Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #588: College

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

I was about to take my daughter off to college, so I dedicated a podcast to talking about what lessons college taught me that impact my life and how I design Magic.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so later this week, I'm going to be taking my daughter to college. So Rachel, for those fans of the show, Rachel, who for many, many podcasts, I drove her to high school, is now going to college. to high school, is now going to college. And so I thought in tribute to my daughter going to college, I would talk a little bit about my college years and the things I learned from college. So I came up with 10 lessons that I learned from college that I think are applicable to design. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how I learned them in college and then talk about

why I think they're applicable in magic design. So you guys know the routine. Okay, so number one, find your own crowd. So one of the things that I really enjoyed about college, so when I went to high school, I went to Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio. It was a small school. I think I had 180 kids in my graduating class. So the whole school was, I don't know, uh, 800 some kids maybe.

We, we had eighth graders in our school in addition. So, uh, that's why if you do the math. Um, anyway, uh, it was a small school. And I mean, the people I spend time with were the people that I could spend time with. But when I got to college, one of the things I learned is one of the cool things about college is, you really get to find people that are more like yourself. You know, in high school, especially for me, since I had a small high school,

you know, there were less people like me. But in a college where there's thousands and thousands of people, it's a lot easier to sort of find your niche. So one of the themes that will pop up during today's podcast is one of the big niches I did when I was on campus was I got involved in the theater troupe. Stage troupe is the name of Boston University. And I did a whole bunch of things. I wrote and directed my own plays. I started an improv troupe. I started a writer's workshop. And I helped out with other plays. I was definitely very much involved in the theater scene.

And a lot of my own self-expression, a lot of the chance of me learning to sort of perform and write and direct, and all that stuff happened at college, although in the extracurricular space. But one of the things that was really important is the idea of, and one of the reasons I really loved college was that I was able to find people like myself, that I was able to find my own crowd. And one of the things, for example, I've really enjoyed about working at Wizards of the Coast is it's that same kind of thing um that I get to go work day to day with people that are very much like me that you know that are gamers and have a lot of a similar sensibilities to me and a lot of the fun of work is that we can share things over and above just the game itself which we do share but

um we can share a lot of other shared interests inside um now how does this apply to game design how does it apply to magic design um How does this apply to magic design? Well, one of the things that I think is interesting is part of making a good magic set is letting mechanics find their own crowd. And what I mean by that is that you could just take mechanic A and mechanic B and stick them in a set together,

but really to make a set sing, what you want to do is find mechanic A and then find the mechanics that really connects to mechanic A, that really works with mechanic A. Maybe that's mechanic L or M or N. But the idea is, you know, one of the things is as I design, I'm constantly finding new mechanics. And then I have to hold and wait until I find the right mix at the right time. A perfect example of that

would be energy. Originally, I tried to do energy during original Mirrodin. And it didn't quite work. There were a bunch of reasons why this wasn't the right spot for it. But I held it. I waited for it. I said, okay, let me, you know, someday there'll be a point where it's the perfect fit. And Kaladesh came

along and I'm like, oh, wow, this really is an organic, you know, it fits the flavor of what we were trying to do. We wanted to invent a world and the idea of this world in which, you know, this resource is important that the society is built around. It was a really cool idea. And so I had to wait. You know, energy didn't fit right away. But when I found the right place, when I found energy's crowd, if you will, I was able to sort of make that work. And a lot of that I remember is my daughter, obviously, Rachel's going off to school,

so one of the things I said to her is, this is really an opportunity for you to, more so than normal, because in high school life, you're much more limited by the people that you're... It's more like I'm spending time with people that happen to be around me. But college and the way it's structured and the way classes work and just how it's much more open stuff, you really can gravitate toward the people

that you have a closer bond with. Okay, number two. Excel at something. So one of the things that's interesting about college for me was that you really could learn. There's lots and lots and lots to learn. Like one of the things that you realize is you meet a lot of people at college. And each person, there's a thing they want. There's a thing they're interested in.

And something that I might be bored to tears about somebody else is fascinated by. And that one of the things you realize in college is that it's your chance to excel, but not at everything. You know, no one person's good at everything. What you really want to do in college is find the right thing and excel at that. And when I say excel at something is the whole point of college is to give yourself a set of skills so you're marketable, that you can go get a job. But the key to doing that is sort of spending the time learning your own set of skills, figuring out what your passion is. I did a whole podcast on finding your dream job, and this is not too far from that. But the idea is figure out what excites you and get good at it

so that someone will pay you to do it. And college, like for me, the interesting thing for me is I walked into college having some idea what I wanted to do. So I went to Boston University, and I went to the College of Communications, which is the communication school at Boston University. Now, at the time that I went there, this is back in, I started in 85, there weren't a lot of communication schools.

I think there were four schools in the country at the time that dedicated to communication. Not like every college has a communication school. That's just running the norm to have one of those. But back in the day, having a dedicated school was still a little bit of a novelty. It wasn't something you saw a lot of. And I have always loved communications. And so I was very excited to sort of go and study media. And, you know, it was really something that I had a passion for. And it allowed me to focus, you know. And even then, even within my communications, even then I had a focus. And that's where I really found my love of screenwriting.

I mean, obviously some of this I would deviate a little bit from, but it really was a place where I found my passion and figured out what I wanted to do. Set design is not too much different from that. Kind of what you want to do when you're building a set is the set needs to excel at something. It needs to be really good about something. What is the heart of the set? I call it the mechanical heart. So part of it when you're designing a magic set is saying, okay, the set doesn't need to be good at everything, but it wants to be really good at something. What is this set? What's it focused on? Is it a top-down set? Is it a bottom-up set? Is there a mechanical element I'm trying to get? Or is

there more flavor things? And then I got to figure out mechanically based on what my starting point is, where's my focus? And the best sets are the ones that have a strong, you know, they figure out what they're about and they excel at that thing. And that not every set has to do everything well. Not every set has to be about everything. But it's got to be about something. And that, you know, you have to figure out what it is that your set excels at.

And then focus and make sure you excel at that thing. Okay. Number three. It's okay to try things out. So one of the things about college

that's really cool is there's an infinite number of classes. There's a lot. It's a finite, but a large number of classes. And you really get to sample, you know, and that one of the cool things about college is you don't need to know walking in exactly what it is you want to specialize in. Part of college is trying things out. And there's a lot of courses that I took,

some of which were my choice, some of which weren't even my choice. But, like, I've talked before about how I had taken an aesthetics class that I would never, never have taken on my own. But I was really happy that I did, and I learned a lot from it. And it's one of the courses that probably sticks most with me in my current job. And in that particular class, I was told I had to take it by my school. So when I say try things out, sometimes you'll choose to try them out. Sometimes other people will sort of ask you to try them out. But the idea that you can sample and try things and really dig into things that maybe you didn't know much about. And sometimes you find passion in something. You're like, oh, I took this for

whatever reason, but I really found it spoke to me in a way that makes me understand something, you know, pushes me in a certain direction. And a lot about magic design has a similar quality to it, which is you don't know when you're starting your design exactly where you're ending up. In fact, exploratory design is very much about try here, try here, try here, and going very wide but very shallow to sort of get a sampling of what are the spaces that you can play around in. What are the things that there's a chance that you can do something cool with? And, you know, college being a sampler is a very important part of what the college experience is.

That you have the opportunity to try things that you might never have tried before. And in trying things, you'll learn things. And it is that that starts cementing, like one of the things about college is they don't make you to pick your major normally until junior year. So you have the first two years to try things and experiment and sort of see, like one of the things in communication school they do is my school had three different departments. They might have more now.

But at the time they had broadcast and film, which was all about TV and movies and stuff. Internet wasn't a thing yet. They had public relations and mass communications, which is all about sort of selling things and general PR type stuff. And then there was journalism. And so one of the things you did

if you were in the school is you took classes in all of those things to get a sense of, oh, where do my interests lie? You know, where exactly am I, what direction am I going? And it let you sort of, like, they wanted you to get a sense

of where you wanted to go, so you did a sampling of everything to understand it. Likewise, there was a sampling that we were asked to do in the liberal arts school, so you were taking a lot of different subject matters, and you had a lot of flexibility. Like, one of the courses that I really enjoyed is one of my math courses,

and I'm not the biggest of math people, but is I took a logic course, and I really, the biggest of math people, but is I took a logic course. And I really, really enjoyed the logic course. And what I realized is there's aspects of math. I'm a big puzzle person. There's a lot of math and puzzles over line in a lot of ways. And it really let me sort of use some of the skills that I had built up over years playing logic, you know, logic puzzles.

And it really was an interesting class for me. And it really, the fact, for example, that I could take a math class, I enjoyed as much as that really made me go, oh, math is more than necessarily maybe the narrow scope I'm thinking of from where it had been in high school. So anyway, when you're doing a new set, you want to try things out. You want to experiment. You don't always know where you're going. And the act of trying things sometimes helps delineate what it is you're going and what it is you're doing. Number four, failure is a great teacher. One of the things that I realized in school was that you really are kind of taught not to be afraid of failing. you really are kind of taught not to, or to be afraid of failing.

And a lot of the lessons I got in school were pushing to try things and having the things not working and then having to adapt to that. You know, one of the things that's really interesting is I had a couple of times different projects I had to do. So I took a lot of film classes, for example. a couple times different projects I had to do. So I took a lot of film classes, for example. And the way the film class works is we literally were shooting on film. I think it was 8mm.

And we would shoot stuff and then we would cut it. And one of the things you learn is a lot of times you would shoot something and you would cut it together and it didn't work. And you're like, oh. And you would sometimes go back and have to reshoot things. Or if you were smart, sometimes you'd shoot extra coverage of things so you had some options in how you wanted to cut.

And it was very, very fascinating. It was definitely something that, you know, having the opportunity, like one of the things that I felt I learned a lot was I did a lot of project work, a lot of, okay, you're in filmmaking, let's make a film or you're in video making, let's make a video. And we would do stuff and I would have to learn from that. And a lot of times I would try things and fail miserably. And then I would, I would have to learn from that.

And from trying and learning from it, I got better. And a lot of the things I learned, like I've talked about this before. I mean, success teaches repetition to a certain extent. Failure really teaches you to learn. Failure, I mean, not that success can't teach you. You learn stuff from success. But, wow, does failure motivate you to learn what went wrong and how to improve.

And one of the things that I really embraced about college is learning that failure is okay. And the same is true in magic design in that, look, you need to try things. You're just tying into the last lesson. You need to push and try things. Some things will not work. And some of my best magic designs came out of, like Scars of Mirrodin is a good example where I'd hit a brick wall and I really didn't know what to do. And it was kind of from coming from

the real low point for me to figure out how to do something. And I ended up coming up with a really interesting answer that was not at all, you know, not where I started from. But in failing, I sort of learned that I had made some assumptions that I thought were wrong. And that, you know, failure really said, okay, what does matter? And addressing that, you know, for those who don't know, Scars of Mirrodin originally was going to be New Phyrexia. The set starts and we're just on New Phyrexia. And then at the end of the block we learn, oh my god, it used to be Mirrodin. And then we realize, oh, we were missing this. That's where I realized we were missing something cool. I wanted to see Mirrodin. I wanted to see Mirrodin fall to the Phyrexians.

That was the story. And we were sort of glossing it over. It's sort of like, like oh you don't quite know what happened and at the very end oh guess what happened like well that's the cool story the fall of Mirrodin so that made me rethink

how we were doing it how the whole structure riffing with Bill we got the idea of we don't know the end the Phyrexians are attacking there's a war what's going to happen

is Phyrexian going to win is the Mirrodin going to win and it really led to something cool but it came out of a sense of of failure and allowing myself to fail and finding through the failure the solution. Okay, number five, you can learn from anything. One of my big, big takeaways from college is a lot of the things that I learned in college didn't happen in the classes. I learned plenty in the classes. Classes were quite valuable.

But I also learned a lot of things. You know, one of the things about college is it's the first time you get to be on your own, really. You know, when you're living at home, your parents are there. And as much independence as you get, you still have people that are there all the time. And helping you when you need the help. And I was like watching my daughter go right now. I was like, you know, she's going to have to learn, okay, this needs to get done. Well, no one else is doing it.

I need to make it happen. You know, my laundry is not going to clean itself. I got to clean my laundry. And, you know, really sort of taking responsibility. And some of that comes from, okay, sort of you're thrown in the pool where you got to swim. And I think college really, there's so much you got to learn at college. It's a really interesting experience.

But one of the things you have to understand is this idea, well, the only place to learn in college is the classes. Well, the classes will teach you, but you learn a lot from college way beyond the classes. And magic design is very similar in that when you're trying to design something, always be aware you can learn from anywhere. Your lessons can come from anywhere. The epiphanies can come from anywhere. You know, that, for example, one of the big stories I always tell is

how we ended up making Big Furry Monster which was the cardin unglued that had a left side and a right side and you had to play both of them together it was a giant 99 99 creature and that ability that idea came about because

I was listening we had a meeting. We had had a bunch of brainstorming meetings about weird things we can do. And I decided to go talk to the people that did the frames and ask them, the printing people, the graphic design people. And they had all these wacky ideas that I never would have thought of. Because their job, they're like, well, if we could do crazy stuff with what we do, here's what we would do. And there's things that they could do that I never thought of.

And the idea of bleeding off the side of the card, I just hadn't thought of that. And then all of a sudden, like, oh, now I can make a card that's two cards wide, right? It just let me do crazy things that I never thought of. And I got there because I was willing to ask. I was willing to say, okay, where else can I find ideas from? And a lot of being good at anything is recognizing that there's lots of ideas out there and that you have to hunt out and find where the good ideas can come from. And don't limit yourself. Good ideas can literally come from anywhere. Okay, number six. The information you need is there if you look.

So one of the things that's also very interesting is the number of times in college where I was instructed by the teacher to do something which at first glance seemed impossible. And then once I dug in and really sort of was forced to look at stuff, I started to realize how much information is available that I just never was aware of.

That there's so much, that's one of my big takeaways from college is that I was really taught to kind of look. I wanted to solve something and really said, oh, well, what resources do I have available to me? Wow, a lot more resources than I think. Wow, the answers to a lot of my problems are in places that are right in front of me.

And once again, these lessons all tie together, but in magic design, a lot of times finding solutions is just a matter of looking in places you hadn't thought to look. That a lot of neat solutions come from you saying,

okay, what if I looked in a different place? There's been numerous times where I've gone to the rules manager or the editors and I go with a problem and I don't know how to solve it. And they're like, oh, well, guess what? We have a suggestion of how to solve this. This is something we've faced before, something we think about. And a lot of times, one of the things that I've learned over the years is all the different resources are available to me and taking advantage of that. My editor is a great resource.

My rules manager is a great resource. The person who does the frames, the person who names my cards, all the different people really have expertise. And when I need it, it's just of knowing where to go for what, and I can get that expertise. And that's one of the things that has made making sense easier is understanding where to go and look. Which leads to number seven, the ultimate resource is people. So one of the things that I really got from my college experience was how often I had to and needed to rely on other people and how valuable that was of how part of, like, for example, let me just talk about stage troupe of my theater crowd. in that is the place I started my improv troupe and a lot of what my improv troupe taught me was kind of

how to rely on other people because improv is all about and I did a whole podcast on improv you get up on stage with some people and then you're given ideas you've never heard before and you just got to go with it and a lot of it is just learning to lean on one other and learning when somebody else is like I got it I got this and you go okay

you know give some material to the scene. And even in projects, a lot of the things they do at school is projects in which you're working with other people. And the reason they do that is part of really excelling is learning how to work with other people.

And magic design is no different. You know, with very few exceptions, magic is designed by teams. And every time I have a team, it's a group of people. And part of, you know, making a set what it wants to be is understanding the strengths of my team and playing to my team's strengths. You know, allowing my team to, I want my team to be the best that it can be. And in doing that, it's about figuring out each individual person, what are their strengths, what do they add to the sim,

and how do I make use of them so that, you know, how does each person on my team, what can they add to the process? And the best teams are the teams in which everybody is contributing and, you know, each person is playing to their strengths in a way that's synergistic between the whole team. And that is, like I'm saying, a lot of the success I've had in design is just learning how to motivate teams and how to discover where the team's strength lies. Okay, lesson number eight. To see the future future understand the past so a big part of college

for me like one of the things i found really interesting is how do you be a good uh filmmaker tv maker study film television you know for example i wanted to be a screenwriter so i took a lot of screenwriting classes well we spent a lot of time studying existing screenplays. Why? Because from looking at existing things, you can understand what worked and what didn't work. You know, where was the special sauce?

What made something click? Like one of the things that my, I watched a film class and my film professor would have us watch the first 10 minutes of the film and then shut it off. Hopefully you'd seen the film already. And then he would say to us,

okay, what did they do? How did they set it up? What's the premise? You know, he'd talk about how important the beginning of a movie was. And this was for screenwriting. And often about how much, like to him, the microcosm of the film

was what you could see in the first ten minutes of the film. Like, usually the whole essence of what the film is from the first ten minutes. Because each part of a film is the whole, is a small part of the whole. And as you chop off a little piece, you can sort of tell what the whole is. And anyway, it's very interesting.

Helped me learn a lot about movies and about screenplays. And the same, I find, is true of magic design. I think in order to be a good designer, you have to be a student of magic's past. You have to know what we've done before. You have to know what we've tried, what's worked, what hasn't worked. Because a lot of what happens is

people will suggest ideas and I have to say, okay, well let's talk about when we did that last. Let's talk about where we played in that space before. And there's a lot of lessons you can get. Now, that doesn't mean you can't go in a different direction in the future than you did in the past. You're not locked by the past. But the past is a teaching tool to help you understand what it is you can and can't do. Okay, number nine, you never know where your success will come from

um one of the things that's very telling is time and time again i've had sets where people will people you know you you think that one thing is going to be where the set thrives and it's another set where it ends up being um like the story i tell with Onslaught was most of R&D was convinced that what made Onslaught the most amazing set ever was Morph and that Tribal was just kind of extra seasoning but when we went to the pre-release what we found was that it was the Tribal stuff

that really drew people's attention not that they disliked Morph. Morph was fun. But in their minds, it was more a tribal set with Morph than a Morph set with tribal. And now, one of the things I've learned is part of the reason you do playtesting, part of the reason you get feedback is

sometimes the thing you think will be the thing ends up not being as exciting as you think. And the thing that you think is just ho-hum run of the mill really excites people. So part of being a good designer is learning when to find those things. Learning when to recognize that, oh, that's not what I thought would happen,

but that is what did happen. And my college experience was just filled with that, where constantly a lot of the nuggets, the things I took away from college, weren't always in places I expected them to be. And even when I learned stuff in class, it wasn't always the thing I thought. Like, it was very interesting how often I would have a big epiphany, but it wasn't when the teacher was teaching me. It was when I was trying to do something they had asked for me to do. And in the act of trying to do it, I figured out for myself something which obviously was the whole point of them asking me to do it in the first place

but that was one of the really interesting things about college is look, the college professors, they know what they're doing and there's a lot of neat introspection comes and a lot of learning comes from being open and willing to find things where they come rather than where you think they will be Okay, number 10 Being open and willing to find things where they come rather than where you think they will be. Okay, number 10. Enjoying what you do is the key to happiness.

This is an important one. Like, one of the things that I really learned about college was that I both could learn something and be good at something and excel at something, yet still enjoy it. And that one of the things that I'm a big believer in is you want to find your passion. You want to spend your life doing something that you enjoy doing. And college really is about setting yourself up, is getting yourself the tools so that you can do that. You can find something you're very passionate about. And college for me, one of the reasons I left college wasn't just that I enjoyed what I studied. I very much did, obviously.

To this day, communications very much is a huge part of who I am and how I function. I brought a lot of communications to my job at Wizards because it's something I'm passionate about. But also the things that I did in school that weren't even the classes themselves. Obviously you've heard me talk a lot about my theater and my improv and things that really shaped me and helped make me the person I am. And they came about because they were, I was doing the things that made me happy. Um, and then one of the things that I, this is my advice to my daughter is, um, get out and do things. I think college is an amazing opportunity

if you take advantage of it. I think it's very easy to just sort of not do things. But the thing I loved about college and the thing that really I thought was kind of the biggest teacher for me was I really jumped in and took full advantage of everything I had access to.

All my classes, all the school opportunities, extracurricular opportunities. And one of the things I've sort of said to my daughter is, my daughter is now going off to school herself, which is, look, this is a wonderful opportunity, but you need to take advantage of that opportunity. And magic design, I think, is also quite true, which is, I want to be happy with every design I do. Um, I want to make sure that when the dust settles and I'm, I'm handing off my design to somebody else to do their part with it, that I'm happy with what I've done. That I, like, I, I feel very strongly that, um,

you know, you need to, you need to be happy with your work. You want to excel with your work. You want your work to speak for who you are and be something that you're proud of. And so every set, I want to be proud of every set I do. And I want to find a way of, okay, what about this set is me doing something different than what I've done in other sets? And, you know, it's funny because one of the questions I get asked all the time

is, what is your favorite set? And my canned answer to that is, oh, which of my children do I like the best? Because it's hard. It's like every set, I poured my heart and soul into it. And there's something about it that really is a part of me. And so any set I've done, even sets that weren't popular, even sets I've done, I've had a few clunkers in my day. Even those that there was something about them that really spoke to me and it was me pushing in a new direction. And maybe I learned something. Maybe that was a mistake that I learned from. But it meant something to me and there was a piece of me in it. And so a big part of that is, you know, look, whatever you do, it'll mean more if you're

invested in the things you're doing, if you're happy with the things you're doing and you care about the things you're doing. And that's something that, I don't know, college really cemented in my mind. I mean, a lot of today's lessons, the funny thing is, it's not that any lesson I'm teaching you today had to be learned at college. They're just things that I learned at college. And that it is, like, one of the things as I'm, you know, taking my daughter off to college is I have very, very fond memories of college. I mean, I'm not saying there weren't traumatic times. And, you know, college is a mixed bag. And, you know, there's definitely ups and downs of anything.

and there's definitely ups and downs of anything. But one of the things that I really I wanted to view in my daughter is how much that it meant to me and how much that it was something I see college as this really great opportunity and I want to view that in my daughter and in some ways I think that one of the things

that, if I look at my magic career as a magic designer, set designer, I really think that one of the things that have, I don't know, marked my time is that I really embrace what the sets are, and I really try to make each set its own, and I, you know, I really embrace what the sets are and I really try to make each set its own and I've embraced and enjoyed what I do. I think it is possible to do magic design and not sort of enjoy it as much. One of the things that people talk to me all the time is I'm very enthusiastic. I'm an enthusiastic person.

Now, A, part of that's me. That's my energy level. But part of it also is that look you know why i'm happy because of decisions i made i i i every day i get to go to work and i get to work on a game that i love that i consider to be the best game in the world and i get to do that every single day and i get to interact with the public that constantly gives me feedback most of which is positive not all of it's positive but i get to do something that I know really means something to people

and inhabits people and excites people. And that drives me. And like I said, I mean, I'm coming up on my 23rd anniversary of doing this job. It's a long time. Doing the same thing for 23 years. Working on the same game for 23 years. And my enthusiasm, if anything,

is even higher than it. Like, I keep getting more excited because I really enjoy what we're doing and where we're going. And like, one of the things that's neat is we're not resting on our loyals.

Magic just had its 25th anniversary and there are, there are changes that are coming. There are cool things that we are doing. We are not, like one of the things that I thought was always interesting

about Magic is that Magic does not sit still. That magic is constantly altering and changing. That magic is always in flux. And that one of the things I enjoy about R&D is we're never resting on a laurel saying, well, magic's good enough. Magic is, you know, it doesn't need to be any better. We're always working to figure out how to make it even better. And that is a big part of why I love this job is we're never sort of saying it's good enough.

We're always saying, what more can we do? And the cool thing is I live in the future. There is exciting things coming in the future. There are things we're doing that you have no idea, that you could not imagine what we're doing. And I'm not just talking deck themes and cool sets. We're doing that, obviously. But even other things. Things, you know, we're constantly thinking about how to reinvent

the game, and in order to do that, we have to check everywhere. And we have to take all these lessons that I learned from college and apply them. And we are. So anyway, there's a lot of cool things coming your way. And if you're not, if you aren't yet excited about the future of magic

you should be very excited because there is really cool stuff coming but with that said I have to park my car so I hope you guys enjoyed today a little different kind of a podcast I like doing these life ones where I share a little bit of my life and then talk about sort of how it affects magic

but anyway y'all know when I park, what that means? It means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.