real fast. And that's another thing with complexity is how are you presenting your complexity? And a really powerful way

is the more you can use flavor for your complexity, the more your complexity makes sense because it just naturally follows what's going on, the easier it is for the player. And so one of the things to always keep in mind is, and I talk about this, I did a whole podcast on piggybacking. You can go listen to.

In fact, I've done multiples on piggybacking. One of the things to think about when you're building your game, and this is one of the things we've learned a lot from Magic, is the more you can play in space that your player has expectations, you can use that expectations

as a means to teach, as a means to make things easier to do. And that, it is very funny that I can take, there are cards that I can take and I can just, if I, if you understand the flavor, they make sense and you strip away the flavor and they don't make sense. And it's like I said, it is, it is interesting how, you know, as soon as I add on the flavor that ties those things together, the audience goes from, oh, like, what? To, oh, okay. And so another big thing in the way you can sort of handle complexity is

preface it within context that people understand. And let me divide this in two sections. One section is resonance, which is just, you know this already. You already know this. This is a werewolf. Well, how do werewolves function? Oh, well, it goes back and forth between being a human and being a werewolf? Okay, yeah, that's how werewolves work.

You know, that we took something that was a little on the complex side, but because we were playing something people knew, okay, the expectation of, I play a human, and one day it will become a werewolf and it will go back to being a human. Like, okay, look, that was what I expected out of a werewolf. And so even though we had a more complex thing to do that, some of our complexity was taken off of people knowing that. The other thing you can do with flavor is you can teach people the flavor and then have the flavor sort of make sense. So resident says they already know it. Oh, it's thing X. I know thing X.

The second thing you can do is you can use flavor in your game to build flavor rules to say, okay, well, these kinds of things do that. Oh, like, for example, let's say your game has some kind of flying, like magic does, and we introduce a brand new creature you've never seen before. It's a blockety block. Oh, a blockety block?

What's a blockety block? And I say, well, all blockety blocks have wings. They all fly. Okay, now you have to learn that a blockety block can fly, but once I teach you that a blockety block can fly, now the second time you see a blockety block, you go, well, I know that flies. They have wings.

Or, once again, like in magic, we have illustrations. I can show you a brand new creature, but if I put wings on that creature, so, okay, there is resonance in which you know what things are there is flavor in which I teach you things and then there's the middle ground so the wings is the middle ground in which you have resonance of what wings are

so if I put wings on a creature even though you may not know that creature at least wings mean something to you and then there's the full flavor thing where I teach you that this subset of things you've never seen before all have this property that you understand, like they fly. And then you're able to more quickly adapt future versions. That's another big thing to remember with flavor is you can take things that don't connect and make them connect and the audience

treats them as a singular thing. Okay, so let me get into chunking, since we're talking about... Chunking can be used not just in flavors. Let me explain this real quick. The human brain can only remember so much at one time. The brain is well aware of this, and there are processing things. One of the big things for example is the number three. That in general the brain can

process three things at a time. So what happens when the brain needs to do more than three things at a time? Well it does something called chunking and what that is is it starts trying to connect things together so they can think about them as a singular thing. And the idea is that you can use chunking. It's another way for you to help with complexity. And what chunking says is, if I can make people think of these things together, if thing A and thing B aren't A and B, but C, which includes A and includes B,

that's easier to think about. So another thing that you can do in your game to help with complexity is you can group things together so that players can learn that A and B go together. I used an example of flavor a second ago. Oh, all blacky-black fly. Oh, well, and so let's imagine flying like magic had a relevant rules thing.

If all black and black fly and all flying does this mechanics, I've now chunked that together. So for example, I'll just use magic flying. So flying in magic means that I can't be blocked except by other flyers. Okay, that's a rule. And I've now chunked that rule to flying by using flavor. By saying, okay, well this flavorfully makes sense. Okay, I got it. Flying, the realistic thing that birds do

that I understand from the real world is being connected to this mechanic. Got it. Now, I say that this creature, brand new creature you've never seen before, is a flying thing. Now I chunk it together again. So now when I see a blockety block,

I'm like, oh, this rule is inherently part of that thing. What I've done is I've taken a bunch of different things and made them one thing. Sorry, I have hiccups here. Let me take a sip of water. Okay, so the idea of chunking is that if you are consistent in how you use things, such that you allow your players to learn rules about them, even if those rules are brand new, even though, yes, resonance is nice,

yes, you can use flavor, but simply just connecting things. If people learn that whenever thing A happens, thing B happens, they start thinking of thing A and B as being a joint thing. So another place that you can sort of gain on or help with complexity is by making use of chunking.

Flavor will help with chunking, but it doesn't always have to be flavor-connected. It could just be, I make people aware that when one thing happens, I need to be track of the other thing. The other thing you can do with complexity is that you can compartmentalize it. And what I mean by that is,

you can figure out when some... Let's say you have part of your game that you think is complex. If you make your player always worry about it, then it's just you're overloading the teacup. It's another thing that they have to worry about. But if you say to them, okay, this thing can only happen at this time, that I'm going to let you know when you have to worry about it. So for example, in Magic,

one of the rules in Magic is when Richard made the game, you have 20 points, 20 life points, and when you get to zero, you lose. But Richard knew, like, well, what happens if I'm gaining life or I'm doing something in which that's not ending the game? And so he said, okay, well, there's a deck of cards. When you run out of cards, that is a secondary loss. And there are times in which we care about that, and there's mechanics that care about it. But in general, it's a rule that doesn't apply until it's necessary. So the way that decking tends to work is, you don't really think about decking. Most games don't come down to decking. And the only time you ever think about decking is when you recognize that your deck's kind of low.

Like, uh-oh, might decking be an issue? But until you have, like, ten or less cards in your deck, it's usually not an issue. So it's something, it's some element of the game that the way the complexity is kept in check is it doesn't matter most of the time, and when you're supposed to care about it, it's locked to a certain thing. Now that's something that, that is time-based on how long the game goes.

There are other things that might be, oh, well only during this section of the game. For example, with magic, you can only cast spells in your turn. Except there are certain times when you can cast them in your opponent's turn. And magic is a little freer and will let you do that. But one of the things I've seen in a lot of other games is that they'll say, okay, you can only do things on my turn on this very specific time period. That most of my turn, you can't do something.

But there's a window where you can, and now we both know when that window is, and so I don't need, on your turn, I don't need to worry about doing something until that small window exists. And then I know I can do something, and you know I can do something. So the idea there is you're sort of choosing when something can happen. That's what compartmentalizing means, is that you say, yes, this is complexity. Yes, this matters, but it only matters at a specific time. So you don't have to worry about it most of the time. You only have to worry about it in certain circumstances. And that's a way for you to have some complexity.

And if you compartmentalize properly, if you say, well, this complex thing happens only at this time, and this complex thing happens at this time, and those two times are not the same time, meaning I never have to worry about both at the same time, is a way to have the game overall have greater complexity, but at any one point in time have lower complexity. So that's another thing to keep in mind, by the way, is that it's very easy to think of complexity as being an overall thing.

But really what I want to think about it, you know, you're filling the tea of the cup. The tea level may lower and rise. So as you're doing playtesting and stuff, you can kind of watch and figure out. Some games, for example, have stages where it's stage one, stage two, stage three. And certain parts of the game don't even come into play until later stages.

Like there's some games that go, first you do this. Well, once everybody's done that, now you do this. So that's one way to compartmentalize. But another thing to keep track of is to sort of watch where the complexity goes as the game goes along. Because you can change. One of the things you can do is if you make the complex thing don't overlap,

then you don't have the additive elements of those complexities. So that's what I'll call positioning, which is tied to compartmentalizing, which says that if I sort of are careful where I position things so that when people have to think about things you don't sort of force two things together with each thing. If you think about when you do things in contracts with other things, then that's another way you can sort of keep complexity in check. Say, at any one point in time, I have N things to worry about, but N is not all the things the game makes you worry about.

I just make you care about different things at different times. That is another way that you can keep complexity down. Another bit of tricks that I like to use with complexity also is sort of making it such that some games introduce it and some don't. And that, the idea that, I talk about magic blocks. One of the things we do in magic is, each

block, we say to ourselves, okay, there's one thing you get to care about you don't normally get to care about. In Zendikar, we made you care about when you play the land. Normally you don't care about when you play a land. Just play a land when you want to play a land. It's not particularly relevant. In Kaladesh we had this whole energy mechanic

and you were tracking this entire thing you never ever track. And the idea is if you understand what you're doing you can put complexity in your game if you sort of space it up over time. So, not only can you space it within the game, you can space it between

the games. You can say, okay, and this really comes in when you have a game that has expansions and stuff, where okay, now we're going to play the game and something different is going to happen. Actually, there's two different ways. Either you have expansions or, and this is something Donalex loves to do.

Donald X made Dominion, among many other games. Donald Decorino. Is you could have a game where you have components, but you don't always use all the components every game. Donald does a lot of this in his games.

It's a very good technique. Like Dominion is you don't play with all the cards every time. So each time you start with... So the game experience is different based on what components you have. That's another way you can sort of keep complexity in check is don't give the players access to all the elements.

That they choose some elements and they can mix the elements. Either they mix them by the beginning of the game or how they get introduced to the game changes. The other thing you can do, I'm almost to Rachel, one last thing you can do is what I'll call complexity ramping, which is that you build your game so that, and video games do this quite a bit.

You look at tutorials. It's like when you start playing a tutorial, hey, just care about this one thing. Okay, you got this one thing? Well, now I'm adding the second thing., just care about this one thing. Okay, you got this one thing. Well, now I'm adding the second thing. Now care about the second thing. Ramping means that you slowly introduce more things. And so that they don't have to experience all the stuff.

You know, they sort of slowly introduce them. Video game tutorials do this all the time. If you look at stuff like the legacy games, like Risk Legacy and stuff, those are games that have permanent changes that happen over time. But because the permanent changes happen over time, you know, they ramp the complexity in it. Magic does its ramping by it has a mana system where you just can't play all the spells at once.

So how do I keep the complexity in check? Well, yeah, I have expensive spells that do crazy things, but you can't do that till later in the game. That the game holds them off. That it's like, okay, I can that do crazy things, but you can't do that till later in the game. That the game holds them off. That it's like, okay, I can only do these things, and the things that we let you do early tend to be simpler and smaller. And so as the game goes on, we ramp into the complexity.

And once again, using magic as an example, you also want to think about complexity in the context of one game and complexity overall. Those are actually two slightly different things. Is, you know, overall has to do with bear entry stuff. Like, how hard is the game to understand? And then within the game is,

I want to make sure there's a flow to the game itself that I'm sort of ramping into the complexity or I'm compartmentalizing the complexity that I'm making sure that any one moment in time in playing the game, I'm compartmentalizing the complexity, then I'm making sure that any one moment in time in playing the game, I'm not overwhelming you. I hope today, like one of my big goals

of today is to show you that complexity is a complex topic. It is not a good or bad thing. It's not a good or evil thing. It is a component. It's something that games need. And you have to figure out

how and where to use it. It comes at a cost. It means something that games need. And you have to figure out how and where to use it. It comes at a cost. It means something. It can have an impact on your players, not just your new players, but your existing players. But there's also benefits that come from it if used correctly. And so a lot of what I want to say today is complexity is a valuable tool that can do wonderful things for your game. But it comes at a cost, and it can do a lot of dangerous things and so the key is understanding when and how and why you're using inflexi and make sure you're using correctly using it right won't enhance your game and make your game more fun use it wrong and

distances people it tires out your players and it keeps people from enjoying them as well as it can okay Okay, I'm now at Rachel's, so I want to say this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks for joining me today.