Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #630: Five Requests I Ignore

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Based on my previous article, I explain why we just can't do some of the things fans request for Magic.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is based on a column I wrote a while back called Five Requests I Often Have to Ignore. And the point of the column in today's podcast is talking about how there are certain requests I get from players a lot that I don't think necessarily leads to good designs. So I'm going to walk through what these requests are and why I think they can be problematic. Now to start, the first thing I have to explain is what is design about?

Why do you design a game? And so let me first talk about what I consider the goal to be. So I think that the goal to game design is to create an optimal experience for your target audience. That you are trying to create something that is a joyful experience for the people that you mean for it to be. And when I say optimal, the experience, most people, it's entertainment. Most people, it's fun. There are people that make games to promote other emotions and things.

I'm not against that. If you want to make a game to make people really think or make people sad or whatever you'd like, that's fine. But the point of game design is you're trying to create an optimal experience for your target audience. I'll come back to that. That's why I wanted to stress that up front. Okay, so the first request that I get that I often have to ignore. Prove that you can do it right. So this one usually comes when we're talking about something that a subset of players enjoyed, but the majority didn't enjoy. Where something didn't go well.

We want to go back to a world that failed the first time you did it. Or we want you to reuse a mechanic that players didn't like. And usually it's sort of like, oh, well, R&D has gotten better. So, you know, you show that you have the technology and the skill set to take this thing that failed, but make it good this time. And the problem there is that design is hard. Designing a game is very hard. That even when you start from an optimal experience, design is something that is very tricky to do.

So starting from a non, you know, starting where you're starting at a deficit, where it's like my ideas, the low-hanging fruit of how to do this has already proven not to work, is definitely dangerous. And the thing to remember is is when you make a game, um, you know, there's no, like, let's say you took, you make it, game A you make, and game A

is a normal game that you make, and game B, you started from an impossible place. You gave yourself this giant hill of a challenge, and both game A and Game B are successful. Does Game B make you any happier? I would argue no. I mean, making games is hard. Making any game, you're going to put your all on any game you make. So making Game A and having it succeed will feel really good as a game designer. And Game B will feel equally good. It won't feel any better. Being successful, whatever you do, takes a lot of work.

And my point is between game A and B is I don't think B makes you feel any better than A, but B is a lot harder. There's a lot more risk than A. That is a lot harder to start from a place of a deficit. And from a business standpoint, it's just not great business. There's a reason they don't make sequels out of movie flops.

They don't tend to remake things that were not successful. And the reason for that is it's hard to sell things. That even if you make an amazing game, even if you make the best game you've ever made, if you can't sell it, it doesn't matter. And starting with a negative... If people see it and the first thing they have is a negative connection, it just makes it really hard to get people to go see that. It makes it tricky and tough. Now, that's not to say that you can't redeem something.

So my example here is the Chroma Mechanic. So the Chroma Mechanic, I think we first teased it in Future Sight, and then it showed up in Eventide. So Chroma basically said, we'll tell you when and where, but you're going to count mana symbols on cards, wherever we tell you, and then have scalable effects based on that. And it didn't go well.

We put it in, it didn't go. There's a lot of reasons it didn't go well. In my heart of hearts, I was sad. I had high hopes for the mechanic. So anyway, many years later, we're making Theros, and we're trying to solve a problem. We're like, okay, I felt it was important that we represented that the people had an affinity for the gods. That one of the things about capturing Greek mythology is the relationship between the people and their gods is a big part of Greek mythology. And I really wanted a sense of that the gods

sort of draw on their power from the belief of their people. We also were doing an enchantment set. It had enchantments in it. And so it just meant that we just had more things sitting on the board than normal. And so when we were trying to figure out how to solve this problem, one of my team members, a guy named Zach Hill, suggested Chroma. And at the time, I was like, oh, this perfectly fits. Yes, that's exactly the kind of mechanic we need to fit here.

And because Chroma had been unsuccessful, Yes, that's exactly the kind of mechanic we need to fit here. And because Chroma had been unsuccessful, Chroma's biggest problem really was its name, that its flavor didn't really fit. And we wanted to be a little bit more focused. We didn't care, like, we wanted to be things in play and not like, we'll tell you where to look, just have it be things in play.

So we were able to sort of take Chroma and tweak it, give it a new name, Devotion, obviously, and then make it, instead of making it broader but vaguer, make it more flavorful and connected. Like, oh, well we're going to look at mana symbols on permanents that you control on the battlefield.

And that is the influence you have. And by making the tweak and renaming it and giving it a different context, Devotion went on to be a huge success. So, I mean, you can reinvent things. But it shouldn't be... I don't think if we started a design with, okay, let's find a way to make Chroma work,

that we were going to end up with necessarily a great design. That having it there and then figuring out when we get to a place where it makes sense, oh, we're making Theros, and Theros has this god, you know, mythology theme, and it has enchantments and all the factors, and going, oh, I recognize now that we're looking to solve this problem that this old thing, Tweaked, could solve the problem, Fit. But I don't think we would have nearly as good success refitting Chroma if we started with, okay, this set has to have

Chroma in it. And one of the most interesting things about it is trying to fit it into where it needed to fit made us make changes to it that I think were important changes. I think the name change was important to Chroma. Where if we were to reinvent Chroma,

I don't know necessarily we would have thought to change the name. The idea of limiting where you looked really made sense in Theros, and I actually think made it a more cohesive, better mechanic. But once again, without that restriction pushing us that direction, I don't know if we get that. You know what I'm saying? That in a lot of ways, the sweet spot of making it work came from finding a place that really forced us

to think about how to bring it alive in a way that if it was sitting in a vacuum, I'm not sure we would have gotten there. You know, a lot of Chroma's problems were we weren't, we didn't restrict it enough. And I don't know if us in a vacuum, do whatever you want to do with Chroma, gets us there. Where us fitting it into a need made us think about it in a different way that solved the problem. Okay, request number two. That sounds novel. Okay, so request number two is players hear something.

Either they see it in another game, or Magic's doing it in some non-standard way. People want to see it in standard. You know, it's sort of like, oh, this is a cool thing. So my example here is Maria from Good Luck High Five. It's a podcast. She made a tweet one day that said, you know, it might be cool setting a set in the blind eternities.

Now, for those that don't know, So, you know what might be cool? Setting a set in the blind eternities. Now, for those that don't know, the blind eternities is the material in between planes. It's not a place. My metaphor at the time was, it's sort of like making a set that's set only in doorways. It's not really cohesive. But a lot of players said, oh, but that, ooh, a set set in doorways, that sounds fascinating. Or, you know, ooh, you guys should figure out how to make that work.

How would that, you know, and they were really excited by this idea of this is weird and different, make this weird and different thing work. Um, so the problem is there's a lot of, when we make a world, there's a lot of needs that we have that we have. That we can't just go to any world. That worlds have to have certain needs to be a magic world. So one of the obvious ones, for example, is we have to have a plains, an island, a swamp, a mountain, and a forest. Now we're willing to get metaphorical. You know, the plains of Ravnica was buildings.

We're willing to be flexible in how we think about it. But you need to have something that embodies the essence of the five colors. Well, the Blind Eternities, by its very nature, not only isn't a place, for starters, but it's also colorless by nature. You know, the Eldrazi, which is the only thing that sort of emanated from there, aren't even colored because there's no color there. So there's a lack of color. So there's a lack of color and there's a lack of place to show

things. And there's not really creatures in the Blind Eternity. Even if they are, you know, one of the things we look for when we make a world is some resonance. You want something that people know what they are so they can, ooh, I appreciate this. You know, sometimes the world itself, like Theros or Innistrad or

Amaget, is built around a real world top-down influence. But sometimes with something like Kaladesh, we add in things, you know, like gremlins or things in which they're based on something that you have some sense of what the thing is. And even if we do our own spin on it, there's some resonance to build it off of. Oh, I know what that thing is. I'm curious to see magic do it. I'm curious to see, or sometimes we take existing magic things and do a new tweak on them. You know, the goblins in Ixalan looked very different from normal goblins,

but they had a lot of the feel of goblins. And, you know, the Blind Eternities doesn't really have creatures, and even if it does, I'm not sure how you get resonance out of it. The other big thing that we need is you have to cast magic spells, and they have to be colored magic spells. You know, the, the, well, the, you know, an idea can sound fascinating in the, in the, wow, that sounds so weird and different. That doesn't mean that's a good jumping off point. I'm not saying that we won't find one day some way to make the blind attorneys mean something, maybe. Maybe it's a mechanical nod.

I mean, I'm not saying that we can't someday fit it into a set in some way. It being the place is an odd set because it's not really a place. And, like, I really think starting there would cause all sorts of problems because it's not... One of the things about when you start a design is you need to understand what your design needs

and make sure that your starting point has potential to get there. There's this... It sounds kind of sexy to this idea of, wow, this is so, so different. How would you do that? But the problem is we have to do that. Um, that there's this romanticism of doing the impossible, but when you're actually doing the job, you don't want the impossible.

You want the possible, you know, you want to open yourself up to cool things happening, but you, you need to make sure that you're giving yourself, you know, you're giving yourself the tools for success. And, you know, one of the things that, so my parallel, my example in the article is, let's say I go to a carpenter and say, hey, could you build a building without any tools? And the carpenter should say to me, I don't know. I mean, probably not. But even if I could,

I'm not going to build you the best house if I don't have access to my tools. You know, that it's not like if you're trying to build the best house, hey, here's a challenge that fights the very nature of how you want to do it, it's not going to lead necessarily to something, to the best execution of it. You know, that novel for novelty's sake, it doesn't lead to good things. Now, that doesn't mean you can't get to something novel. It can't mean we can't find a way to fold in the blind eternities. But that's going to come from us sort of being open to the possibility and then if we see some opportunity, seizing on it and using it.

But as a jumping off point, you're just asking for trouble. Number three. Number three is you haven't done it yet. Um, so this is another one where maybe they see it somewhere else, or maybe they come up with something they think would be neat. Um, and it's like,

magic's never done this. Do this. Um, and the problem there is that, um, if you're not careful, like, something that we've never done, there might be a reason why it's never done. There's nothing inherent. There's nothing that says that anything could work.

You know, it's not like, oh, well, magic, it could just do anything. It can do a lot of things, and magic's probably a more flexible game than most, but not everything's possible. You know, and that one of the dangers of starting from something you've never done is, you know, if it doesn't work out, you're kind of in trouble. You know, that if I try to make a set based on something we've never done before, and then that thing turns out not to be viable, then I'm in trouble. I only got four months to put my set together, you know.

If I go down a path of something where the entire path proves unviable, I've wasted a lot of time trying to make something work that maybe inherently could never work. So, for example, let me give you an example here. Let's talk about double-faced cards. Duel Masters, which is a game we make at Wizards, uh, it's made exclusively for the Japanese

markets trading card game, made use of double-faced cards. Um, so we were aware they existed. Um, and the way they ended up in Magic was we were making Innistrad, and I gave my team a challenge. I said to them, Magic has, I mean, we had done, I guess, three werewolves before Innistrad, but none of them were particularly memorable. I said, you know, one of the things that's going to really be the make or break for the set is werewolves. Vampires, zombies, spirits, humans, we've done all those before. Yeah, there's cool ways we could do them here, but all of those magic had done in large volume. But we'd never really done werewolves. I mean, we'd done a smattering, but nothing defined. And I said, if we could really

nail werewolves, if we really could find a way to bring werewolves to life, that, I think, will be a good sign for this set. So one of the earliest tasks I gave to my team was, let's make werewolves work. And we had a lot of really out there cool ideas of how to do it. Some of them weren't even that out there. Some of them were pretty straightforward. But some of them were more out there.

So one of my team, a guy named Tom Lapilli, had worked on a Duel Masters team that had the Double Face cards and said, hey, maybe we could use the Double Face cards from Duel Masters. Now, the fact that Duel Masters had done them had meant we logistically can make them. That's a problem sometimes. Do this cool thing. Well, can we? And when I say logistics, A, is it something we're even able to do? And B, you know, financially can we do it? It's one thing to say, oh, here's this cool thing. And you go, well, our printer can't do that. Or, hey, here's a cool thing. Well, printer can do it our printer can't do that. Or, hey, here's a cool thing. Well, our printer can do it, but in order to do it,

it would be at a cost that wouldn't allow us to make the cards at the cost we normally make the cards. And so it's not viable from a business standpoint. But the fact that Duel Masters had made them, it said, okay, well, at least they're doable. They're technologically doable, and they're doable at a cost that probably is reasonable because we can make them for another trading card game. So we kind of knew, for example, that they were possible.

But there's a lot of logistical issues. And the way they work in Duel Masters, for those that don't know Duel Masters, is they don't go in the deck. They sit in this uber-dimensional zone, I think it's called. And there's cards in the deck that go get the cards out of the uber-dimensional zone. And originally, by the way, when we tried werewolves, the double-faced cards didn't even go in your deck. But it turned out that we couldn't one-for-one put them in packs.

The idea was there'd be a card that'd go get the double-faced werewolf and the double-faced werewolf. And they would be in the pack together was the idea originally. But at the time, technology did not allow that. They could only guarantee like a 90% connection rate. That wasn't good enough for us. So we ended up making him double-faced. Anyway, the point of the story is

we tried to make werewolves work, and that was the best way to make werewolves work. And then once we realized that, we liked the idea of dark transformation, and we used them to do other stuff as well. But had we started there, had that been where we started, I don't know, you know, when you start with something you don't know, you don't know that it's going to work. And, you know, getting double-faced cards done, there was a lot of internal pressure to get them done. There was a lot of people, there was a lot of internal tension. Like, I had to convince people to get them done.

And there was a fight to do it. And once they got out to the public, there was a lot of initial worry from the public. When we first announced them, there was a lot of concern. Now, once people saw them and they played with them, they really enjoyed them. But here's the thing. Double-faced cards have gone on to be a really good and valuable tool for magic. But let's say I had made them, but I didn't optimize them when I first made them. You know, that I didn't find the perfect spot for them. I didn't wait till I found the perfect spot. I just tried to make them work. And then I did the best I can to make them work.

I might have not been able to get them printed. I might have not been able to get them printed because I might not have been able to fight my way through the internal struggle because what eventually got me through was, wow, they work so well. They're such an integral part of the set that people said, okay, I guess we should make them. And even if I got them out to you, the public,

let's say I used something that was suboptimal to get there, you guys might not have liked them. You know, all the initial worry might have gone, oh, we're right. The initial worry is right. These aren't good. And then I take this thing that went on to be a really good tool for magic, and I might not be able to use it again. I might burn the equity in it.

So the idea there is that it's not that we can't do novel new things. It's not that we can't do things we haven't done before, but we need to find the right place to do them. Because if we don't, we could strand ourselves in the design. I can get something that I just can't internally make. I can get something that comes out but burns equity, and then we never make it again, but it could be something that had potential if I had done it correct.

So you've got to be careful that you haven't done it yet is not necessarily a great jumping off point for doing something. Okay, number four. Do that again, but different. So the example here is just do another Ravnica, but just make it different. Ravnica is a lot of fun. Can you just do it again and make different factions? And the thing there is

that part of what we want to do when we do a magic set is we want each set to have its own identity. And that doesn't mean that we can't use things as a jumping off point for other things, but usually it's not trying to make it exactly like that. Like when we've made faction

sets, for example, Ravnica was the first, well, there were faction sets before Ravnica. Ravnica was the first that kind of structured around their factions. Although, Fallen Empires, I would argue, is really the first faction set, and a lot of the way it's structured was built around factions. I think Ravnica was a little more popular,

and the way we identified the factions was a little different than we had done in something like Fallen Empires. And a lot of, you know, we said, okay, we want to make other faction sets. And when I say a faction, I mean, you know, factions have names and identities and a watermark and we make shirts with their symbol and, you know, it really, there's a real flavor to what the essence is. And the factions have a relationship to each other. And, you know, when we've done that, we've gone out of our way to make sure that it has its own identity.

That, you know, the next time we did factions was three-color factions. You know, we didn't just go to two-color, did factions was three-color factions. We didn't just go to two-color, we went to three-color, because we wanted it to be a little bit different, which is Alara. And even Alara, we didn't go quite as full as we did in Ravnica. We didn't watermark, make symbols and stuff. But then Khan's of Tarkir, we did wedges. Alara was shards or arcs, three colors in a row.

And then in Tarkir, we did wedges, which is a color in its two enemies, rather than a color in its two allies, which is what shards are. And I do believe, for example, there'll be another day where we do two-color factions. I mean, one could argue dragons in Tarkir with two-color factions.

But when we do, it'll be because we are trying to figure out how to give it its own identity, how to make it different. Like Ravnica itself was actually me doing Invasion, but different. Of saying, okay, I want to have another multicolored themed set, because Invasion was very popular, but I don't want it just to be Invasion. And that one of the things we look at when we try to do something new,

invasion. And that one of the things we look at when we try to do something new based on something old is finding a hook that really gives it its breath of fresh air. And I don't want to start something until I have that hook. I don't want to start something until I know how it's going to be its own thing and not just a carbon copy of something else. And while I get the request of I really like this thing, make more things like this thing that's a valuable, it's valuable information to have

and it is something where part of what I care about when someone says they like something is I want to understand what components really excite them so that we can mix and match components in different ways one of the things for example when I talk to people at Ravnica really excite them so that we can mix and match components in different ways. One of the things, for example, when I talk to people at Ravnica, is they really enjoyed the flavor of the guild. The guild had a really strong, unique identity.

So a lot of that, when we built Alara and we built Tarkir, we really worked hard to give each of those factions a unique mechanical identity so that if you just saw a card, you kind of knew where they went. Or you saw flavor, you knew where it went, that they had that identity. And a lot of making more sort of Ravnica is understanding what is what Ravnica people like, and that sometimes it's like, well, we're going to take this part you like but not that part, and part of what makes it different is we're taking this element from another thing, or from a new thing and putting it together.

Okay, number five. Break your rules. So this comes up a bunch of different ways. I'll give three examples. These are all common things I get. One is, hey, this color doesn't do that. Do that.

This color doesn't do thing X. Ooh, it should do thing X. Or this guild doesn't have that creature type. That creature type's in other guilds, but not this guild. Ooh, you should do one in that guild. You know, angels aren't a thing in Selesnya. Ooh, Selesnya should have one angel, one special angel in Selesnya. Or,

we make a mechanic that's at sorcery speed. Like, oh, you should make it instant speed. It should be instant, not on sorcery. Do it on instant. So, each one of these is a good example while we can get ourselves in trouble. So let's take the first one. The color X thing. One of the problems about breaking your rules

is you have a system, and you don't want to undermine your system. So the color pie exists for very important reasons. I've done, obviously, numerous podcasts on the color pie. It's one of the things I consider to be the golden strike factor of Richard's three genius ideas that came together to make magic.

The color pie is the glue, it's the foundation, it's what makes everything work. And the fact that colors have their own identity, the fact that the colors just can't all do the same things, that each has their strengths and each has their weaknesses, is fundamental to the health of the game. And that while there are places we can bend the color pie,

breaking the color pie is something we should never be doing. And that, you know, you don't want to undermine the inherent of what you're doing. That the novelty of doing something different isn't always worth it if it undermines the integrity of what you're doing. That, you know, magic would be less fun

if every color did everything, because there'd be no reason to ever play a second color. You know, the colors would lose their identity because, well, if everybody does everything, they start to lack their individualness. And so, you don't want to undermine the system.

That's important. Second, you don't want to confuse the message. So let's talk about the guilds and the creature types. We specifically chose to limit where the creature types went. There's a lot of different creature types in Ravnica on purpose but when we took certain things

and said okay, not everybody's going to have everything and the reason is we want the guilds to feel different well four of the guilds overlap in a color but we don't want to put that creature type in every color for example, take angels as I said before we put angels in Boros

and we put angels in Orzhov. So we say, you know what? Let's not put angels in Azorius and not put angels in Selesnya. So we see an angel and it has a little bit more of an identity to it. And one of the problems,

people say, well, just make one special like legendary exception. But here's the problem, that when you don't do something, you don't do it. And when you do zero cards, you don't do it. When you do one

card, you do do it. You know? And from a perceptual standpoint, the problem between zero and one is zero is you don't do it, and one is you do do it. And in a game where we don't control the order you see things, if the very first card you open up in Seleznia is the angel,

then your first take on, oh, I guess Seleznia's where the angels are, you know, and that the fact that this might be one mythic, legendary thing, you can't grasp that necessarily in the way the game works. So you might not know it's a rare exception. So, you know,

we have to be careful in what we do and the choices we make in that we're trying to necessarily pull a message across. And do a message in a trading card game where we don't control the order people see things. So, you know, one of the biggest tools we have is purposely leaving things out. Because you eventually will notice when something's missing. It takes more time to notice, but you eventually do notice that, especially for the more enfranchised players. And so

we, you know, you have to be careful of that, and breaking rules to mess up your messaging causes a lot of problems. Three, you can work some gameplay. One of the reasons that a certain mechanic might only be done on sorcery or sorcery speed

is because we spent months playing with it, and we figured out that it works better. Like level up is a classic example. Level up was in Eventide. It was a mechanic where you could spend mana to make your creature better. It had three different states, and so the power toughness could change,

the abilities could change, and we chose to make that at sorcery speed. And the reason was we we started with Instant Speed. And what happened was, it really complicated the board state. That if I have a bunch of mana open, and I have a couple level up guys, just trying to do the math to figure out what possibly could happen was really intimidating, and really made it hard to process. really intimidating and really made it hard to process.

And it also, you know, it just, it made direct damage harder. Like, it just, anything in which I can then respond, there's this extra layer that I have to do. And one of the things, one of the reasons we make sorcerers in the first place is we like you oftentimes having to make commitments with your mana on your turn. That, you know, it's... When I have mana up on my opponent's turn, it makes it harder to process because I might do

things. Now, some games do that and there's some decks that do that, but just making less things do that makes it easier to process what is going on. And that a lot of times people are like, oh, you know, we haven't done that, you should do that.

Well, there's a reason we didn't do it. The other big thing, and this goes back to the messaging, is sometimes all the mechanics work the same way is so that you know how it works. That if it sometimes works one way and sometimes another, every time you face a card, you're like, oh, okay, which one is this? Or if they all work the same, you just learn they all work the same, and then it just makes it easier to process. So, I mean,

there's a number of reasons. The reason we do something the way we do it is because we thought about it. And, you know, we is, well, a lot of times it's like, oh, it would be cool not to do something different. Eh, that doesn't necessarily of times it's like, oh, it'd be cool not to do something different. Eh, that doesn't necessarily lead to it being something better. Now, that doesn't mean we can't break our own rules. We break our own rules all the time. Magic is a game that breaks its own rules.

We bend the color pie. We try not to break it, but we do bend the color pie, but we bend it when it's thematically important to what the set is doing. Oh, you know, Red normally doesn't do a lot of stuff with the graveyard, but we're doing a graveyard set. Okay, we'll find some things that Red can do.

You know, we don't like to push creature types where they don't belong, but hey, maybe if there's a world where it makes sense, you know, green merfolk are kind of quirky, but Nixlan, it worked to the world. White zombies are kind of of quirky, but next one, it worked to the world. White zombies are kind of weird, but nominate, it worked to the world. That if we find a place in which shifting something can be used as a tool to enable messaging, to help flavor a world, you know, that's where we want to shift things and make things different, where it's enhancing what we're doing.

You know, it's setting a message, not confusing the message. Or there's times when we take things that we normally do at sorcery speed and find a place and time to do them instant speed, but it's when they're serving some purpose or it's enabling the gameplay. Normally we don't do that, but in this. Like, normally we often do a lot of our land fetching at sorcery speed, but in Zendikar where we had landfall, there's interesting things of having landfall happen at instant speed, so we put some things in. You know, we don't normally do

land fetching at instant, but we added some into that block because of landfall, and that, you know, there's times we break our rules because it lends toward better gameplay. We have to be careful where we bend them but we bend them when it's something

that makes gameplay, improves gameplay or allows you to have options that that particular environment really takes advantage of. Okay, so here's my final thought. So, my five things were prove that you can do it right that sounds novel

you haven't done it yet do that again but different and break your rules each one of them it is not that you can never do that it is not that we can't prove we can't take something that has failed

and prove that we can do it it is not that we can't take something that has failed and prove that we can do it. It is not that we can't do something that is novel or do something that has never been, that we haven't done yet, or do something that is like what we've done but different, or break a rule that we haven't broken before. But the way to do it is not to start that as the impetus. That what you don't want to do is start your design by saying, I'm going to take something problematic that I don't understand yet and start there. Rather, what you want to do is do what we call blue sky work. You know, work on something without a product in mind and test out these ideas. And then, when you find an opportunity within the design where it fits and matches what you're doing, where it

enhances what you're doing, that's when you make use of it. That it is not that we can't do these things. It's not that magic doesn't want to, you know, do different things and new things and novel things and reinvent things and rediscover things. We want to do all of that. But it is a bad impetus to start. That is my point. Not that we can't do it, but when you're trying to set up for your design and stem from a jumping off point, you want to give yourself the best opportunity you have to succeed.

And that starting from a place where you don't know the answers, or, sorry, often you don't know the answers, starting from a place where you're putting yourself at a deficit to try to solve something is a dangerous place to be. There's no reward for doing that, and it just makes your job harder. But having access to ideas, working on ideas in a free form way in blue sky design and then being open to them when the opportunity arises can allow you to have access to some of these things and do some of the stuff that players want so kind of what my answer today is it's not that we can't

give players the things they're asking for, but it is bad design to use that as the impetus to jump off of design. That you're asking for trouble. That's part of my thing today in that you are trying to make the optimal experience for the target audience. That is a hard job. That's a difficult thing to do. for the target audience. That is a hard job. That's a difficult thing to do. And I do think that one of the reasons I like blue sky design,

one of the reasons it's good to design things without having an end state is it lets you test ideas and explore what might be done with it. There's a reason we start every design with exploratory, which in some ways has some blue sky elements to it, although it's a little bit different from blue sky

because you have a goal you're working toward. In that, I want to sort of test things out and figure out where things can be. But then, when you get into the design, the design needs to have an impetus. You want to start with something that is fruitful.

You want to start with something where you fruitful. You want to start with something where you have faith that it can be done. And then, and then, starting from that vantage point, you can bring in the unknown. You can bring in things when they are working towards what you're trying to do. But one of the things, the reason I do all these podcasts and really sort of trying to help all the designers out there that are just getting started this idea that any challenge is a good challenge that anything will lead you where you want to go

you have to be careful there are paths you can start down that instead of leading you to exciting places can frustrate you and cause lots of problems. And there's this kind of romantic myth that like, the harder of a challenge, the sweeter the victory. And that's really not the case. That what I want to do is, you know, the end result of a design is not proving something.

It's not showing off something. It is not the thrill of the experience. In some ways, I'm not a Spike or a Johnny, Jenny, or Timmy, Tammy. Being a designer is a job. I'm trying to accomplish something. I'm trying to make the optimal experience for my target audience. And what that means is there's a lot of hard work you have to put into it to make sure that you're doing what you need to do and you're setting yourself up to success. And that means a lot of these ideas that are romantic and cool and out there can be folded into the design. Yes, all these things we're talking about,

some magic designs will end up with them, but those are good when they fit what you're trying to do, not you're using them as the jumping off point. And that was my point today. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast, but I'm at work, so we all know what that 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.