Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #329 - 20 Lessons: Human Nature

Episode Date: May 6, 2016

Mark begins a new 20-part podcasts where he talks about life lessons he has learned.

I'm calling out of the driveway. We don't know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the start of a long series. So I talked about how I went to GDC this year, and I gave a speech. So my speech was called 20 Years, 20 Lessons. It was all about, in the 20 years of working on Magic, on the same game for 20 years, what were the 20 lessons that I learned? And I decided it was, instead of just doing a single podcast, I was going to do 20 podcasts, one for each lesson.

So I'm calling this series 20 Years, 20 Podcasts. No, I can't call it that. I already called it 20 Years, 20 Podcasts. How about 20 Lessons, 20 Podcasts? We'll try that. So 20 Lessons, 20 Podcasts. Okay try that. So 20 lessons, 20 podcasts. Okay, so today is lesson number one. So lesson number one was when you fight against human nature, or fighting against human nature is a losing battle. That was lesson number one.

Fighting against human nature is a losing battle. So one of the things to remember is I'm trying to make this series more, I'll talk about magic as my examples, obviously, but I'm going to try to make it more general for people who are just general game design theory. So one of the things that I learned is, so I guess I'll start with a story. In my speech, I always had a story, so I'll start with my magic story. Okay, so it was during time spiral, and we had made suspend. So for those who don't remember what suspend was, suspend allowed you to reduce the cost of your spell. And normally when you cast a spell in magic, you pay your mana and you cast it right away.

Well, suspend, it was cheaper. You know, you're trading time for money, money being mana in magic. And so when you cast it, you got it a lot cheaper than normal, but you had to wait so many turns for it to come into play. Technically, what would happen is you would exile it, put counters on it. Every turn you remove a counter. And when the last counter was removed, it got cast. So a lot of the Time Spiral cards were suspend creatures. And so what would happen is, let's say you suspend something for four turns. That means you have to wait. Turn one, okay, take off a counter, not yet.

Turn two, take off a counter, not yet. Turn three, take off a counter, not yet. Turn four, whoo, I got it. And then players would attack with it. Because they've been waiting so long. They've been waiting four turns. They wanted to use it. The problem is, when you cast a creature, you're not allowed to attack it unless it has haste,

because of summoning sickness, right? Creatures can't attack the turn you play them. So the problem was, people really had this desire to attack with it, because they felt they'd been waiting so long that when they finally had access to it, they wanted to use it. But the problem was, that's not the rules of the game. The game doesn't let you do that. And so we try to do a bunch of things to communicate to people, hey, hey, hey, creatures have summoning sickness. You can't do this. And so we tried a bunch of different templating things. We tried just spelling out directly in the rules. First,

we tried like in the reminder text and realized no one read the reminder text. Then we tried putting it directly in the rules. But no matter matter what we did the majority of people just kept attacking with it and so we were trying to figure out how do we keep people from attacking with it and finally the solution was stop trying to keep people from attacking with it let them attack with it we gave them haste

all the creatures came in with haste they were allowed to attack right away and the solution to the problem was instead of trying to make players act the way you wanted them to make, make what you were doing act the way they wanted it to make. So what I said in my speech is, instead of changing your players to match your game, change your game to match your players. So one of the things in general, there are things in life that are so fundamental

that they change the way humans function. Like I remember, for example, the first time I got an answering machine. So for those that are too young to remember life pre-answering machines, once upon a time, if someone called you on the phone, if you weren't there,

remember, there was no, this was before cell phones or anything, phones were plugged into the wall. They were at a location. So if somebody wanted to call and talk to you, you had to be at a location that they knew where you were and you had to pick up the phone

and talk to them. So the idea was, if I wanted to communicate to somebody, I had to catch them at home. And so it was, it was troubling at times sometimes because if I could not catch them, I could not talk to them. There were times when I had something important to say to somebody

and it could take a week or more to somehow catch them at home. So eventually, I remember I got a gift. I was in college, I believe, at the time. And my parents gave me a gift. It was an answering machine, which is brand new at the time. And my parents gave me a gift. It was an answering machine, which is brand new at the time. And an answering machine for those, obviously, you know, someone could call and if you weren't home, it could take a message. They could leave a message for you. And that was revolutionary. It really changed

how you functioned. Because before, if you knew that someone needed to contact you, you had to be near a phone. And once again, this was before cell phones, before the phones were on you. And that was very fundamental, just in the way it acted, the way people responded. Knowing

that there was a place by which I could leave information, that someone could retrieve the information, changed how you functioned. And then again, cell phones came off, and now the phone is on you. That completely changed how you functioned. Once upon a time, if I wanted to meet someone somewhere, we had a plan ahead of time

to know where to meet. And if one of us was late, the other could just sort of wait there and eventually they'd leave and they'd go, well, I guess they're not coming but there's no way,

you know, there's no way to communicate. Now it's like, I'll just, when I get there, I'll call you on your phone because you have a device on you, you know.

And these are just examples of things that fundamentally change how humans behave. I'm not saying that you can't do that. It is possible to change human behavior. But it is really, really hard to change human behavior. And so a lot of what I'm saying is, assuming your game is so revolutionary that it's going to change the fundamentals of how humans function is a bit naive.

And so one of the big lessons I learned, and this is the reason I, one of the things about my speech was I put the lessons in order for a reason. This was a very important lesson and I wanted to start with this lesson because the idea is when you are designing a game,

like one of my, if you follow along with my, with my writings and stuff, one of the big things is, and I spend a lot of time on this, which is you have to understand who you're designing for. There's a very popular expression, it's know your audience. Well, guess what? Your audience is human. And that means you have to understand how humans function.

One of the things that's interesting is I definitely take psychology classes. And my mom, for those who don't know, I mean, she's retired now, but was a psychologist. And one of the things that's interesting as you study psychology is people are individuals. But there definitely are, as you study humanity, as you study people as a whole, there are definitely a lot of people function in certain ways. There's a truism. Like one of the things that's really interesting is they'll do experiments where they go around the world and they will, you know, ask different things from different cultures things. And certain things change from culture to culture. That they're nurture, not nature-based. You know, that, oh, you learn to do something, you've learned it, and it's a cultural thing. And that you go to one culture and people do it a certain way and do another culture a different way.

A good example there is the idea sort of, there's a lot of cultural things about what's acceptable and what's not and morals and values. And that tends to be very cultural. That what is right and what is wrong can change greatly from culture to culture. But there are other things that transcend that, that are sort of human things. For example, one of them is emotions. Like when they study emotions, it's not like, oh, well, some people have certain emotions, some people have some other emotions. No, no, no. Emotions are pretty basic to the human experience.

That the idea of being happy or sad or fearful or angry or disgusted, you know, those are all really, really basic human feelings. And so one of the things you find as you sort of do studies around the world is that there is things that tie humans together. So the reason I bring up emotions is one of the ongoing themes you'll hear throughout all my talks is I want you to understand your audience and I want you to understand how your audience functions. And so it's really important to realize that humans, one of the things

that unifies how humans function is emotions. That it is a common bond that runs throughout all of humanity. All humans function. Like, it's very interesting. They've done this thing where they take faces of people sort of expressing emotions and they go around the globe.

You know, they'll go to places where you know, they'll go to the deepest, darkest, like, villages in the middle of nowhere who haven't had outside, you know, haven't, don't even interact with the outside world. And they'll ask them, like, they'll show faces of, is this guy happy or sad? That's universal. People can look at a human face and know the emotion on the face. That is not something that is learned.

That is something that is intrinsic to the human behavior. Or I mean, I guess it's learned at some level, but it's not culturally learned. Like happiness is happiness. All humans have happiness. It's not like some cultures have happiness and some cultures don't have happiness. And so one of the things that like one of my ongoing themes that I want to stress here is that what you're trying to do is you're trying to make your game so that you understand the audience as you're making it. That, once again, the idea of I'm going to make people fundamentally change to adapt to my game is, like I said, I'm not saying you can't make games that change people. And I'm not saying you shouldn't try to make games that change people. make games that change people, and I'm not saying you shouldn't try to make games that change people, but assuming that your game will change people, assuming that people will

just function in a way that is not how people normally function, is not going to lead to success. Now, one of the things that's interesting is, in my job, I'm often called to do things we haven't done before. So I am called to shock people, and that's okay. That's different than what I'm talking about. So I am called to shock people. And that's okay.

That's different than what I'm talking about. One of the things I'm trying to figure out is, like, when humans are faced with something they don't know, they have to figure it out. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, humans are creatures of comfort, obviously. Habit is important to humans. But humans also like surprise.

Those who know my, you know, they like comfort. They like surprise. They like completions. Those are basic elements of how humans function. So it's not that you can't do new and different things and try to make people act in different ways. But whenever I try to make something to fundamentally make people act differently than how they've shown they normally will act, it's an uphill battle. And a lot of what I've learned in magic is when I have a new mechanic what we try to do is we like to take our mechanic

and play test it with people that don't know what we're doing, Magic players but one of the things is Wizards has a lot of employees, R&D is a tiny fraction of Wizards so we have a lot of people who do play Magic who work at Wizards one of the nice things

is if you work on a game, that's what you do for a living, most people say, hey, I should learn how to play the game. I make this game. I should know how to play it. So most people at wizards, a good, I mean, the vast majority know how to play magic. And so we have a lot of people we can test on that don't necessarily know things. And so one of the things we do all the time is we will do a play test. We'll put words on cards, meaning the things we do all the time is we will do a playtest. We'll put words on cards, meaning we will spell out on the cards what the cards do. So you can read the card.

I mean, that information is there. But then we do no other help. We don't guide them. We don't tell them anything. We just let them play and watch what happens. And one of the things that's very interesting that we... I learned that not just from watching our playtests, but we do what's called focus groups where we get people who are players or non-players, whatever, and we put them

on the other side of a two-sided glass, and then we watch them play. So there's a lot of times where what you do is you get people to play, and then you watch them play, step back and watch them play. So here's some things I've learned from years and years and years of doing this. Number one is people don't really read the card. They kind of read the card. They want to get a gist of what they think it does. But as soon as they think they understand it, they stop reading. That like literally they read enough until they get to the point where they think they know what it is

and then they stop. And a lot of times people will make mistakes that the card just tells them how to do it. If they had just completely read the card and understood the card, they wouldn't have had a problem. But they don't. Humans are pretty famous for jumping to conclusions. And so one of the things that's really important, like one of the things I'll talk a lot about is the reason you want to match expectations is you just make your game easier for people to learn. That one of the giant things of game design in general is what I call barrier to entry. That there are points when people can check out of your game. Well, the biggest time people check out of your game is when they're trying to learn your game.

That people go, okay, I want to learn this, hopefully there's some impetus to learn and maybe they know somebody who already plays who enjoys it or whatever. There's something about the game that drives them and they want to learn. They will then give it a shot and at the end of that period,

if they weren't happy, if it wasn't a good experience for them, most people, not all, but most people go, yeah, okay, I tried that. No, I'm not doing that.

And so the biggest exit point for better entry, the biggest time when people will leave your game is when they are learning your game. So one of the things that's really important is making sure that your game functions intuitively, that your game functions the way people expect it to function. And that one of the things, and I'm going to hit the theme again and again,

is you want to understand what your audience expects and then deliver on your audience's expectations. Now, once again, that doesn't mean you can't surprise them. It doesn't mean you can't do things that are different than what they expect. You can, but you can't disorient them on every level of your game. Your game can't be nothing is what you expect. Because I'm telling you, if they play your game and there's no sense of comfort there, once again, remember, comfort, surprise, completion. In that order.

Okay? This is communication theory. The first thing you have to do is make someone feel comfortable. Nobody wants surprise until they feel comfort. And so the beginning of your game is you need to get them to understand the basics of what your game is so they go, oh, I see what, okay, I got it. I understand what you're trying to do. So the beginning of your game is you need to get them to understand the basics of what your game is. So they go, oh, I see what, okay, I got it. I understand what you're trying to do.

And when I talk a lot, for example, about, you know, 10 things every game needs, one of the things that I got into was the idea of your game needs a simple, easy, graspable concept. That's why I talk about the hook. Now, the hook usually is something, a step above that, something sexy to draw them in. But inherent in the idea of a hook is I can sum up what my game is about so you can get the essence of what my game is. You know, magic at its core is fighting with magic. That's what it's about. You know, we're magic users and we're fighting. You know, you don't need to know the word planeswalker. You don't need to understand all the logistics of how exactly everything works. That's in a nutshell what it is.

And that sounds like fighting with magical duels. That sounds like fun. So remember that one of the things when I talk about fighting human nature, what I mean is you have so many battles with your game. You've got to get somebody to learn your game. You've got to get somebody to want to play your game a second time. You want to get someone to continue to play your game. You've got to get somebody to learn your game. You've got to get somebody to want to play your game a second time. You want to get someone to continue to play your game. You want to get someone to invest in what you're doing,

to learn about your game, to want to get better at it. There's a lot of things you're trying to get your players to do. And part of that is you need to make them feel comfortable, first and foremost. They have to understand what's going on. Now, once again, we'll get to surprise. You have to excite them.

You have to do some things they don't expect. I'm not saying, yeah, if everything is running the mill, at some point they go, yawn, I'll move on. I mean, they might also leave your game because nothing about them in trances, you know. Like, here's the double-edged sword you have to deal with. On one side, you want to make sure here's the double-edged sword you have to deal with. On one side, you want to make sure they can understand it

and appreciate it and that they aren't overwhelmed by it. But on the other side, you want it to be enough different, enough novel, that they're like, ooh, this is fun. This is, you know,

I haven't done this before. And there's a balance you want to get there. There's a balance between being easy to understand and being novel. So this first lesson, fighting human nature,

I'm not talking about the novelty at all. Humans like surprise. Humans like novelty. So this lesson is not don't have novel things. What this lesson is, is be careful when you make your game what your audience expects to do and be really, really careful when your game fights that expectation.

Because if your game is fighting sort of what the people's intuition is, they're going to keep getting it wrong. And once again, we learned this lesson during suspend, but I will just repeat it one more time, which is it doesn't matter if you clearly spell out to your audience what they're supposed to do. Suspend clearly spelled out what it was supposed to do. It's a little confusing, I guess, because it had a lot of operations to it.

But this idea that, oh, no, no, as long as I explain to my audience, things will be fine, not good enough. It is not good enough. It's not a matter of just explaining. People, and once again, you will write rules. People will read as little of your rules as they can. People will try to figure out your game without reading your rules if they can help it.

And even if they read your rules, most people do not read all the rules. They skim the rules. They just, they want to figure out the thing they need to know, skim to find it, find it good, got it, and go. Like, one of the things, for example, with focus testing is I've watched people play games,

not just Magic, but different games through focus testing. And it is banging your head on the table frustrating at times because there are things that people will do where they just clearly, they will just not even try to use any of the tools you have

to help them learn how to play. You know, you will have, you will spend months and months and months, sometimes years, fine-tuning your rules to get it to a precision so you can teach people what you want to teach them. And they'll just ignore it.

Worse yet, the craziest thing is they'll read the rules and they'll still get it wrong. You know, they'll even, because they'll just jump to conclusions. People will jump to conclusions. And really, a lot of what this lesson is saying is, is people have a natural, like, one of the things about writing, back in my writing days,

one of the things they teach you is, there are certain expectations for how stories function. There are certain ways, there are certain kinds of stories, there are certain structures

to stories. And that, it's not saying that you can't ever break those structures, but you need to break them for a reason, and not just to break them.

Like, you should not write a story where things don't function the way stories function just to do it. As a general rule of thumb, that's horrible. Doing things just to do them, actually, that's a whole lesson I'll get to later. You want to make sure that what you are doing naturally flows.

And that's one of the reasons playtesting is so important, is you want to make sure that your audience, that what your audience's gut instinct is, lines up with what you're asking them to do. Because if their gut instinct is wrong, then you're going to run into problems time and time again. And that's why I think the best game makers understand, oh, so for example, here's a story.

This is from a story from A Whack on the Side of the Head, so for example, here's a story. This is from a story from A Whack on the Side of the Head, my favorite book by Roger Van Eck. He talked about how they were trying to figure, they went to a college and they were trying to figure out where to put the sidewalks. They wanted the sidewalks

to be the most efficient possible. Because there was a grass, there was like a big grassy, you know, giant grassy center court. And they wanted to put sidewalks in, you know, paths so that people could walk on the paths. But they didn't know what was the correct way to do it. How do people want to walk? Do they want to walk straight across?

Do they want to kind of curve? Like, what was the way to do it? And so the solution they finally came up with was don't put it in the end. Just let people walk across the lawn. And then come back in a month after school started and see what's worn. What natural path did they take? You know, when people weren't, had no, you know,

the idea was let people kind of naturally form their path and then once we realize that, then turn those into the actual paths. And I think that is very similar to what we're talking about here, which is that part of what we're talking about here, which is that part of what you're trying to do on some level is, metaphorically what I just explained,

is you want to make your, you want to figure out what pathways your audience wants, your players want, and sometimes what you do is put it out there and see where they go. What do they want to do? How do they want to do it? And that one of the things you have to be open with as a game designer is being open to

they may not do it the way you first thought to do it. And the reason is that you have a game designer's mind. There's things you're trying to solve and there's a lot of attraction to things that are simple. There's a lot of attraction

to things that combine components to lower complexity. There's a lot of attraction to things that are simple. There's a lot of attraction to things that combine components to lower complexity. Like, there's a lot of things you as a game designer want to do to make things, I don't know, feel better. And a lot of times those instincts are dead on. But sometimes they tend to fight what players want to do. Sometimes you'll talk yourself out of, like, well well, like a good example is, I mean, I actually use this, I use this example later on for a different lesson, but I won't go into the specifics of it. But there was a mechanic that I, someone playtested it and they used it a certain way. And they're like, aren't players just going to do this? And my answer was, oh, no, no, no, they're not going to do that because that's not, you know, I don't think they'll do that. I think they're going to do this

other thing. And he's like, well, but that's, if they want to win, this is the way they should do it. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, but that's not the fun way to do it. They should do it this other way. And I just didn't listen to him, you know, and really what he was saying was, he's like, look, I'm going to try to do what I'm going to do, and this is natural. It seems like what I, according to what you're doing, this seems what I'm supposed to be doing. And I talk myself out of it. And you really, really have to listen to your playtesters.

Your playtesters are going to give you goals and information about what is and isn't matching their own intuitions. They're not going to word and light that, by the way. They're not going to say, I have an intuition this.

They're just going to say that things feel off or things feel wrong. And once again, the reason you want to do a lot of different playtesting with different people is any one individual might believe a certain thing

or feel a certain way. But what you'll find is people as a whole will tend to lean in one direction. That human nature will kick in and usually there's something

that the majority will do. That happened with Suspend. Suspend is a good example. There are people I met, Eric Lauer being one of them, who is completely, that's not how they function. You know, Eric is a very logical person,

and to him, look, there's a rule. When creatures come into play, you can't attack with them. Well, why does this one work differently than that rule? That was, that, our thing was hard for him. It didn't intuitively mess

how he thought the game would work. But he was the minority. The majority of players didn't feel that way, didn't function that way. So we made the change because we wanted to match where the majority of players were at.

But be aware when you're testing that there are going to be individuals that don't follow that. It's not 100% of your audience. Human nature is consistent overall, but it's not consistent on a person-by-person basis. There might be things that most people do that one individual person can't do, which

is why playtesting with a group of people is important. You want to not just try one or two because you can get swings when you're using a small sample size. You need to test enough. So another thing, by the way, is let me talk about complexity a little bit. Another thing, by the way, is let me talk about complexity a little bit. One of the other big things that as a game designer you're always facing is the specter of complexity. When I talk about our exit points, one of the big things that causes exit points is complexity.

People, as a general rule, don't like to feel dumb. And that when they can't get something, when they're trying to play a game or do it, do whatever, if at some point they just can't understand something, they quit it because it makes them feel bad, that you don't want to feel bad about yourself. And there's a point in which you're like, I don't understand this. I don't want to deal with it anymore. It just, it's making me feel bad about me. Now, be aware, once again, there's a big difference between what we call core and casual gamers. Core gamers are gamers that like gaming is their hobby. They are dedicated to gaming. They are hardcore. They are serious about their gaming. And a core gamer is willing to spend a lot more time and energy figuring something out. They'll play much more complex games.

They'll play more copies of the game without completely understanding what's going on. Like a core gamer will often play the same game multiple times without completely understanding it so they can figure it out. But that's a core gamer. That's someone who's like gaming is their thing. A casual gamer is somebody who gaming is fun. It's usually more social. But it's something that they enjoy doing. but they don't do it as often, usually.

And a casual gamer, it's more about the experience. It's less about sort of conquering the rules, that the gaming is a means usually to some other things, not a means unto itself. With a core gamer, the game itself is a lot of what they're shooting for. So with a casual gamer, one of the things is their bar is much lower. They're not going to play multiple times.

Like, one of the things they used to say is you need to be able to give an elevator pitch of your game. And what I mean by that is describe your game in just a few senses to get somebody to play. Why should I play this game? Well, here is, in a very short amount of time, in just a few sentences, something that makes me go,

oh, that sounds interesting. Now, your elevator pitch doesn't have to be verbal. Like, one of the things magic can do is, like, look at these cards. Oh, these are really pretty. I mean, there's different ways to draw people in. It could be visual. It could be oral. I mean, it could be, there's lots of ways to do it.

But you need something that says, okay, in a very short period of time, in under 30 seconds, I make people go, ooh, that's interesting. I want to know more. Then, when you're teaching them, what you want to do is, at least for a casual player, you want to sort of have really no more than five minutes to explain the rules. And even then, the shorter it can be, the better. A more core gamer is willing to play through an entire game without understanding what's going on.

But a casual gamer, if they finish the first game and they don't understand what's going on, meaning, A, they didn't have fun, and B, they don't understand things, they're more likely to walk away. So another thing that's really important about sort of matching intuition and matching human nature, if you will, is the more that you do what the player expects you to do,

the lesser it is to learn. The easier learning is. That if I want you to play a game and my first intuition, the first thing I would do is wrong, is not playing the game correctly, well then I'm just more likely to bounce off the game. But if I do something and my gut instinct is to do something and that's just the right thing to do, it'll feel more natural. And that's a general sense of, I don't think people think of games this way, but when people, for example, let's use my dressing room metaphor. I want to buy a piece

of clothing. So I go to the store and I take it So I go to the store, and I go to the dressing room, and I put it on. And I look at it, and I go, do I like how it feels? Do I like how it looks? Am I happy with the experience that is this piece of clothing? I would argue that games, there's a dressing room period, that when you first enter a game, the first time you play a game, you are trying that game on for size. Do I like it? Do I like how it feels? Do I sort of like how I look playing it? And the

thing is, the more negative emotions that are attached to that experience, the more I feel awkward or I feel dumb or I just feel out of sorts. You know, if I play the game and I'm happy and I'm laughing and I'm having fun and I'm, you know, it is creating positive emotions, then that's a good dressing room experience. I'm like, ooh, this dress looks good or this shirt looks good or these pants look good and I'm buying it, you know. But if I have a negative experience and I'm like, oh, I don't understand or wait a minute, that doesn't feel right. Or if I have some experience where I'm ease, um, where something just feels off, I'm more likely to give up. I'm more likely to go, eh, not for me. These pants, not for me. You know, the shirt, not for me. The dress, not for me. Whatever I'm trying on, not for me.

Um, and that, I think one of the things when I talk about, um, fighting against human nature is an uphill battle is you don't want an uphill battle. You don't want a battle. When you're trying to get someone to learn a game, you want to be careful. I mean, once again, it's not that players can't have any stress in the system, but you want the stress in the right places.

You want them, like for example, if there are a lot of interesting decisions and there are hard decisions to make, that's not necessarily going to drive a player away I mean it can depending on the kind of player but pretty much like oh here's a neat and interesting decision that is more fun

you know but I don't understand how to play that's not fun you know you're willing to accept a little bit of it because in learning there's like okay I don't know and I need to do things to know but fundamentally there's a point in which you're like okay i just don't get it okay moving on not for me not my pants not you know i've tried it it's not for me um and that one of the things

that is so important about matching the player expectation is that when things make players disconnect, that's a negative emotion that just, you know, leans them closer to stepping away from your game. And so one of the things that I talk about, not wanting to fight human nature, is you want to sort of have your game, when someone plays it, it just feels right. And, I mean, I'm going to get into this a little bit on my next, I mean,

notice these podcasts are not consecutive, but I'll be doing the series from time to time. And next time I'm going to talk a little bit about perception. So this overlaps that lesson. But you do want things to feel correct for the audience. And it's really important that when they first start playing, you want your rules to feel correct. You want your gameplay to feel correct. And part of doing that is understanding expectations and meeting expectations. Now, once again, that is not saying you can't surprise people. That is not saying you can't do something they don't expect.

That's fine. And by the way, that is fun. The correctly, surprise correctly used is a lot of fun. But the place not to put that is where it's like, well, people would expect to do this, so I'm just going to change this for no reason. I'm just going to change it to change it. I'm just going to do this to be different.

That is very dangerous. And like I said, I'm not saying you can't do that, but there needs to be purpose behind it. You need to be making the change very much because you mean to make the change. So one of the things I'm trying for each of these talks is to start talking about the takeaway. So my big takeaway is the importance of playtesting and the importance of understanding. So it's not just a matter of playtesting. It's a matter of when people play, watching people,

and try to get a sense of where there's discomfort. I mentioned this before in another podcast, but one of the signs of whether or not your game is succeeding is by watching the emotions of the player. Are they experiencing things that are, in general, are they having positive emotions? And that doesn't mean, for example, they can't, like, yes, people can get puzzled by things, or people can have moments, like,

I'm not saying that all your emotions need to be happy emotions, although, be careful. In general, you know, you don't make games too many unhappy things. There's times and places for games like that. I'm not saying you can't make them, but you need to be careful. In general, you know, you don't want to make your games too many unhappy things. There's times and places for games like that. I'm not saying you can't make them, but you need to be careful with that. But you want to make sure that whatever it is you want your players to experience, like, and this is an upcoming lesson, too. These all tie together, which secretly is the last lesson.

You want to make sure that when you are playtesting and watching, you want to understand what are you trying to evoke out of your audience and then watch and make sure that is happening. And that, another thing is, after you're done playtesting, this is important, once you're done playtesting, the next thing you want to do is you want to get feedback directly from your audience. In R&D, we tend to write up notes. Usually when you do focus testing, you talk directly with them.

You have somebody who's an expert at asking questions, usually not you, come in and ask the questions. It's important, by the way, that the people answering the questions don't think that you are the person that has anything to do with the game if you happen to be the one asking them questions. Once again, I'll stress this again. If people believe that saying something bad will upset the person they're talking with, they won't say it. It's just general human nature that, don't fight human nature. Generally, that if I feel like, oh, I say something and I'm affecting the person right across from me, like, oh, well, I'm not, you know, you've learned sort of societally to not do that.

So if you are the one asking questions about your game, do not let them know that you're the one that made the game. It will warp their answers. But anyway, talk to them. Get feedback. Find out what they like and didn't like.

And then, if something didn't work for them, try to figure out why it didn't work. What about it? A really good question to ask people

if they do something incorrect is what do they expect to happen and why do they expect that to happen? You'll get very illuminating answers. A lot of times you'll say, oh, well, I expected this because blah. And you're like, oh, that's a very good point. Okay, let me take that into account. And you can learn a lot of things. Wow, I'm hitting, it's funny.

As I'm talking, I'm realizing how many other lessons I'm hitting. But I will come back around. Anyway, I'm not too far from my daughter's school today, so let's wrap this up. So anyway, you do not want to fight human nature if you can help it. And that one of the things that, in short, what that means is

when you make your game, you want to understand the essence of your game. What is your game trying to do? You want to have a nice elevator pitchable version of it that you can explain to somebody. And then you want to make sure that your game flow-wise matches the expectations. Meaning when you give the elevator pitch, you're going to set expectations. And this is really important, too. A lot of matching human behavior is proper expectation setting. That you want to make sure that your audience knows what they're expecting so they can expect the right thing.

If you've set false expectations, the problem you run into is people will be ill at ease. They will feel bad because they expected one thing and got a different thing. So sometimes with human nature, it's a problem of not properly setting the expectations for what to expect. That if you set it properly, it will match human behavior, you just set it up incorrectly. That's a very common problem. incorrectly. That's a very common problem.

So anyway, I'm hoping today that you see your audience is human. They have certain expectations. It is your job as the game designer to understand those expectations and pick your battles carefully. Once again, I'm not saying you

can never sort of fly against expectation or intuition, but you really got to be doing it for a reason. And don't do it a lot. In general, you should understand what your audience expects, how they expect it, and then use that as a template to figure out how best to make your game.

And I will almost just go, I believe in this thought, which is you, the person making the game, are trying. Your goal is not to test your audience necessarily. Your goal is to provide an experience for your audience. And that involves testing them, but you're not testing what they're willing to do to play the game. That's not where you want to test them.

You don't want to test them to see, are they willing to do this? You want to test them in, here's the fun thing, here's the things they want to test them. You don't want to test them to see are they willing to do this. You want to test them and here's the fun thing. Here's the things they want to do and test them in the spaces they want to be where the fun lies.

Once again, I'm talking about lots of other lessons. But anyway, human nature, it's important to understand that you need to understand human nature

to be a game designer. Follow that through. Understand what your game, what your players want. Use play testing to understand that. Talk with them to understand it. And then, once again, do not change the players

to match your game. Change your game to match your players. Okay, guys. I'm now in my parking space. We all know what that means. It means 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.