Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #345 - Twenty Lessons: Resonance

Episode Date: July 1, 2016

Mark's third podcast in a series of 20 from GDC.

I'm pulling out of a driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my 20 lessons series. So I did a podcast at GDC this last year. It was 20 years, 20 lessons, about the 20 or 20 of the lessons I've learned in 20 years of making the same game. And so I decided to take each of these lessons and put it into its own podcast. So I've already done the first two ones. I talked about how fighting against human nature is the losing battle.

I talked about why aesthetics matter. Well, today I'm going to talk about why resonance is important. So I'm going to talk about resonance, what it is, and then talk about what it matters for gameplay and why you should care about it. Okay, so to begin with, let's talk about the example i gave for each of my lessons i started by telling a story so this story goes back to innistrad actually innistrad and dark ascension um so what happened was one of the techniques that we learned because innistrad was my my first time doing uh top down design uh not magic's first time. Magic had already done both Arabian Nights and Champions of Kamigawa.

But I was on neither of those design teams. So the first time that I was on a design team, let alone running one, leading one, was in the Shrod. And so the idea was, walking in, I knew that we were trying to do Gothic horror. And that I wanted the design to capture the essence of Gothic horror.

So one of the techniques that I tried is, so Jenna Helland was the creative representative for both Innistrad and Dark Ascension. One of the things we like to do is we like to make sure that we have a representative from the creative team to sort of be there to make sure that as we're building the design, that we're sort of staying true to what the creative as we're building the design, that we're sort of staying true to what the creative is, what the story is, what the art is, you know, that we're matching the overall sense of the creative. And especially true on Innistrad because it was a top-down design. We really wanted to make sure that the design of the set and the feel of the world were really linked up.

So one of the assignments I gave to Jenna was, I said, here's what I want you to do. Come up with names that sound like really good names for the set. Get good evocative names. And so Jenna did that. And so what she did is she brought the names to the meeting. And what we would do is we literally would go around. People would pick a name. Sometimes we'd randomize the names.

And then we as a team would design cards for it. You know, and it's how, there's a whole bunch of cards we designed. Evil Twin was designed that way. Bump in the Night was designed that way. You know, Wooden Steak, stake, graveyard shovel, black cat. There was a whole bunch of cards. We said, okay, black cat is a good example. We're like, okay, we want to do a black cat.

What would you expect a black cat to be? And we walked through, we're like, okay, well, black cats are unlucky. So clearly, somehow, crossing this cat in some way is unlucky. Like, well, what if somehow when it died, you know, crossing the cat is messing with the cat, and when it dies, something bad happens? Like, what could it be? Oh, what if it's a discard?

You know, what if we make it a zombie cat, because we're in a gothic horror set, and it's like, okay, don't mess with the black cat, which was literally a black cat, and it was unlucky to kill it, because it then made you discard a card. And so, you know, we would sort of start from the top up, start from the top and work our way down. And we ended up with a lot of really good cards.

Okay, so why do I bring up this example? Well, it gets us to a concept called resonance. So here's the way I like to explain it. Here's my little metaphor. I've already talked in a previous podcast about how your audience is humans. You have to understand human behavior, human perception. Okay, you've got to design to humans. That's who your audience is.

Well, another important thing to understand about humans is they come preloaded. What I mean by that is when somebody comes to your game, they're not a blank slate. It's not as if they have no life experiences. It's not as if nothing has already shaped how they see things. And so one of the things that, one of the tools you have available to you is not just the tools that you have at your disposal from, you know, external to the project, but also you have your audience's preloaded knowledge. And what I mean by that is, I'm going to take zombies as my example.

That's why I use an example in my podcast, in my speech. Okay, let's take zombies. We put zombies in IndieShrod. Okay, but we didn't just... Zombies weren't this completely unknown thing. That most of the audience had a pre-knowledge of zombies. That they'd interacted with zombies

through pop culture, for example. They'd seen TV shows and movies and read books or comics. They've done a lot of things in which they've interacted with zombies. That zombies meant something and they felt about zombies in a certain way. That one of the things about resonance is a couple of things. First off, there is expectation.

That when you play around in a space where the person knows the thing, they're aware of the thing, then it allows you to shortcut. And, you know, A, it has some pre, there's ideas that come with it already. You know, when people think about zombies, for example, when you go to movies and TVs and stuff, that zombies are this slow prodding force. Like the thing I always like to say is zombies are an interesting horror villain in that no one zombie is particularly that threatening. That, you know, if you have a zombie,

any human probably can handle one zombie, especially if they have a weapon. You know, zombies are slow. They're dumb. You know, they're not really organized. You know, they're after your brains. But, eh, you know,

any one zombie, a human with a weapon, can handle. What makes zombies dangerous is not that there's a singular zombie. Singular zombies aren't super dangerous. What makes them dangerous is that they come in large numbers. That they're just going to overwhelm you. Yeah, you can kill some zombies. You can kill a zombie, five zombies, ten zombies, twenty zombies.

At some point, they's overwhelming. At some point, you literally just can't kill any more zombies because you're so exhausted from killing whatever number you've already done. And that's the scary part of zombies is that they come in this never-ending wave of zombies. That there's always more coming. That zombies are kind of associated with a zombie apocalypse. It's not as if you fight a zombie in a world in which, eh, there's one zombie to fight. No, you're in a world in which most everything has become a zombie. And zombies also have this scary element of,

as they kill people, they turn them into zombies. And so your zombie army just grows. As the zombies win, they just make more zombies. Okay, all that, by the way, pre-exists. Your zombie army just grows. As the zombies win, they just make more zombies. Okay. All that, by the way, pre-exists. Magic didn't invent any of that. All that, long before magic existed, before 1993, all that was true. So, resonance brings with you just pre-existing knowledge.

And it brings with you sort of an emotional relationship with the subject at hand. That zombies behave in a certain way. So, like, one of the things when I was making the zombie deck, you know, the zombies in Innistrad was, I was able to say, okay, what was the expectation of zombies? What do people already know about zombies that they would expect zombies to do? And what is the emotional connection to zombies? How do zombies work? You know, how do I get people to, like, for example,

I was trying to create a sense of fear in the set. You know, I was trying to create, I was doing gothic horror. I wanted people to be afraid. So how do I do that? What do I do to make that happen? And I'm like, okay, I'm using monsters. Well, monsters inherently are scary. And when I take zombies, I go, okay, okay,

zombies are scary. Why are zombies scary? Well, they're not scary because any one zombie necessarily is particularly scary. They're scary because they keep coming. Okay, well, that gave me a lot of vantage point for how to design them. Because what I said is, I didn't need to make them particularly big. It wasn't like any one zombie was particularly threatening. In fact, here's a really good example. One of the things we wanted to do, and in fact we did this in the design meeting, is we said, okay, I want a big scary monster for each of the monster tribes. I want like, what's the scariest version of the monster you can think of?

So for vampires, I made Count Dracula became Olivia Valerian. But I mean, the idea of, you know, it's the lord or lady of the monster you can think of. So for vampires, I made Count Dracula. I became Olivia Valerian. But I mean, the idea of, you know, it's the lord or lady of the vampires. It's the leader of the vampires. This is not just a vampire. This is someone who commands vampires. You know, who could turn you into a vampire. Who has the ability to control you.

Somebody who is scary. So the interesting thing was when we were trying to come up with the scariest zombie, what we ended up making was not a singular creature. We made a spell that summons 13 zombies into play. And then, because it had flashback, it could summon 13 more zombies into play. So what was the scariest thing we could do with zombies? Make 26 zombies. Now note, each of them are 2-2

zombies. Not like scathe zombies where it all started back in early in Alpha. It's not that scary. A 2-2 creature, you can deal with a 2-2 creature. You shouldn't be afraid of a 2-2 creature. But 26 2-2 creatures? Okay.

Now it gets kind of scary. And that was the thing we were working with, is the idea that part of what made our zombies scary was we want to create the sense that zombies keep coming. Endless Rings of the Dead is another really fun card we made. And that idea is however many zombies you had, it made more zombies. I think it was half-rounded down of the zombies.

So if I have four zombies, it makes two more zombies. And then if I don't deal with that, you know, I have six zombies. Well, that makes three zombies and I have nine. Next turn, assuming I haven't dealt with that, it makes four more zombies. It just keeps making zombies. And if you don't deal with it, the zombies start coming in more and more number. It creates waves of zombies. So the reason this is so important is I was able to create a really cool, interesting, flavorful

gameplay, and the reason I was able to do that was I wasn't making something from scratch. I was following expectations. So that's the thing to remember. Resonance does a couple really important things. A, it helps you as a designer because it gives you something that the audience already understands to build off of.

It just makes it easier for you. And it gives you a, because the audience has a relationship with it, has an emotional relationship, it has a built-in sort of, you're able to sort of, I always talk about what you want to do in a game is you want to sort of, you're creating emotional states in your audience. You're trying to make them feel something. Part of having fun is you want to sort of put them through the emotional ringer, if you will. In playing a game, you want highs and lows to happen.

Okay, well, I was doing Innistrad. Innistrad was about making people afraid. So the question was, how do I do that? Well, let's take monsters that they already know. Like, if you notice, for example, Innistrad, all the monsters were very, like, it's not like we made up brand new monsters you've never heard of. It's not like, oh, there's five, you know,

four different kinds of monsters. There's the Gigglepolls and the gigapoles and the flamingos and the flamingers. Like, if we had just made up monsters, they'd just be like, okay, what's this monster? But no, no, no. We made vampires, werewolves, zombies, spirits, which were ghosts, right? We made real, like, monsters that people have equity with, that mean something to them. And that it allowed us to not just fine-tune what we were making. For example, it's a lot easier to say, okay, let's design vampires. Vampires mean something, you know, and I'm able to make mechanics that sort of take place

in that meaning. And that's one of the things that I think is most important understanding why resonance is so important is as a designer you are trying to evoke something out of your audience well guess what if they already have associations built in you know what I'm saying like one of the things that I'm trying to get to today is

you don't need to reinvent the wheel you don't need to start from scratch that one of the things about being a designer is you use the tools at hand and resonance says, hey, work has happened before you. People have told stories before you. People might have made games before you. People have done things in which you are building upon.

In fact, one of the interesting things about magic is there's resonance in magic. Forget resonance outside of magic. We just made, I don't know, the 100th magic set or something. I mean, we've made a lot of magic sets. And so the idea is when we make something, a lot of things are already with equity.

A lot of things already mean something. That not only are we using resonance outside of magic, we're using resonance of magic itself. That a giant growth means something to a magic player. You know, and that when I do a twist on a giant growth, there's already expectations for what a giant growth is. You know, a lot of what we are doing is we are taking things of flavor. Like the game, for example, go back to Alpha, you know, Richard borrowed very liberally from a lot of fantasy sources. You know, you could see influences of Dungeon Dragons, of Tolkien, of Greek mythology, that there's a lot of places where he took monsters that meant something. You know, that a lot of what Alpha did and did really well was said, okay, let's take

existing things people know and then use that as a framework to build off of. And a lot of the reason Alpha was really popular was people had associations with a lot of what he was doing. It's not that Richard never made things up. Magic has made up its own creatures. We have AtoGs and Lurgoids and Vidalcan, and there's things we've made that are uniquely our own. But a lot of what Magic is going for is we are taking the full breadth of the fantasy archetype,

a little bit of the horror archetype, a little bit of the science fiction archetype, that we're taking things that people recognize that have some association with, and then we're using it to build around. We're using it to build off of. And for example, the reason the Innistrad, I think, was so powerful was you came into it with expectations. Oh, vampires.

I know what to expect of vampires. Yeah, those are vampires. Zombies. I know what to expect of zombies. Yeah, those are zombies. And that was a real importance of what we were doing. I think resonance is true in anything.

I think top-down design even more so because you're building off of flavor. Okay, so that leads to the next big question, which is, okay, so you have resonance, you're building off what the audience already knows, but there's something a little more to it beyond that. So one of the stories I tell is Aaron Forsythe, he's the senior director of Magic R&D. He's my boss.

He was tasked with doing Magic 2010. And he came up with a realization. And this was a big turning point for Magic, which was he realized that when he was looking at Alpha and looked at sort of where we were, that we had drifted a little bit. And that one of the big things that he really attached to was the idea of resonance, the idea of the importance of resonance. And a lot of what I think Magic 2010 did said is, you know what, this is a core set. A, he came up with the idea that we can make new cards, which was pretty big. But he also came up with the idea of, you know what, we really need to be hitting,

let's make things people know and make clean, cool, definitive versions of them. And that one of the things that we try really hard is we want to make sure when we're making something, you know, so for example, archetypes talk about, for stories and for characters, So, for example, archetypes talk about, for stories and for characters, the idea is that there are certain things that humans just associate with and work with. If you ever go to, like, TV Tropes is a good example, where TV Tropes talks about all these tropes, archetypes and tropes.

Archetypes tend to be structural and tropes tend to be components, but they're all part of the same thing, which says that there are certain things the audience just relies on. They're shorthand. Like, one of the things is humans sort of are, there are certain kinds of things they're comfortable with. There are certain kinds of stories. And when you take anthropology and you apply it to storytelling,

something like Joseph Campbell, a classic person, who said, okay, I'm going to study the stories that people tell. And what he realized was they really were the same stories. That, for example, Jesus Christ, Star Wars, Harry Potter, those are all the same structure. The same basic story you're telling is the same story. It's somebody who's a little lost in the world who comes to realize that they have an importance that they don't understand. And through their journey, which is really rough at times, they come to see the hero that they are.

And you've seen that story many, many times. Talk about the journey of a mythic hero. That is something that is really core to our identity as humans. There's something about the idea that I'm living a dreary life, but wait a minute. Actually, I'm important. That even though it seems like I'm living a dreary life, but wait a minute, actually, I'm important. That even though it seems like I'm not important, I'm not only I'm somewhat important, I'm very important. And there's something that speaks to us that we want to believe that sort of

the fantasy is, you know, if you're hungry, I'm life. Wait, no, no, no, I matter. I'm really important in some way, you know, and that the story, like, a lot of stories are sort of living through things that are cathartic in nature. And so the idea of archetypal stories, of archetypal characters, of tropes, is this idea that there are things that really resonate. There are things that really connect to people. And I know people, like, the first thing is, oh, those are just cliches. I'm like, well, be careful. I mean, cliches come out of overuse of archetypes and tropes. But a lot of what

they say is the reason cliches are cliches is there's a kernel of truth there that is, you know, it gets overused, but it means something. It represents something. And a lot of the cool idea of tropes is you want to give a current spin to it. You know, a lot of what magic tries to do is we try to figure out what the archetypes are, what the tropes are, and we give a modern twist to it, meaning it's not that we're supposed to do it as always done and not sort of put commentary onto it. One of the great things about stories is what you do is you take a known archetype and then you put the modern twist, meaning you give the modern sensibility to the story archetype.

And the classic example there is, I'll just use a recent example, or not that recent, but somewhat recent. So Shakespeare, for example, made a lot of plays, lasted the test of time. So there was a, you have to go back about 10 years, 10, 15 years, but there was a bunch of, there's a series of Hollywood films where what they did is they said, okay, let's take this

famous story, usually with Shakespearean, sometimes with classical literature, and let's apply it to high school. Let's tell some kids, you know, some stories about kids, high school students, you know, Some stories about kids, high school students, about adolescents. But let's take Shakespearean models and tell a story based on Shakespearean. So what they did is took classic sort of archetypal stories and told modern day stories with them. You know, like Clueless, the movie Clueless, is the novel Emma. You know, Ten Things I Hate About You is Taming of the Shrew. And it was very interesting to say,

I mean, West Side Story goes a ways back, but West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet. You know, that you can take these classic tales and you can tell them in a more modern setting and it doesn't lose any of the, you know, in fact, it takes what is strong about the archetype and then adds a modern sensibility to it. And each of those is a real good example of somebody who's writing from resonance.

And the thing that's important, one of the things that we do now, the reason I bring Magic 2010 up is, it really said to us, okay, one of the things we do now when we build a set is we say, where is the vein of resonance? That every set has to have something where we're like, okay, there's some recognizable things we can work off of here.

Because one of the things we've come to realize is, if we make a world in which you see nothing, I mean, this is even true of magic itself, which is, if you come in and you have nothing to center yourself on, you have no place to start, it is hard to appreciate something new. Once again, if you go back to start, it is hard to appreciate something new. Once again, if you go back to my teaching about communication theory, the first thing is comfort.

Second is surprise, there's completion, but comfort is first. Meaning, if everything is disorienting, if you can't get a foothold, then you have problems sort of digesting something. That if you go to something and everything's so weird and different that there's no vantage point that you just go, I can't relate to it. So one of the things that's important for anything, story, you know, like in writing a story, one of the things you want is you've got to figure out the emotional beats of the character. What is the character going through? I have to find a universal issue

that then I can, because let's say the main character is having a problem with one of their parents. Let's say their mom. Okay. Who can't relate to having a problem with their mom? You know, who, there's just a dynamic relationship between you and your mom. And when

you watch the character have this problem, you know, it's not that the problem's exactly the problem you have, but you can relate to it. Who can't relate not having some conflict with their mother? You know, everybody. It's a universal human thing. But at the same time, everybody loves their mother.

That there's some, you know, there's some relationship there, you know, and that there's conflict, but, you know, there's a dynamic between a relationship with a mother that's really universal. And so if I have a character, and the conflict is about his relationship with his mother, even if there's fantastical

elements or something that's unique about it, at least the audience can relate to that experience. And the same is for magic. I talk about this a lot, that I want to make sure that enough of the gameplay that you're playing, you're familiar with. That I want it to feel like a game of magic. I mean, it's possible for me to take the game of magic and stretch it. And although technically it's the game of magic, it would be so far

away from a normal game of magic. You're like, whoa, what's going on? I'm disoriented. And I've done that. I've actually made designs where early in design, I pulled too far away. People are like, whoa, this is a little too trippy. I need it more attached. So one of the things we do now is when we design worlds, we say to ourselves, okay, we need to have some amount of resonance in it. What is the resonance?

Now, some of the time, it's top-down design. Okay, we're doing Gothic horror world. We're doing Greek mythology world. Okay, we're doing the world in which there's a ton of resonance. I mean, part of our job there is to build off it. Like, okay, I want to be a Greek mythology set. What do I need to do? Another time, it's based in the setting.

A good example right there would be Khans of Tarkir. Khans of Tarkir wasn't a top-down set, but we used a lot of cultural references. You know, it had a lot of Asian influences. For example, the Mardu had a lot of Mongolian connections. The Ozban had a lot of Turkish sort of elements to it. The Jeskai were Shaolin monks that we really went and took real world references

to pull off of. And those also, like, you know, Shaolin monks, like, you think about, you go to cinema, you go to pop culture, and, like, okay, you've seen the bald monk, you know, who's trained in a temple fighting kung fu and, you know, learning the way of the balance of the world. I mean, you've seen that. You've seen that that is a resonant trope that you've seen. You know, and like a lot of people joke,

like there was one of the pictures we had for Just Guy where people kept joking that it was reminiscent of Kung Fu Panda. I'm like, well, it's the same source material. You know, there's a certain posing, that trope space had a certain visual look to it. That's another place, by the way, we also go for resonance. Not just sort of how it feels, but how it looks. That's another big place.

I know Jeremy and his team are always sort of figuring out what's the resonant look angle. We're trying to look like something, but we want to look at something you recognize. It's not just weirdness. It's like, oh, okay, well, we're in Tarkir. We're doing Eastern Asian stuff. Like, what do the temples look like of the Jeskai?

What does the forest of the Sultai look like? We want to tie into things that you have some expectation for. And other times, sometimes what we can do is we can figure out sort of the gameplay like I know

with Zendikar that we were playing very much into Adventure World, and a lot of that was like okay, let's take games like Dungeon Dragon like I know with Zendikar that we were playing very much into adventure world and a lot of that was like okay let's take games like Dungeon Dragons and take movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and sort of get a sense of feel for those I mean we did a little bit of

matching exact things but also sort of trying to match the feel of things and the idea now is whatever we do, wherever we go, we sort of say, okay, where's the resonance? Where's the tropes we can play around with? You know, what's the trope space? And it's a very common thing now when we're building a world, we're like, okay,

what about this world is familiar? In fact, one of the most important things you want to do, and this is, once again, this is Discommunication Theory 101, but you want to say, what is familiar and what is not familiar. So I talked about Hollywood, the three beat in Hollywood, where you take two existing things and you put them together to show the context of what it is. You know, that, you know, I'll try a good example.

I mean, like, for example, let's say I wanted to make a movie that was all about, it was a fantasy world where dinosaurs ran rampant. I might go, Lord of the Rings meets Jurassic Park, or Jurassic World.

I want to be up to date. And the idea is, oh, well, Lord of the Rings says fantasy and epic adventure and Jurassic World says dinosaurs. And you go, oh, okay, you're doing some sort of fantasy, but fantasy in a world of dinosaurs. And what it does in Hollywood is it says, okay, I'm going to take A, a known quantity that's successful,

and B, a known quantity that's successful, and smash them together. And the intersection of them, that's a brand new thing. And so in magic, one of the questions we are always asking ourselves is, what is the resonant thing, and what is the new thing? And the new thing should tie into the resonant thing, but that's something we're always conscious of. You know, when I say resonance is important is, we don't design the magic set anymore without understanding what resonance we're trying to tap into.

What is the thing where the audience, like, if you just, I mean, this is no, if you look at Magic 2010 forward, you know, we really made an effort of going, okay, like, we, when we reveal the name, we always show what we call the key art, which is one singular image. And so normally what you have to do is you get to see the name of the set and its whatever treatment of its logo and you get to see this piece of art. And just from the name and logo and the piece of art, normally people go, ha ha! Like, you know, smiles come across

their face. They have a sense of what, not that they know everything we're going to do, but they understand the general area we're aiming in. You know, that when you saw Innistrad, and just saw the name of Innistrad, and the picture of Liliana sitting on the throne, you're like, oh, we're doing Gothic horror. You know, or we saw Elspeth with the fallen Hydra, and, you know, you saw the name for Theros. You're like, oh, we're going to Greek mythology world, you know.

That when we are able to do that, it really invokes and gives a sense of the feel of the world. And the reason for that, the reason that that singular image, that singular name in Logo, is we're trying hard to make sure that we are connecting and doing something. And so a lot of the point of today is that part of doing your job as a game designer is you want to evoke strong reactions out of your player base. You want to do something where they get excited. Well, guess what?

Before they even came to you, there was things they were excited about that you don't have to create your excitement from pure scratch, that you're allowed to build upon existing things, that the audience already has things that mean something to them. You don't need to start from scratch. Part of what you are trying to do

is you are trying to create emotional feelings. You're trying to sort of bring something to the table to get them excited and invested. And clearly, clearly part of that is you table to get them excited and invested. And clearly, clearly part of that is you have to put your own component in. I am not saying that you can just copy 100% and have something that will be successful. But what I'm saying is, likewise, you don't need to 100% make everything. That there are pre-existing things that your audience has that you can work off of. And that, that is very much, that is as much a tool as any other tool you have at your disposal. And sometimes people don't think of their audience's pre-existing mental state as a tool.

You don't think that, you know, because your audience comes with things already, like, I know some people are like, well, but you didn't earn that. already, like, I know some people are like, well, but you didn't earn that. Somebody else, you know, like, somebody else made awesome zombie movies and zombie shows and zombie comics and made them fall in love with zombies, you know. Somehow, like, well, you have to make them fall in love with zombies on your own way. I'm like, no, no, no. They fell in love with zombies. It's great. I know how to get to take zombies. And clearly, by the way, our goal was not in Innistrad to make...

We weren't trying to make Walking Dead zombies. We weren't trying to make Zombieland zombies. We weren't trying to make World War X zombies. We weren't trying to make, you know, Plants vs. Zombies zombies. We were trying to make Innistrad zombies. Magic zombies. You know, and we worked really hard to sort of, like, for example, the Scobs, the Scobs, that's a real, I mean, obviously it's using Frankenstein as a model, but they don't look like Frankenstein, that is a very sort of unique element that we've created, you know, and we created a whole world in which there are, you know, there's

two different types of necromancers, you know, there's ones that raise the dead and ones that build the dead, you know, and Geese and Girl for, like, You know, there's ones that raise the dead and ones that build the dead. You know, geese and giraffes are like, you know, they're brother-sister that sort of represent the two ways to make zombies. We built a cosmology

around zombies. The zombies in Innistrad are magic zombies and have a magic feel and do a magic thing. It's not that we made zombies, we didn't just copy somebody else exactly,

but we took the, we took the elements that they had introduced and they had sort of made popular and figured out how to spin that to give our thing. We took the archetype, if you will, and put our modern sensibility on it. We made it ours. That's true of the vampires, that's true of

the ghosts, that's true of the werewolves that we made our version of them but we didn't just start from scratch. We didn't just make, you know, well, our vampires and our zombies and our werewolves are unlike any you've ever seen before. No! You know, like, you expect certain things out of your zombies.

And we have to understand, part of resonance is saying, what does the audience expect, and then what can you, how can you change it? So how can you sort of take the known and then combine it with the unknown to make something that together is exciting, that's understandable, but it's something that people can latch onto. Because if you make things that the player has no handhold

to start with, they'll never get attached. They'll never, you need to give them the starting point and resonance is the perfect place that if you can say, okay, the audience, humans as a whole, come into this with some understanding, let's play off that, put our modern sensibility on it. You know, West Side Story was not exactly Romeo and Juliet,

but it had the framework of Romeo and Juliet. You know, star-crossed lovers, people that fall in love, whose families hate each other, you know, the group they come from hates the other group. That's powerful stuff. That goes down to a core identity. It talks about love and talking about, you know, having people that aren't accepted. I mean, it really speaks to a lot.

And so by using resonance, you're able to build off it. Once again, you have to put your own spin on it, but it is a very important and valuable and very successful tool to do that. So that, my friends, is why resonance is important. Okay, guys, I'm now dropping off my daughter. So we all know what that means. This means it's 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. Bye-bye.