Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #265 - Creative Process Part 2

Episode Date: September 25, 2015

Mark concludes his two-parter about the creative process.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking about the creative process. And my focus in the last podcast was about starting with the blank page. And I wanted to get from the blank page to the beginning of sort of the structure and organizing of it. And so today I was going to do the next section. So okay, just a quick recap from the previous podcast, in case you haven't heard it. Clearly, you should listen to it in its entirety, but the short version is, the creativity, the creative process is an iterative process in which you're bouncing back and forth between two concepts, a generation period

and a period where you're evaluating. So there's generation and there's evaluation. So I talked about last time about how you had to start with something, that the reason the blank page is so scary is you just need something to grab onto. I also realized that last podcast, by the way, I claimed that clams made pearls when oysters made pearls. So anyway, you can tell

I don't want to be biologically incorrect in my podcast. Anyway, okay, so, when last we left off, what you would happen was

you would start with something, you would generate a lot of ideas, you use that, you then separate the thing into boxes to figure out what you liked and what you didn't like.

You picked one thing in the box you liked to sort of work off of, and through this process of sort of generating and evaluating, you slowly started to figure out what you cared about most. What was the thing you want to build your design around? And I stress that you can only build around one thing. I mean, you can have multiple priorities, but something's your main priority. Something has to win out when you are evaluating things. Once you have that main priority, you then can start structuring. And my argument is, usually the beginning of the creative process,

the structuring doesn't happen right in the beginning. In the beginning, you got to figure out what it is you want. Now, sometimes people kind of do that in their head, and by the time they sit down to do something, they've already figured out what they want. So the part I talked about last time, sometimes people would internally process that. So if you started at the structure point, that's because you sort of have molded over your mind

and sort of figured out what you wanted. But if you're starting from the truly blank page, the first process is important. Okay, we pick up where we left off, which is you prioritize something you want to do, and then you started taking your intellect and saying, okay, what does that mean? How do I have to structure this? What does it entail? And the reason this part is very important is that at some point, you have to pick something, prioritize it,

and then understand the ramifications of what prioritizing it means. One of the big things that happens when you're sort of building a project is you can't have too many masters. You can't go, I want A and B and C, because what happens when A and B come in conflict with each other? What you need to do is say, priority A, secondary priority B, tertiary priority C,

which means that B will guide you except when it contradicts A, and C will guide you except when it contradicts A or B. Meaning that A is really your main priority. A is the thing that when you have to make a decision and you're caught between things, you have to know first and foremost what you're doing. So when I design sets, when I'm leading a design, I have to figure out what it is exactly I want to be doing.

What is my focus? What is the thing that I go, okay, it's about this. We'll take Innistrad as an example. okay, it's about this. We'll take Innistrad as an example. Innistrad, I wanted to bring the horror genre to life in cards. I wanted you to play and go, wow, this captures the feel of the horror genre.

The zombies act like zombies. The vampires act like vampires. The werewolves act like werewolves. That I wanted to create an environment where everything kind of matched expectation. So it was truly a top-down design. I was trying to create a feel, but that was my number one priority. I wanted to create the feel of horror. I wanted to capture the essence of it. Now, there were other things I wanted to do.

You know, that wasn't my only priority, but it was my number one priority. And so when I was trying to structure things, when I was trying to figure out how the set got put together, I kept saying, okay, my number one priority is this. And the reason it's so important, a lot of times when people are creating something, if they don't really know what's guiding them, they get pulled in multiple different directions and you'll get caught sometimes because you'll be wanting to do something and this is good and that's good. You need something to sort of help make your mind up when you have conflicts. And if you know what your focus is, you go, okay, well, since this is my focus.

Now, something I mentioned last time, which is, you are allowed to change your focus. Just because you have a focus doesn't mean that you can't alter it as the process goes along. But, and this is the important thing, you need to understand when to do that. Okay, so let me explain. So now you've figured out what you want to do, at least what your jumping off point to begin with is, and you start structuring and figuring out what needs to get done.

The reason this intellectual part is very important is that your brain is good at different things, but when you focus on a particular task, you're clear at it. If you let your heart and head always guide you equally at every time, you'll run into trouble.

Maybe my theme of today is you have to always prioritize something. So in the creative process, there's times when you want to emotionally lead, there's times when you want to intellectually lead. You just got to know at each point what part is supposed to be doing that. And in general, the generation period, you want your heart to be leading. And when you're evaluating, the evaluation period, you want your head to be leading. Now, that doesn't mean your heart can't jump in on the evaluation or your head can't do something on generation. But it's important to understand where you're leading from. So when

you're sort of evaluating things, here's what, let me walk through what evaluation means, because it's a bunch of things. Number one is you're trying to figure out, okay, given my premise, I'll use another metaphor, which is in the court of law, the reason you have a jury is the jury is supposed to decide what the facts are. The jury doesn't decide what the law is. The judge decides what the law is. The jury decides what the facts are.

Because the facts can be subjective. You need someone to go, okay, we've listened to all this. We've decided these are the facts. Now, once the judge knows the facts, the judge then applies the law to the facts. But, and this is the important thing, the jury's job is not to apply the law.

The jury's job is to figure out what happened, what is true. And then the judge applies the law to it. So in some ways, the jury, in this particular scenario, is the heart and the judge is the intellect. That the heart has to figure out what's true. I'm doing something. I'm writing a story. I'm making a card set.

What is the emotional truth? And that is really important when you're creating something, that you understand what speaks to you. What is the thing about what you're doing that goes, oh, this is what's going to, this is what my piece is about. You know?

And that has to be decided emotionally. Trying to get the essence of what you're trying to do creatively needs to be done emotionally. But once you understand what the emotional heart is, what the emotional truth of your piece is, you then have to let your brain, your intellect, start to figure out what it means. Okay, given I am doing that,

what do I have to do? So, for example, I use Innistrad. Okay, the emotional heart was I wanted to capture gothic horror. I sort of worked for a little bit. I'm thinking, you know what really excites me? Is I think I can really bring these monsters to life, and I can create this sense that the monsters act like monsters, and the gameplay feels like if you were watching a horror film.

You know, the zombies, they're going to come out and they're going to be slow, but they're slowly going to overwhelm you, and there'll be more and more zombies before you're overrun by zombies. And there's a sensation that comes with that, that when you see a zombie, you go, oh, that zombie's not a threat. And you see a zombie, you go, oh, that zombie's not a threat. And you see two zombies, you go, well, okay, a little more of a threat. And then you see four zombies, you go, wow, that might be a problem. You see eight zombies, you're like, okay, I'm in trouble.

Then it captures that sense that you want. So you use the intellect to figure out, okay, given the emotional truth, given the emotional choice I've made, what needs to be done? So the next level is your intellect starts saying, okay, if this is true, this is what... The intellect is better at structure. It's saying, okay, well, if we're trying to do that, this is what we need to have, this is the kind of things we need to do,

and your intellect will then start figuring things out. Now, the other thing your intellect will do that your emotions won't do is your intellect will say, what are the priorities as far as getting it done? What, you know, I'm making a car set, for example, the magic design. There's certain things we got to do. There's so many commons and uncommons and rares, and there's a lot of structural things that have to happen. I can't just go, you know what?

I just feel like this many comments is right. No, we have to print on a sheet. There are actually things that are not changeable that I have to adapt to and that I, in planning what I'm doing, have to sort of think about that. Now, the thing is, I don't want to think about some of those things all the time. I don't want to bound in my process by saying, oh, well, don't do A, B, or C, because when I'm trying to generate content, I don't want to be bound by that. But when I'm trying to evaluate content, I must be bound by that.

And that's the big thing. So in the iterative process of the creative creation, you want to go back and forth between your heart and your brain and your intellect. Okay, so you plot it out. This is the point in the creative process where you start doing the skeleton. I talk about in design, you have a design skeleton. In writing stories, you have a story skeleton. In doing art, you might have a sketch.

You do something where you figure out the basics of what you want. And the reason that's important is you have to start sort of thinking through the ramifications of the emotional decisions you've made. Now, the next part is you then go and generate it again, but you generate to specific guidelines set to you by your intellect. If you're writing a story, you might be, okay, I've mapped out the thing. I'm going to start writing a scene. Now, I can write whatever scene I want.

I don't necessarily have to write the scenes in order, but I have to now start writing a scene I think I might use. What is a scene that actually would happen in the story? Now, that doesn't mean the stuff you're going to generate for this next period doesn't mean that will all end up getting used, but you are starting to move toward practical generation space,

which means, okay, given this emotional truth that I came to, I've structured things with my intellect, and now, as I generate, I'm being given assignments by my intellect, saying, okay, if you're going to do stuff, let's work in this area. For example, in magic Design, I might, Zendikar for example, we started design knowing that we wanted to be about land, but land mechanics. So I had my team make lots and lots and lots of land mechanics. Okay, then we stopped, we made like 40 land mechanics, we then played them. We looked at them. We studied them.

We stuck them in the boxes. Which ones were successful? Which ones were failures? Which ones, eh, we weren't quite sure. And as I started looking at the successes in the success box, I started getting a sense of where we were going, what kind of mechanics were working, what wasn't working, what was working,

and that started guiding me in the kind of thing I wanted. Now, also, the thing that happened was, as I slowly, so, okay, that's not the point where I'm like, okay, I looked at what I did, I figured out what worked, I figured out what didn't work, and I start to say, okay, if we're actually going to build a set, and these are the kind of mechanics that I think might work, let's start thinking about how we do that. That's when I start thinking about designing commons or designing a particular, assigning colors, or I start structuring how I want to do it. You know, I've spent some time exploring, and now that I've explored and I sort of evaluated what

I've done, I now go, okay, given that, let's start thinking about how this would work. Start doing the initial construction. Okay, so next comes a generation period where you're generating, but to sort of assignments, if you will, made by the evaluator process. Okay, if we're telling this kind of story, let's break it out. Here's the kind of scenes we need. Now, the next period is when you're going to generate your assignment, then you're going to evaluate. And there's two things you evaluate in the next period is when you're going to generate your assignment, then you're going to evaluate.

And there's two things you evaluate in the next period is, A, what's the quality of the material you made? And B, is it going in the direction that you thought it would go? So one of the things that's very important with the creative process is you always want to go into the generation periods with a focus. I'm doing something. That when you're trying to create, you want to have a bullseye. You want to have a focus. When you're evaluating, you no longer are tied to that.

You no longer have to say, this has to be true. What you want to do is say, okay, let me evaluate on what it is and judge it on what it is. Meaning, let's say you did something, you said, okay, it's all about thing A. You figure out what, if it's about thing A, what you'd have to do. You make things to kind of prove that you could do A, and it comes back, and you realize, oh, you know what? This is really interesting, but it's not really leaning toward A. It's actually leaning toward B.

Hmm, I hadn't thought about that. So during the evaluation period is when you get to re-evaluate whether or not, using the data that you've just looked at, okay, what does the new generation tell me? I've made a bunch of stuff based on the guidelines, you know. I had an emotional truth. I figured out what I needed to do to match that.

I used that as my focus. I made things. Now when I evaluate, I don't, I take away the bullseye. I mean, I understand that's what I was trying to do. But I look at what I've done and I have to say, okay, now that I've tried to sort of prove what I was doing last time,

what did, what I make, is what I make, what was successful when I did and didn't do? Make, you got to make your boxes again. Successes, failures, and don't know. Real quick on the don't know box. The reason there's a don't know box is you don't is if you had to put everything in success or failure, you would have things that aren't quite figured out yet that you would throw away. That a lot of times in creating something, you make

something that isn't quite all the way there, but it's some way there and that you need to give that time to breathe. And so you don't want to throw away things that you don't understand are failures. If you don't understand what they're doing, if you go, I don't know if that's success success or a failure, don't get rid of it yet. That means there's still potential for success in that.

Things that don't work out, every once in a while you'll do something that's a horrible failure, but you'll still see something in it. And maybe that just means it's a maybe because you see something in it. But anyway, so you take the things that you generated based on the assignments that you gave yourself, and then you re-evaluate, okay? Now, once you evaluate, you stick in the boxes, the good, the bad, and the unknown, not the ugly, then you have to figure out, okay, now, let me step back and look at what I've done and look at my successes. Where are my successes leading me?

What are they trying to tell me? And so every time you come back to the evaluation process, you are allowed to readjust your focus. But, and this is the important thing, the evaluation doesn't pick the focus in a vacuum. It looks at the generation material and says, based on what I've generated, looking at my project, it's now clear that this needs to be the focus. And that's why, it's why the iterative process is so powerful. Because during the

generation period of it, you are just making, making, making, making, making, making, making, making. During the evaluation process, you are really looking at what you've done. And the neat thing about the generation process is you don't want to have too many filters. You want to just go, okay, I'm doing something. Now, the reason that you need focus is that if you just go everywhere, you kind of go nowhere. You want to be working in some direction. And so the way the iterative process works is that generation makes material, and the evaluation provides focus. That when you evaluate and you figure out what you're doing, you then come back to the generation portion, and it says,

okay, I now have a new place to focus. And that is a lot of what the iterative process is. It's going back between generation and evaluation where generation is creating material and evaluation is figuring out what is working and where to go with the next generation.

So as you can see, this is the path you start going down. And the one thing about iteration, by the way, is it speeds up as time goes along through the creative process. That early on, your iteration loops can be longer. I might spend a long time generating because I have a lot of things I want to generate.

And I might spend a long time evaluating because I have so many things to look at. But what happens is, as you advance along the iterative process, your loops get smaller because more and more get cemented. More and more like, okay, that's really working. I'm doing this. Now, when I talk about your focus moving, really that's the earlier part of the process. That what happens is, as you start cementing things, you start getting a more solidified sense of what you're doing. Now, that doesn't mean you can't get partway through

and realize that you've gone down a wrong path or something, or you discover something new that you hadn't discovered that really shows promise and makes you want to rethink what you're doing. But anyway, in magic, we talk about having vision refinement. in magic we talk about having vision refinement I say vision refinement is the last part integration, vision integration refinement

so I'm going to use that about the creative process so we're still in the vision portion we're still in the part where you are generating material and then when you're evaluating you keep adjusting what you're doing so the vision phase ends of any sort of creative thing are generating material and then when you're evaluating, you keep adjusting what you're doing. So the vision phase ends of any sort of creative thing when you have figured out the crux of what you want to do and you've proven that you can do it to this extent where you're

like, okay, this is what I'm doing. I'm doing this thing. That's when you leave vision. When you're like, I'm no longer shifting what my vision is. I've tried things. I've usually been through a couple iterations and I lock in. I go, okay, I got it. This is, I'm no longer shifting what my vision is. I've tried things. I've usually been through a couple iterations. And I lock in. I go, okay, I got it.

This is what I'm doing. So normally in magic design, when we come out of the vision phase, it's like we've made mechanics. Like we're down the path of going, this is where we're going. That doesn't mean things can't change. That doesn't mean that large chunks of things can't change. But it does mean, okay, we've locked in. We know what we're going to do, everyone's on the same page, and we have executed on that idea.

We have initial execution on that idea. Okay. So now we get into, I keep forgetting the word. So it's after vision is integration. Okay. So the next part, what integration is all about in the creative process is saying, okay,

I now have created something. I have spent a lot of iteration, sort of getting to the place where I'm happy. The next part, the iterative part is, I now must include the outside world. So I talk about when you do playtesting, during vision

you want to playtest with very people who are tight to the group making it. People that are invested in what you're doing. If you have a design team, I'm working with my design team. During vision, I mean magic, we are so advanced in how we do magic that I can pull some people during the vision phase, but

that's only because they're very invested in the product and that they understand the design aspect of how magic works because we've done it so many times. Normally during vision, you want to stay very close to the people you're doing. Integration is, okay, I'm going to start bringing in outside people for playtesting. And the reason there is integration is about figuring out, okay, I followed my heart, I went somewhere, I did something, I'm proud of what I've done, but now I need some outside, I need just a

little bit of outside input. Just to sort of give myself a little bit of anchoring. a little bit of anchoring. Now, how far you go out depends. I'm not saying, I mean, in games, you tend to go a little farther out. I want people to play that don't, you know, that I'm not even emotionally connected to. In other creative endeavors,

it might be going to somebody who you feel closer to. Like, okay, I'm going to let a close friend of mine read my first draft. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be I'm going to total strangers. Game design, you can have playtest groups, but usually in game design, there's a little more wanting to go to outside people, but that's unique about game design.

Not all creative process if you want to go to absolute strangers. But what you do want is you want some input from outside to understand what you've done, some context of what you've done. Because you've become very invested in what you're doing. You and your team become very invested in what you're doing. And you are kind of blind to things. On some level, my metaphor here is, if you're someplace and there's a strong smell and you just stay there long enough, at some point you there's a strong smell and you just stay there long enough

at some point you don't notice the smell. You just get used to it. And not that it's not there you're just you're so used to it that in some level you're not used to it.

You've just normalized for it. That's true of sound that's true of smell somewhat true of some visuals but you sort of normalize to whatever it is. So the problem is, after you've iterated enough times,

some of the things you're invisible to. If your creative thing metaphorically stinks, if you will, you might not be able to smell it. Where if you bring an outside person who has a fresh set of eyes, they come to it and are able to sort of see things that you can't see anymore. And a lot of the iterative process is taking, so the evaluated process is going to be outside yourself and your team, is getting some input that's a little larger and is a little contextual. In magic design, the iterative process is

a lot about getting other sections in, is getting buy-off on development and making sure there's buy-off from creative, making sure the other, sometimes digital, sometimes brand, sometimes organized play, there's all these other teams that care about the thing you're making, and there comes a point where you're like,

okay, I think I know what I want to do, but now I need some outside, just to make sure that what I'm doing doesn't cause problems for others. Now, game design, magic design is a more collaborative process, so a lot more people have to be involved. When it's a creative process by yourself, a lot of what you're doing is just getting some outside opinion to sort of get a sense of where you're at. But anyway, the idea during... I keep blinking on the I. It is vision, integration, refinement.

On integration, what you want to do is your evaluative steps bring in other opinions. That you're bringing in other vantage points. Now that doesn't mean that you don't also look at it. Every time you generate, it doesn't mean that you don't also look at it. Every time you generate, it doesn't mean that you don't also evaluate. This is not, other people are not to the exclusion of your evaluation. It's just a tool

that you're still the one evaluating. They're just a tool. You need outside eyes to be able to see some stuff that maybe you haven't seen. So in game design, for example, integration is where you have the first outside playtesting where you bring people out to get people who

are a first set of eyes. And then during the iterative process, it's about you get feedback, you figure out what people have to say, you do your own, you know, you evaluate it on your own, and then the same thing. You go, okay, now that I know this, now that I've had this feedback,

now let's go back and make changes to address something. Then you generate within the guideline of the area you're asking for. And be aware, by the way, don't be afraid of when you're generating if you end up making something that doesn't quite seem to fit with what you're being asked to do. Sometimes what happens is your brain is like, okay, I have an idea that's actually generated by this request

that doesn't seem like it's from this request, but I really, wow, this guideline really made me want to do this. Follow that through. A lot of times what happens is the brain's very complex, that there's something internally that it is connecting it, but you don't understand why. Let me make a quick comment about instinct here. I believe that instinct is mental muscle memory, which

that means is that your instinct is you learning things mentally that work and then shorthand them, much like muscle memory, where it's like, I don't have to think about how to sit down in a chair. I've just sat down in enough chairs. My body is like, hey, body, you know what to do. Sit down in the chair. I don't have to think about it. I think the same is true for mental processing, which is if you just mental process something enough times that your brain kind of learns to do it.

And so a lot of instinct is your brain doing mental processing and just giving you the, okay, I did it. Here's the outcome. And you're like, oh, okay. And you didn't even realize you were doing it, but your brain is used to it and does it for you. And that's stuff you want to listen to. So sometimes your brain's like, okay, do thing B. And you're like, where did thing B come from? I thought we were doing

thing A. And like, your brain's doing stuff. Listen to your brain and try a little bit. See, you know, a lot of times we will find this, it does connect up, that your brain, to your brain it did connect, you just didn't understand why it connected yet. Okay, which brings us to the final part of the creative thing, the refinement phase. Okay, so the idea is, during the integration phase, you're getting outside feedback, you're taking your own evaluation, and you're sort of using that to guide and come up with stuff.

Refinement is the final part where it's like, okay, I've been focusing on the deep and heavy things, you know, and refinement is like, okay, I've made the inner workings work. If I'm metaphorically building a clock, the cogs are working. It's telling time correctly. But now, before I sell my clock, before my clock is done, I now have to decorate the clock. Refinement is about the details. Because when you're really digging in deep and worrying about how things are working, you're fixing your car, you make sure your car runs smoothly. But you know what? Before you sell your car, you make sure your car runs smoothly, but you know what?

Before you sell your car, you've got to make the car look pretty. And refinement is about sweating the details. It's about saying, okay, in writing, for example, I'll just use writing as a parallel to game design. In writing, it's like, I've got to make the story work.

I've got to make the characters work. I've got to have the essence, the character arcs, and the ethos, I gotta have the essence the character arcs and the ethos I have to have the book mean something but refinement is like okay, like for example I did a time travel story once where once I got to the refinement phase

I was trying to figure it out, I realized that I had a gun that got passed from character to character and I'm like oh where did the gun come from? It was a loop like it didn't come from anywhere, like people kept passing character, and I'm like, oh, where did the gun come from? It was a loop. Like, it didn't come from anywhere. Like, people kept passing among themselves, and I'm like, oh, I've got to make that come from somewhere. And it was just this little, I mean, it wasn't a big thing.

It wasn't that the story worked or didn't work without it, but it was the detail that mattered. And a lot of times, there's, one of the things that I often love to say is, players, or your audience, how about that? Be broader. Your audience falls in love with details.

That it is great to have all the larger stuff and people appreciate the larger stuff, but in the end, what makes people emotionally bond to something is finding some personal connection on a micro level. That they appreciate the macro, but they fall in love with the micro.

That they see, for example, one of the things that makes them fall in love with the character is the character will have some little tiny quirk that they just connect with. I do that little tiny thing. Oh, this character's like me. We both do this little tiny thing. You know, and that it is really the details that make people fall in love with things because people want to personalize things

and that something that everybody recognizes is not as personal. It's a little tiny thing like, oh, that character and I, we do this thing. Not everybody. Most people don't do this thing, but we do this thing. That's something we do.

And the details become very, very important. So the refinement is all about getting the details correct. And what that means is, your evaluative process just becomes different. Which is that, when you're sort of starting out, you're digging really deep, and you're kind of glossing over some of the details.

That early on, you don't want to get too bogged down in details. Because if the larger things change, the details might change anyway. So when I'm designing a set, for example, there are things that will pop up that I know are power level concerns, like development's

going to have to worry about them. And I'm like, if I know development's going to do them, I don't worry about them. I mean, I make sure the developer on the design team balances the card so that, you know, for playtesting, it's not broken or anything. But there are a lot of little things that I know development's going to do and that I just don't waste my time

because it's not going to matter until all the major things are figured out. I'm not going to figure all the, you know, I'm going to, development's going to make a lot of tweaks down the road and so the details I'm working on are the details that matter to demonstrate what it is we're doing. The details do matter, and I want to show to play off the details, but I will focus on the details that matter at the thing I'm doing. In general, by the way, what you want to do is, when you

evaluate, is you look at the details and figure out, is the micro matching the macro? That is the big question that comes up again and again in refinement. Is the micro matching the macro? And what that means is that all your details should follow the same reasoning for your major decisions. That if the plot works a certain way because a character does a certain thing, well, if a character would do the things

that make the plot work, the same decisions in the minor decisions need to be made. What t-shirt he's going to put on or she's going to put on or what book is being read or what poster's on the wall. All those little details matter because you want

to have consistency. And, once again, one of the ways that people will identify things that you're doing is by using the details as guidelines. It is no mistake, for example, the next time you're watching a movie and a character is reading a book, look at the book the

character is reading. I guarantee you, I garin, garin, guarantee you, that book is no accident. That that was carefully, carefully chosen, probably by the writer, maybe by the director, but to reinforce something

important about the character. A book is never chosen randomly. Or very, very, you know, that anyone who's doing it correctly, that book matters. And so whenever you see a character reading a book, look at the book. That's going to tell you something about the character.

Look at the surroundings. Look at the posters on their walls. Every little detail in the production design, in the clothing of the character, you know, that there's someone who's in charge of wardrobe and every little decision they're making is reinforcing who the character is. There's a prop guy, and every decision he's making about that person's room or cubicle or whatever,

every decision is about reinforcing that character. And so all those details really, really do add up. And refinement is about making sure that the key details are there. Now, I happen to be in a situation where when I finish with design, there's a later process. So I'm a little different in that my refinement phase is,

I am trying to refine the details, but there's somebody after me that's going to do more refining. But the refinement phase is super important because you want to make sure, you want to sort of start big and move to small, but you need just as much attention on the small things. That the small,

people will fall in love with the small things and love your creative work because of them. You know, the big things matter and the big things are important, but the small things are also important. Refinement is all about getting those things. Okay, so, let's go through this. So, to recap, I'm almost to work.

We've got the vision phase. We have the, why do I keep forgetting the I? It's vision, refinement, and integration. Vision, integration, refinement, V-I-R. I always wanted the last one to be P, so it would be V-I-P, but refinement didn't work better. Okay, so, overview.

The key to creative things is making an iterative loop, which gets smaller over time. The iterative loop is based on two parts, a generation and an evaluation. During generation, you want to let your emotions lead. You want to make sure that you have some focus and you're pushing toward that focus.

During evaluation, you want to let your intellect lead. You want to figure out sort of what is working and what is not working. And then you want to, evaluation is where you figure out where the new focus is for your generation. Because when generating, you want to have one

focus and move toward that focus. When evaluating, you want to have the freedom to figure out what is and isn't working and adjust accordingly. And the idea, as you move along, a couple things will happen. Your iterative process will get

smaller the loops will get smaller and the details you focus on will get smaller so essentially what happens is early on you're taking the biggest pictures and the biggest things and you have the biggest loops of iteration and then as you go along you have you get tighter and tighter and you're focusing small and small so you start macro and big you get micro and tighter, and you're focusing small and small. So you start macro and big, and you get micro and small. And that, in general, is the creative process. Now, let me make a couple caveats here as I end my thing. Number one is, I'm talking in really general terms. There's a lot of details.

A lot of people do the... I'm trying to explain in very loose terms how the creative process works. That doesn't mean that the execution of how people do it isn't a little different. I'm sure there are people that mix their generation evaluation a little more organically than I'm talking about. I'm talking about making a little cleaner break. That's more for if you're starting out. In general, when I explain how to do things, I explain it for people that need the help

and that as you get more comfortable with what you do, for example, when I started designing magic sets, I created the design skeleton as a tool to be able to monitor what I'm doing.

Eventually, I got to the point where I didn't need the design skeleton because I had internalized what was going on. I think a lot of the creative process is like that. As you get more advanced,

you'll internalize it. The way you do it won't... My way is kind of like the design skeleton for creative ideas, which is, if you're unsure how to do it, it's a nice structure to use. Once you understand it, you're under no guide... Do what works for you as you integrate how it works.

I'm just trying to explain on a big picture kind of how it works. And that's what these two podcasts were about is explaining to you sort of in very big terms kind of what is going on so that if you want to do that,

if you have problems with the blank page, if you have problems generating things, here's a nice structure that you can do to work through. And then the more you do this,

the more you work with it, the more organic it will become and the less structured it needs to be in some level, the more things will, you know, generation and evaluation will become a little more fluid. But anyway, when I started this podcast yesterday, or last time, I didn't realize this would be a two-partner

and this was very interesting. This is one of those podcasts that I didn't quite know where it was going and now that it was going, and now that it's done, I'm really happy with it. So I hope you guys enjoyed listening to it. I hope you enjoyed the creative process, and I gave you some insights. There's nothing different to think about.

I hope for all the Magic fans out there that you might apply how I do this to how I do Magic design. But it also applies to how I write stories or any kind of creative thing I do. This really isn't limited to game design. But anyway, I am now in my space. So we know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic and creativity, it's time to go make magic and be creative. See you guys next time.