Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #653: Other Lessons – Ideas & Execution

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

As a new series following up my "20 Lessons, 20 Podcasts" series, I'm starting "Other Lessons" to talk about other things I've learned during my time at Wizards. This podcast's lesson is "People overrate ideas and underrate execution."

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so back in 2016, I gave a talk at the GDC, the Game Developer Conference, in San Francisco. And I made a whole series of podcasts about all the 20 lessons I learned over my 20 years at Wizards. But it turns out that I learned more than 20 things. So I decided to start another podcast series that I'm going to do occasionally that I'm just calling Other Lessons. And the idea is I'm just going to take other things that I've learned about and just talk about them. So today is another such lesson. So today's lesson is people overvalue ideas and undervalue execution.

So let me explain what I mean by that. I think if you look at, I like to look at movies as a good example of how we communicate things. So let's take a look at movies for a second and talk about how we show somebody coming up with a great idea and executing on it. So normally what happens is you first see the person, they're presented with a problem. You see them encountering the problem. And then you see them somewhere, usually where they're dealing with something that's not the problem, but somehow there's a connection,

and they have the eureka moment. That's a very sexy thing, where all of a sudden they realize something. And depending on the kind of movie, sometimes it's just, you see the actor just goes, oh, I have an idea, and sometimes there's graphics or something to help explain what's going on in their head.

But anyway, they have this idea, and know, graphics or something to help explain what's going on in their head. But anyway, they had this idea and like, oh, okay. Then when we get to the execution part of the idea, it's a montage. It's a whole series of things that happen put to music. And, you know, sometimes there's repetition, whatever, but it's put to a montage. whatever, but it's put to a montage. And what that means is that the idea, the generation of the idea is the sexy moment of the storytelling, right? It's like, you know, they give you a little bit of time to watch the buildup and watch the organicness of the idea happen. But then the execution part of it is like, oh, that's boring.

We'll just put it to music and yeah, yeah, yeah, they figure it out, right? And I think what that tends to do is it tends to create this illusion in my mind that, oh, well, the idea, that was the hard part. And once you come up with the idea, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some busy work to make it happen. And I think that sort of version of the story, I mean, how we sort of talk about this, really colors people's influences on what matters. And the reality is, well, a couple things. One is the idea of the magical eureka moment.

Not that it never happens, it does. But really, that itself is kind of a fake thing. Like, most of the time when you solve something, it is not a moment of inspiration. You know what I'm saying? Like, that is so sexy.

The reason that people, I mean, and I'm guilty as anybody of telling this story. You know, when you want to describe something, the eureka moment is just this sexy kind of moment of, of, of discovery, right? That it's really cool to think of the idea that I didn't have the idea.

It was just mulling in my brain. Then bam, a thunderbolt hits me and I have the idea. But that's, that's not really how most ideas work. Usually what happens is you have an inkling of an idea. You have a general sense. You play around with it. And as you work with have an inkling of an idea. You have a general sense. You play around with it. And as you work with it, you slowly refine the idea. So I'm going to use writing as an example because that's my background. That when you write something, you, like your first draft is you're trying to come up with what you think, you know, a cool story is. And you spend

a lot of time thinking about it and plotting and this and that. But what happens is you sort of organically write as things come along. And then as you rewrite, and once again, the real work of any art is not necessarily the beginning of it. It's the refinement of it. Like writing is a good example where there's a lot of excitement in the raw writing part of it. But most of the work gets done in the rewriting. Most of the work is like, okay, I spit this out, but things aren't working for this reason or this story doesn't, you know. And, oh, I need to change this.

And you start, as you sort of iterate on something, you start to figure out, like, you slowly solve your problem. And I think that, like, one of the ideas today is I just want to communicate. I want people aware of the idea that we sort of, we really put ideas on this high pedestal. Ideas are so important. That is the magical sauce that makes things work. And I think we take execution as like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta do it, but. And I don't think what people realize is when you see something that really excels, that something that's really exciting, that it wasn't necessarily the idea that made it so amazing.

That really what made it amazing was the execution. So I'll use a magic example. War of the Spark. So War of the Spark is a set with 36 planeswalkers in it. Now normally a magic set will have two to three planeswalkers. Maybe in a core set we'd have five planeswalkers. But you just don't have a lot of planeswalkers in the set. But we wanted to tell a story of the War of the Spark. It's a Planeswalker war.

And so the idea we had was, what if we had a set where we couldn't do all, but many of the Planeswalkers you know were all in it together. Like, this is just, you know, we have lots of Planeswalker characters. What if the majority of them were all together in one set? And I think a lot of people look at that and they go, oh my god, 36 planeswalkers, that's exciting. And they really get caught up in the idea to have 36 planeswalkers. That's what makes this amazing.

And the answer is no, it's not. 36 planeswalkers is not the cool part. The cool part is the execution of the planeswalkers. It's the idea of having uncommon and rare planeswalkers, of having static abilities and triggered abilities, of having hybrid, of having just negative loyalty abilities so that you could use them up and they don't refill and like, you know, combining it with proliferate. Like there's all these little things that make it work. But it is not this idea that in a vacuum,

just the concept of having 36 planeswalkers. And here's the biggest thing. Ideas take nothing. You know what I'm saying? Like, ideas, a good designer, or artist, really, will come up with many, many ideas. I think there's definitely this concept that ideas are this commodity that are so important. And the reality is, an idea without execution is nothing.

It's nothing. You know what I'm saying? That what makes an idea have value is that there's a way to execute it. An idea you can't execute is whatever. It's like, hey, I got you a picture of a present. You know, until you get the present, it doesn't matter. Like, well, here's the idea of what the present would be. No, I need the actual thing.

And that one of the things that as somebody working in games, in game design, I think that the... I mean, like I said, I'm guilty as anybody of this, but when, when I write my articles, I'm trying to make it entertaining, right? I'm trying to tell a story and my background is in storytelling. So like, I, I definitely lean into some of the, um, some of the, the sort of story tropes, if you will, to sort of make a compelling story. But, and this is why I wanted to do today's podcast, I think it can be a little bit misleading.

And like I said, I've tried more and more. One of the things that I used to not do is, if we try to do something and it failed, I often wouldn't talk about it because like, oh, well, maybe one day I figure out how to make it work. So I only talk about my successes. So every time you hear me tell a tale about, oh, I had an idea and then here's how I executed it, kind of makes it sound like, well, of course, every idea is executable. And the reality is, no, we try lots of ideas that fail

along the way. And I don't tend to share you the story of the failures. I tend to share, I share the stories of the successes. So you hear all the stories, you're like, oh, had idea executed. Okay. I guess ideas are all just executable, and that's not really the truth you know, when I work on a set, like for example we'll take War of the Spark, when we first started, my original idea of what to do, because I thought, oh, we can't have so many planeswalkers was, it's a planeswalker war, let's play up the war and we had this mechanic called Skirmish,

where somebody would start the skirmish, and it made this sort of, you had this little external game piece, and you'd play this tug-of-war as people are damaging each other, where it went back and forth, and you're trying to sort of win this little mini-game that's overlaid on the combat that's naturally going on. And it was a really cool idea, and it definitely was something that was different.

And reinforced the idea of a war. And it did a lot of cool things. It didn't quite work. Like it didn't quite do what I wanted it to do. And we abandoned it. And I'm not even saying that's a bad idea. There might come a day in a set where we figure out how to use it right. And it's something we do.

And it could be awesome. It ended up not being the right thing here. And the reality is I spent a lot of time. I and my team spent a lot of time on that. Months on it. We really thought that was going to be the thing. Now, at some point, we figured out it wasn't, and we shifted and went into planeswalkers and ended up finding another answer. But I don't have people feeling like the design for World of Spark began.

I said, oh, I'm the shower, 36 planeswalkers, and bam, then we're done. Like, no, no, no, no. Just even getting to the idea that the planeswalkers is what we're going to do or how to execute that, all that, I mean, like I said, it's not that the idea didn't matter. It's that it was the execution that brought it to life. So, okay, big, big picture. Why am I sharing this with you? So, to explain why I'm sharing this with you, I want to tell a story about my wife. Laura is my wife, if you don't know.

I don't talk about my wife all that much. But I'm going to tell a story about my wife. So, back in 2000, Laura and I had our first baby. I mean, she had the baby, I hope she has. But she had first baby. I mean, she had the baby, I hope, I guess. But she had a baby. And I met Laura at Wizards. But when Rachel was born, Rachel's our oldest, Laura decided to stop working and take care of Rachel.

And so she joined a young mothers group. This is a very common thing. I say young, but a new mother's group. That's in the mother has to be young. But the idea is for people who are having their first child. And what they do is, I think her group had 10 women. All of the women had their first child within a three-month window. And I think when they started, all the babies

were three to six months old. Um, and the reason this was so important is that a, um, taking care of babies, it's very demanding and very hard. Um, and that one of the things that's very intimidating when you get a baby or first baby, especially is you don't necessarily, there's not like training that comes with the baby. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's funny, like, do you want to, if you want, my youngest daughter right now is trying to get her driver's license. And she has to take, like, two months worth of classes, and then she and I have to drive for 50 hours. And then she has to take a written test and a driving test and pass both to get her driver's license.

So in order to become a driver, she has to put in probably 100 plus hours of work and take two tests, you know, pass two tests to be able to drive a car. Well, having a baby, you don't need to do much of anything. There's no license. There's no baby license you have to get. You just, you come home from the hospital and you have a baby. And that is very intimidating when it's your first baby because you've never had a baby before.

And, you know, there's a lot. Taking care of a baby is a lot of work. And so the reason that she joined the group was that she just needed other people to, you just have other people that she can turn to and get help and advice and just have more people that can sort of explain, you know, sort of they can work together to figure out how to raise a baby. But the interesting thing is the thing that ended up being the most important thing,

which is not what Laura realized when she joined the group, but the thing that was the most valuable thing was that something would happen to Laura and she'd feel horrible about it. You know, she would change Rachel on the changing table and one day Rachel rolls off the table because Laura didn't realize that she could roll quite that aggressively. And Laura felt horrible, you know. And then she goes to her meeting,

and she's like, oh, it feels so horrible. My baby rolled off the changing table. And then every other month, like, oh, my baby did that too. And like every baby, like the idea of your baby rolling when you're not expecting because at some point babies start rolling is a very common thing and this thing that Laura felt so bad about that she had done and made her such a horrible mother's like oh every other mother had done that that is that is it's not a unique thing that's a very common thing and that one of the things

that's so empowering and helpful to her is realizing that all these things that made her think like, oh my God, what's going on? Why is my baby doing this odd, strange thing? That you're like, oh no, no, no. Babies do that. That is a common experience. And it really, it was very, very valuable to her. And in some level, the reason I wanted to do this today is the same kind of thing, which is, I don't think that game design, A, not a lot of people talk about game design, given more do now than when I

first started writing my column, but and I think that people tend to focus on the happy sort of end of things. It's like, I had an idea, and I figured out how it worked, and it worked, and it's an awesome game now. Because a lot of the reason people write stuff is

to, um, is that it's part of selling their game and getting people excited about their game. I mean, um, I definitely write my column to share with people how game design happens, but look, part of it also is I'm trying to sell the latest set, right? I'm trying to get you excited for what I'm doing.

So my stories tend to be stories of successes. And that is a little unfair to other game designers out there because guess what? Most things I do as a game designer fail. That my successes are a minority of what I do. That a lot of what game design is about is iteration, where you try something and it doesn't work.

So you try something else and it doesn't work. So you try something else and it doesn't work. And eventually you find something that works. But the issue is, along the way, when you are trying to make something happen, you don't know how close you are to making it happen and you don't know if it will happen there's no guarantee like i'm very optimistic i like to go into things assuming there's an answer but one of the things i'll be aware of is

and this is the way i tend to think of things is usually there is an answer although at times there's not um but the issue is really at what cost? Like usually the answer is like, oh, we can do this, but it comes at a cost. And the answer is at what cost? And oftentimes it's not that it can't be done, is it can't be done at the cost that it's being asked to be done. For example, I want to do something and digital is like, I don't know if we can program this.

I'm like, is it possible? And they I don't know if we can program this. I'm like, is it possible? And they're like, well, we could program it. It just would require so many hours. And you know, and like, is it worth it? Or I'm trying to do something. I have to deal with the rules manager and like, can the rules handle as well? You know, it would require rewriting whole sections of the rules. And like, we could do that, but is it worth it? And that's a lot of design. It's not so much, it's like, I need to do it in a way that works for the whole of what I'm doing, that works for the other teams I'm working with, you know,

that I need to make something that creatively can be expressed. I need to make something that can be programmed. I need to make something that can be played in organized play. I need something that can be edited. There's lots of different things I have to worry about. And so part of the process is trying things. And that means that I'm going to fail a lot. In fact, one of the things I talk about whenever we have a playtest is the best playtest is not a playtest in which everything goes well. The best playtest is a playtest in which you learn something. So if we have a playtest where things go horribly wrong,

but we learn and understand why they're going wrong, that is a very valuable and successful playtest. Because the goal of a playtest is to move on and improve. And the worst playtest, to be honest, is when you play and you're like, well, I didn't love anything, but I didn't hate anything. It's like everything was okay. That's a horrible playtest because it doesn't help you move anywhere. You know what I'm saying? If I have a playtest where everything just falls apart or a mechanic is just utterly broken or unfun,

okay, I learned not to do that or learn why I learned something about what I need to change. Um, and so the reason I, the reason for today's podcast is I really want to hammer home that, um, execution is daunting. Execution can be tiring. Execution can be tiring. Execution can be frustrating. But it is where the special stuff actually happens. And I guess I'm not...

It's not that ideas aren't important. It's not that there aren't great ideas. It's not that ideas can't spur awesome things. They can't. My point on ideas is that you have a lot of ideas, and it is not, like, for example, I'll go back to my Hollywood days. When I was in Hollywood, when I first got to Hollywood, what I thought was going to be the real challenge is writing a great script. going to be the real challenge is writing a great script. I said, ah, the key, the hard part of making it as a writer in Hollywood is making the best script. And what I learned was that wasn't

the hardest part. The hardest part is getting people to read your script. Meaning the hardest part is getting someone to notice your good idea. And you're, I mean, also theory of execution. your good idea. And your, I mean, also theory of execution. That the idea unto itself, I mean, that's the thing is, ideas are important and ideas can lead to wonderful things. But I want you to understand the following about ideas.

One is, they're plentiful. You will come up with lots of ideas. The, one of the skills that you need to evolve with time is learning how to judge your ideas. So for starters, not all ideas are equal. Not all ideas are as good as other ideas. Every once in a while you will have an amazing idea. But it's important that you recognize when it is an amazing idea versus when it's just

that's a good idea or it's an okay, you know, understand when like one of the things that's really important is and this is a lot of what vision design is all about is in order to do greatness, you have to have a target and a focus, you know what I'm saying? Like, okay, for example, let's say War of the Spark. Once we said, okay, what would it take to have all these planeswalkers in the set? That was a really interesting idea.

But, I had, like, I had to approach it saying, is this something we can do? Is this something that's possible? And I was able to say, yes, I think we can do this. And I had a bunch of reasons for thinking that, but I did understand, and obviously this is how we sold the set,

I did understand that if on day one of talking about the set, we said 36 planeswalkers, that would make people sit up and go, What? Because I knew that a set has three planeswalkers in it. And this is 12 times that many. You know, it's so much more than normal that you just have to sit up and go, What? You know, it is so much, it's so much more than normal that you just have to sit up and go, what? Now, notice though, the very first thing players did when we say 36 planeswalkers was, how?

How are you doing that? Right? That was the interesting thing, that one of the exciting things about it is, it sounds exciting. A planeswalker in every pack sounds exciting. a planeswalker in every pack sounds exciting, but the very first place you go from the player standpoint is okay, but how? And the reason they go to how is because you know instinctively it doesn't work the way we normally do things. Right? That the second you're like, okay, and then people

have to figure out, well, how can they do that? It doesn't work. But I knew that that was exciting. And I recognized that the idea was exciting. But once you, so ideas are plentiful. And you're going to come up with a lot of great ideas in your life. The thing that I, I mean, I said earlier, but I'll stress again, is an idea without execution doesn't mean anything. It really doesn't.

It's so funny. In Hollywood, there's a lot of people, a lot of writers I found are very, very secretive of the premise of their story. Because the idea is that they're like, oh, this idea is so amazing. I don't want other people to take my idea. And the funny thing is, one of the things you learn is there's so much work taking an idea to fruition that people, no one's going to take your idea. It's just, you know what I'm saying? It's not, it is just not, people don't tend to,

like, it is something that requires a lot of work to use. And really what you're trying to sell is not just the idea, but the execution of your idea. And that if somebody else, if someone else even took your idea and just doesn't execute it correctly, like a lot of ideas don't work unless executed correctly. And so really what you're selling is not just the idea. It's the executable version of your idea. And that is, so when I say we overvalue ideas, what I mean is not that ideas aren't important.

Not that ideas aren't important, but I think we don't understand that idea by itself, idea without execution, is just, has very little value. That what is of value is idea plus execution. And the biggest portion of that is the execution. Now, let me talk a bit about execution. And this is why I told the story of my wife's new mother's group, which is, I don't think I do enough to say to young game designers, or new game designers, that it's going to be

hard. Like, I talk all the time about how my job is awesome. It's a dream job. I love my job, which I do. But that doesn't mean there aren't hard days. So, for example, I've told this story before, but a quick version is, I worked on a set called Scars of Mirrodin many years ago. And we started with a premise that seemed interesting.

The idea, in a nutshell, was that we would visit what seemed to be a new world in which some of our oldest villains, the Phyrexians, were... It was a Phyrexian home world called New Phyrexia. And the idea was,

oh, we'd meet the Phyrexian, New Phyrexia, and then only at the end of the story would we realize that this isn't, that this world is a world we've been to before that's been completely changed. The Phyrexians had been here and conquered it. And we started with that idea. We started, Scars of Mirrodin was supposed to be New Phyrexia. And, oh my God, I didn't know how to do it. And I tried, and I tried all

sorts of different things. And I had one of the, sort of the darkest moments of my soul, if you will, as a game designer, is I got to a point where I was running out of time and I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to do it. And I went and I talked with Bill, the head of R&D, and Bill gave me probably the best pep talk he's ever given me. And what he said is that, you know, that he had faith in me, and that one of the things he always enjoyed about me is that when things didn't work the way I wanted them to, that I was willing to look and find a different way

to make it work. And so it really made me approach that, okay, let me stop assuming things. And one of the things I stopped assuming was this premise, this premise that it's nephrexia and the end of the story, we realize it was secretly mirrored, wasn't working. And I abandoned it. I said, okay, the entire premise I was secretly mirrored, wasn't working. And I abandoned it. I said, okay, the entire premise I was working on, I'm throwing that away. And I said, what's exciting about the story we're trying to tell? And I said, oh, well, the idea that this world we knew got conquered by this enemy that we know, that's a cool story.

Why'd we gloss over that story? Why'd we, at the last second and a little tiny wink at the end, say, oh, by the way, this exciting thing happened that we didn't tell you about. And I'm like, oh, what if that was what this whole block was about, was the conquering of this world. And the idea was, okay, the first set, we see the Frexians and they're just there a little tiny bit. And the second set, it's a war. And half the set is the Frexians and half is the Mirans. And the third set, we don't even know who's going to win.

And that was the big drama of who's going to win this war. Bill, by the way, technically, Bill came up with the idea of having two set names. That was two different versions. That was Bill's idea. But anyway, this whole idea was the path I had gone down that I was trying to make work just didn't work. And I abandoned it. In my hour of need, what I realized was the idea that I was trying to make work just wasn't working. Or not in a way that did what I needed to.

And what I needed to do was retreat a little bit and said, okay, what's the cool thing I'm doing here? It seems like we've set up this neat story and, you know, like I loved the idea, but I'm like, oh, we're just putting the spotlight in the wrong place. New Phyrexia is not the beginning of the story. It's the end of the story. Like we have a cool story, but what I was doing is starting at the end and then going, where do we go? This is the end of the story.

And then when I backed up, all of a sudden floodgates you know what I'm saying like once I realized what we were doing it came pouring out and we started understanding what we were doing and the reason I tell that story is I don't know how often I tell a story where it's like I tried something and I tried and I tried and iterated and iterated. And yeah, just didn't work. I had to abandon it. Because I think one of the lessons I think I want people to hear that are doing design is I know there's this magical story of the thunderbolt moment

and then just, you know, chug along to your montage and you solve it and then, hey, everybody's happy. And that's kind of the movies. That is not really how it works. That a lot of what makes things happen is putting in the time and energy to slowly, iteratively figure out your problem. And that the real solution, the real amazing things that happen, and I'm not saying there never is a thunderbolt moment.

I'm not saying that never happens. It does. But that is the exception. That's the rarity. The idea that I'm just someone like, oh, this, you know, that is not. And even when you have the thunderbolt moment. So, for example, I will tell the story of Magic's Origin. I've told this before, but I'll do the short version. So Richard Garfield and friend, go to Wizard of the Coast to sell RoboRally,

but Peter Atkinson says to them, that's too expensive a game to make. The components are too much. I can't make that. But I do have access to a printer. I have access to artists. I can make cards. that's what I can make can you give me a dynamic card game? and so Richard walked away this is a moment Richard had

sort of an aha moment, a thunderbolt moment where he came up with the idea of doing a trading card game that what if you combined sort of the coolness of trading cards with randomized cards with a card game? So, trading cards, card game. Okay, but the interesting thing about that is

well, that's an amazing idea. What makes Magic amazing is not that in a vacuum. What makes Magic amazing is Richard then said, okay, how do I do that? How do I make that happen? And he spent a lot of time sort of figuring that out.

Because like one of the biggest problems, for example, what he calls the queen problem. So imagine you're making collectible chess and you get random pieces. And you can play any piece you want. Why wouldn't you play 16 queens? You know what I'm saying? In collectible chess, why would you ever play a piece you want. Why wouldn't you play 16 queens? You know what I'm saying? In collectible chess, why would you ever play a pawn or a rook? Why not just play, I mean, sorry, you play 15 queens and a king. But why not just play the most powerful piece?

Why, if there's cards of varying power level, why would you ever play anything but the absolute best cards? And from that came the color wheel, came the mana system. Like, Richard had to build in a lot of answers for why won't you always just play the best card. And through that, he sort of came together and made what is magic. But it wasn't as if he had the aha moment and poof, magic was born. No, that was just the impetus. That was sort of the bullseye he was

aiming for. And that's what ideas are the best at. It's just giving you direction. Like one of the things that I've learned time and time again, and this is what vision is all about, is people need direction. That designers need direction. And that what ideas are good for, and once again, when I say ideas are overvalued, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be valued at all. Ideas are an important part of the process.

But ideas are there to give guidance and that you want to use the idea to push you in the right direction so that you can iterate and make the things you're making. But A, you have to be able to evaluate your ideas to figure out what your good ideas from your bad ideas are B

be aware that ideas can change that just because you start down a path doesn't mean you stay down that path like one of the things that you do once you get to the iterative process of execution is try things but recognize if something's not working you can back up

the way I kind of like to think of it is imagine you're trying to do a maze Recognize if something's not working, you can back up. The way I kind of like to think of it is imagine you're trying to do a maze. Okay? And you're trying to find the exit to the maze. Well, the way you do a maze is you try one path. You go down the path. And at some point, you might come to a dead end. Well, when you do, you go back and find the point where you didn't have a dead end,

where there's another opportunity. You retrace your steps back, and then you try another avenue. And a lot of finding a maze, there's some trial and error to finding it. The execution is very similar in that try things, take what you think is your best bet, but if that doesn't work, okay. Realize that at some point what you need to do when executing something is understand that it's not working. You need to try a different path. And interestingly, the two biggest mistakes I see on execution is one, is the people not willing to choose a path. And what happens there is

they try to keep as many paths alive as possible. Well, maybe it'll be thing A or thing B or thing C. So everything I make will'll be thing A or thing B or thing C. So everything I make will work with thing A, thing B, and thing C. And the answer is, in the end, you can't have A, B, and C. You know, you need to be about something. You need some central focus. And the problem of having three focuses is you don't end up sort of committing yourselves.

That you sort of, if you're constantly straddling, then you get a very wishy-washy set or game, you know. And that part about making an awesome game is figuring out what you're committing to and committing to it. This is from my acting class. So I used to take acting classes back in my day. I used to do a lot of theater. And one of the great tips I got from one of my acting coaches is what he called committing. And what he said is figure out what drives your character and then you have to commit to it. Whatever your character wants, you have to accept, you have to buy into it. And then, okay, that's what they want.

What would they do to get that thing? And that a lot of what he was saying is part of being a good actor is choosing a path, choosing a decision for what your character is, and then committing to it. One of the things that I really appreciate about Will Ferrell, for example, the reason I think Will Ferrell is so funny is he commits to his comedy. Whatever he's doing, he's in it. He's doing it. He doesn't like halfway. He's not like, well, he commits. And I think in design, there's a similar

quality, which is you got to figure out what your game is about and you got to commit. Now, you can hit dead end. Just because you make a choice doesn't mean you can not change that choice. Sometimes, I committed to doing skirmish in War of the Spark. And at some point, I'm like, oh, this isn't working. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something different. But I committed to it. When we did it, we did it. We tried a lot. We really tried to make that work because when we were doing it, we were like, this is what we're doing. Let's figure out how to make this work. And so be careful when you design stuff that you're not straddling too much,

that you're not trying to understand, that you're not choosing to make a commitment. The other mistake, and this is the sort of opposite end of the spectrum, is sort of what I call the never giving up. I have an idea. I'm going to make that idea work till my eyes bleed. I'm never giving up on my idea. And the idea there is that I like committing. I like committing to something. But there comes a point in which you have to recognize if it's not working. And this idea of I'm going

to do it no matter what and I to do it and no matter what, and I'm all in and no matter what happens, this is going to happen also isn't healthy. You know, that you want to commit to something and try, but if that thing doesn't work out and you have to, one of the keys to doing design is recognizing when something is or isn't working. Like one of the reasons that play design,

not play design, not play design, play testing, one of the reasons that play design, not play design, not play design, play testing, one of the reasons that play testing is so important is you got to see what people are doing with your game. And if they're not having a good time, if they're not enjoying it, you know, that means something is there that shouldn't be there. And that the reason you play test is to figure out what elements are and aren't working and the elements that aren't working

you either have to pull or you have to change substantially enough that it changes how people interact with it but I mean I do find when people when I work with younger designers that the it's funny they either want to not commit or overcommit. But they understand the idea of committing at the right level. That takes a little bit

of time. The other thing about overvaluing ideas, well, I think overvaluing ideas leads to the second thing I just described, where you're so enamored by your idea that you can't sort of loosen it up a little bit. Like in my Scars of Mirrodin story, that if I wasn't able to say, okay, okay, this isn't working, let me reevaluate where I'm starting from. Let me look at the core idea that I'm working with and see if there's something that I can shift from that. I'm working with and see if there's something that I can shift from that. The other thing that's important to understand is not every idea, like ideas thrive in the right place. And so another important to understand about ideas is it is not as if it's a good idea or a bad idea.

I mean, not that there aren't good ideas, bad ideas, but this idea that every idea is either a good idea or a bad idea is a little unfair. Really, ideas are contingent on the environment around them. And what I mean by that is, for example, I made the energy mechanic for original Mirrodin. And it just, there was too much going on, it wasn't working. That didn't mean energy wasn't an interesting idea. It just meant, oh, there in that place at that time, it wasn't doing what I needed. And so another mistake I see players make is they try to do something, it doesn't work,

and they write off the idea as a bad idea. Rather than writing it off as, like, rather than judging in vacuum. Like, one of the things I do when I work on stuff is when I get rid of something, I always want to say to myself, is this a good idea in the wrong place or a bad idea in the right or wrong place. Is the idea inherently something that I think will work somewhere else? I'll take Skirmish as an example. I don't know if Skirmish

will work somewhere else, but I know it didn't work there. I will keep it. One of the things I do, I've done this for a long time and having worked on a lot of sets, is I remember things that were successful, or things that, sorry, not successful, things that I liked that didn't pan out. I mean, energy was a classic example.

I held on to that for years until I found a set where energy made sense. There's a lot of ideas that, for example, I'll use vehicles as an example. Here's a really good example where the idea of the vehicle, the concept of vehicles, oh, these are objects and creatures use them and then you can use them in some way, existed for a long time. But we didn't know how to execute it. And it was a good example of an interesting idea that required very exacting execution. And it wasn't that, like, I didn't write it off as a bad idea.

I wrote it off as an idea that I didn't understand the execution of. And that when eventually we came along with the world, Kaladesh, where they made sense, we spent some time and energy trying to figure out how to solve the problem. And we did, although the interesting thing about that is, I've mentioned this story too, is the ultimate solution was not even in Caledash itself. We were trying to work on a different mechanic

and a different set in Ixalan, and the solution we had made for that problem, which ironically we made different to not step on the toes of vehicles, ended up being the solution to how vehicles ended up working. And so part of today is I want you to see ideas for what they are. And what that is is potential. Ideas are potential. And they can be focal points for amazing things.

When I say it's overvalued, I don't mean that ideas don't have value. I don't mean that they aren't an important part of the process. I just try to say I want you to understand them for what they are. And what that is, is it's a resource that is way more plentiful than you realize that when paired with the proper execution can be something amazing. But they very much, you know, like electric vehicles,

we had the idea of vehicles for a long time. That in itself, by itself, was not, until we married the vehicles to the execution of the vehicles, it was just an idea. And while it was a good idea, a good idea in a vacuum doesn't mean anything. On execution, the thing I really want to communicate is that when I say it's undervalued,

what I mean is that people don't give it the respect it deserves. That execution is going to be why your great idea becomes a great thing. That a great idea is merely an idea until you do something with it, until you make it into something. And that process, that execution, is important, it's valuable, and it can be a lot of work, and it can be very frustrating,

and you can go down a lot of dead ends, and that the reason I want people to value execution is I think if you dismiss it, it makes it much harder when you are struggling with it. That I think if you live in a world where all you need is a great idea, and you get what you think is a great idea and then you struggle and struggle and struggle,

I think a lot of people think as if somehow they're failing the idea as if the idea naturally comes with the answer to it, which it doesn't. And that's one of the things that I'm beginning to realize more and more is that I celebrate the highs of game design. You know, I celebrate the moments where... There are great moments when you solve problems or you watch people play it for the first time. And there's a lot of really shining, fun moments that come in game design.

What I don't do nearly as much is I focus on the lows. But there are high highs, there are low lows. And the biggest, the lowest of the lows tend to come from a time in which you feel lost. A time in which you don't know

what to do. Where the idea that you really had faith in isn't working. Or the thing that you're trying, you're on your 5, sixth, seventh, eighth, twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth, eightieth, whatever. It's just, it's not working. And my advice to you is, A, be aware that there are other ideas, and so don't overcommit to any one idea. And also, making sure that you understand what it is about your

idea that you enjoy. And then a lot of when I get stuck, a lot of when I retreat back and I say, what was it that I enjoyed in the first place about this? Because sometimes what I find is, as you're executing, you sort of drift off course a little bit, and then you end up not really executing what made the idea the cool thing in the first place, and that sometimes when you get stuck, I like to go back a little bit

and take all the assumptions you've made, take every assumption where you said, well, clearly it has to be A, B, and C, and say to yourself, whoa, whoa, whoa, does it have to be A? Does it have to be B? Does it have to be C? And what I find is a lot of the things I assume, once I say, oh,

well, I think it needs to be A, but it doesn't have to be B. As soon as you roll back some of your assumptions, it allows you sometimes to go down a different path. And that's a lot of what today is trying to say is you're going to hit dead ends. You're going to get paths that don't work. And that's okay. And that it is part of the process. That designing games can get really frustrating. That there's not always an easy answer. That every moment of it is not the high high. That I think, you know, a lot of times

when I tell my stories, because I talk about the successes, because I talk about sort successes, because I talk about sort of things going right, I tend to tell the story of what I call happy designer stories. Because even when I'm telling a story of distress,

it always ends with and then things worked out. You know what I'm saying? Even when I'm at my lowest low in the story, you, the person reading it, know it works out because you know I'm talking

about the successful things that I'm doing. And I don't often tell the, and here's the horrible thing where it didn't work out sort of stories. Or even just in things that did work out, I don't dwell too much on the, I don't even dwell on the emotion of it, you know what I'm saying? I think that I really dwell on the I kind of pass and go, yeah, yeah, it was hard. I give the montage version where like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this happened, this happened, and then, yay, it all worked out. And I don't quite dwell on the months and months and months

sometimes years of, and it didn't quite work. So anyway, I'm driving them to work right now. That is today's lesson. People tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue execution. And so hopefully today, my goal is, I'm trying to be the new mother's group of game designers and say to you, guess what? All games do that. All games give you problems. All games make troublesome elements. All games don't quite do what you want them to do. Every game is going to occasionally roll off its changing table. That is the nature of games. That designing games is hard. Designing games is very tough. Designing games can be

very frustrating. And that, yes, there's lots of high, awesome moments. When your baby smiles at you for the first time, it's a joyous feeling. But you know what? You're also going to change a lot of diapers. Today's thing is to try to say to you that it is harder than you might think. And a lot of that is because I think we gloss over sometimes in our telling of the fun story, we gloss over all the hard work and all the frustration and all the things that go along with making something amazing, with making an amazing game. Every moment of, it is not as if every time I'm making a game, every moment is, oh, this is awesome. There's a lot of moments of,

this didn't work, this didn't work, that kind of sucked, that wasn't fun. But it's working through that and understanding that that's part of the process that helps you get to where you need to go. And so, yes, you need good ideas, but you also need good execution. Because the best ideas with the best execution is where the truly awesome things come from. Okay, guys, I'm now at work. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. But, as we all know, instead of talking magic, it's time

for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.