Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #391 - Cohesion

Episode Date: December 9, 2016

Mark talks about an important aspect of card design.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work and drop my daughter off at her internship. Okay, so today, today's a designer-y talk. I'm going to talk about a concept called cohesion. And so one of the things is when I see new designers design cards, one of the things that I always notice, not that I... One of the key things I notice is that a common mistake among newer designers is they don't understand the concept

of cohesion. And so I'm going to explain that today. So the idea is, a real similar problem, a real common problem when new designers build is they want to fill up the card with lots of things. First of all, new designers will over-design as a start. It's sort of like, look at all the wonderful things I can do and they're all on the same card. That they tend to over-stuff in general. So the larger issue today, what I want to talk about is the idea that when you design a card, that all the components of the card need to work together.

And a real common thing I'll see when people sort of design is novice designers like to just put a lot of things on the card because those individual things are cool. And the idea sort of is A is cool, B is cool, C is cool. Well, a card with A, B, and C must be even cooler. And the answer is, no, it's not. One of the things that you have to think about when designing, I mean, I'm going to talk about this in the context of magic cards, although I think this is true beyond just magic cards, is people don't see magic cards as a component of things.

It's a singular thing. When people look at a magic card, it's one item. And so everything on that card has to work together. That one of the things that when you're designing, that what you're trying to do is... I know when you're looking at the pieces of things, it's very interesting to be fascinated by the pieces. And I'll use my metaphor right now,

is the jigsaw puzzle. You know, when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle, you get very focused on little tiny things about pieces. Oh, oh, this is the piece that has that guy's head. Like, one of the things that I do, my wife and I do jigsaw puzzles from time to time, and we like to have very complicated, not complicated, sorry, busy jigsaw puzzles. I want a lot of things going on.

I'm not a big fan of, you know, it's a giant blue sky and everything's blue. I like that there's a lot of things going on. Because one of the neat things is, as you do the puzzle, you start to really get into the minutia. And when you put the jigsaw puzzle together, you're like, oh, oh, here's this guy, and he's doing this thing, and that's doing this thing and that's his head and that's his foot. Or sometimes, for example, we'll do a jigsaw puzzle instead of a theme, like candy bars. And I go, oh, that is the eye to kit cat. And that it's fun to really get obsessed on the minutiae. And I think when you do a jigsaw puzzle that because you're so focused on the individual pieces, that you get so micro in what you're doing, that sometimes you don't, like, you forget that in the end, it's the picture.

It's the macro. That when you're designing, I think it's a similar sense of you kind of sometimes forget the jigsaw puzzle for the pieces. for the pieces, that you get so fascinated on the nuance of the pieces that you forget that when people look at the picture, they're looking at the whole thing, the whole card, that you are not making pieces. And one of the things that's hard when you're working on a craft, when you're the designer, that you have great appreciation for the details. And the details are very important. I talk all the time about the importance of details.

But the thing is, that is not how the audience is going to look at the finished product. That one of the things you have to do is always think about, okay, from the consumer end, what are they looking at? And the answer is that they are looking at it as a cohesive whole. That's why I talk about cohesion. So when we make a magic card, it is not a component of pieces. That is not how people look at magic cards. It's a thing. It's a singular card that has a singular meaning that represents a singular thing. So like one of the things when you make a magic card that's really important is it's very easy to want to distance the creator from mechanics, but you can't. That what the card is, when somebody looks at a card,

all the pieces come together to make one singular thing. And so you, designing the card, you have to understand what that is and how those come together. So one of the, I mean, part of today is to understand cohesion, I want to talk about the lessons of cohesion.

If you want to get cohesion into your game, what do you need to do? Well, the first thing you need to do is you have to not think of what you're making as a component of pieces. This is, by the way, also true if you're a game on some level, that as you're making your game, you're so obsessed on the fine pieces of the game that you forget when someone first experiences your game, there's an entity of a whole that they're experiencing. What's the point of the game?

What am I trying to do? Is this a fun thing? You know, and that one of the things that I think it's so easy is to get, you know, not to see the forest for the trees. It's so easy to get caught up in the trees. It's so easy to go, oh, look at this leaf on this tree and forget that. No, no, no, no. To the audience, they, the audience does not have any preconceptions of what you're doing or what you've done.

Like, one of the things that I talk a lot about is when you make something, it's only the finished product that the audience sees. They don't get to see other versions of things you made. They don't get to see competing choices of what you could do. You know, sometimes, for example, we'll make a mechanic and we'll make a change to it. And people are like, oh, there's components I like about the other mechanic better than this mechanic. And it's like, but the audience isn't going to see the choice between the two.

They're just going to see the choice you give them. And that, you know, it's sometimes, for example, it's, I guess my theme today is when you're designing a game, it is so, because you are the person, you're the, you know, you're the mechanic fixing the car, making the car, that you have great nuance for all the component pieces. But that you need to think about how your audience is going to take things in, how they're representing it. And that there is, so I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of a card, per se.

So I want to make a card. Okay. First and foremost, I want to figure out what is the card trying to do? What's the essence of the card? So the first rule is, if your card has more, it does more than one thing, those two things have to have a relationship to each other. And there's a bunch of different ways they can relate to each other, but they need a relationship. You should never have two things on a card and just go, ah, those have got nothing to do with each other. That's just bad card design. So what you want to figure out is

okay, let's say I have two things on a card. What do the two things have to do with each other? Okay, so there's a couple different ways they can matter. One is a direct mechanical relevance. Effect A can interact with effect B. For example, let's say I had a card, I had two activated abilities, and one activated ability says target creature gets plus one plus O to end of turn. And the other ability says target creature gets trample to end of turn. Okay, well those relate to each other. Why?

Because the more power you have, you know, there's a relationship between how much power you have and what trample means. Because if you do more damage and they have toughness, then you get a trample over. So, those two abilities, you go, okay, I see.

They have a relationship to each other. So, number one is you can just have a mechanical connection. That if the two things can be interrelated, people go, Oh, okay, I see. Well, I see why you might want to do thing A and thing B. They have a relationship to each other. Okay, the second thing you can do is you can have them parallel in how they work.

So for example, let's say I have two abilities. One says target attacking creature gets First Strike. Target attacking creature gets Lifelink. Okay, now, those two abilities don't have a particular synergy. First Strike and Lifelink, you know, First Strike helps your creature survive.

Lifelink helps you gain life. Not particularly synergistic. But the idea is is because both abilities affect target attacking creature it feels like okay now it feels like oh I help attacking creatures I can do first striker, I can do lifelink it's not that the two necessarily link together

or have any connection to each other but it feels connected because the two have a parallelism in how they function oh I get it, I'm helping attacking creatures other, but it feels connected because the two have a parallelism in how they function. Oh, I get it. I'm helping attacking creatures. So you can do a parallelism to help them. Another thing you can do is you can connect through flavor.

So sometimes what we do is, okay, these two abilities, like if you took the flavor off of it, they wouldn't make sense. Oh, but with the flavor on it, you go, I get it. It's a this. And a lot of times when you're trying to do stuff with flavors like um you know let's say for example your um you know we were doing black cat in innistrad and so black cat sort of has this whole you know um if it dies a discard thing um and the reason to sort of help make sense is okay, it's bad luck. Well, how do we represent bad luck on a card?

And then a lot of things that once there's some concept to them it helps tie things together and go oh, I see what's going on. So you can tie things together using flavor as a means to tie them together. So another thing you can do is what we call the aesthetic trick

which is what you can do is you can call the aesthetic trick, which is what you can do is you can take some component that can tie between them. So a real good example is numbers. We do this one a lot where I need two effects. The two effects really aren't that connected. They're not mechanically connected. They need to work differently so they're not parallel in how they structure. So what you do is you have some component and numbers are a

real common one. So let's say, for example, I have, you know, draw two cards or counter target spell unless his opponent pays two. Counter target spell unless your opponent pays some amount of mana and draw cards, I mean, they're both blue abilities, but they're not particularly connected. But by saying, okay, I'm going to tie the number two to it. Draw two cards. Discard unless they pay two. Now, all of a sudden, like, okay, aesthetically speaking, there's just a common bond between them. And they start to feel like, okay, there's some connection between them.

So you can use aesthetics sometimes to connect things. But the key is that what you don't want to do is just put two things on the card where the audience can't find a way to connect them. Because the audience will desperately want to connect them. And now, this is something you can use to your benefit, which is the audience assumes that a card goes together. The assumption is when I see something, so there's a dynamic that goes on. This is the human brain, I guess, not just game design. But humans, when they see something, will assume that things go together. In fact, there's a dynamic in game design we talk about, which is the players will assume

the card works. The players will assume. So if you put two abilities on the card, they should be synergistic if they're able to be synergistic, because the assumption will be they're going to be synergistic. That the audience is looking to find the connection. Now, humans love making connections. Connections are a really cool thing. Our brain is sort of drawn to connections. So part of what I'm saying today is there's a lot of different ways to make the connections but you need to do something

the human brain will grab on something but you have some you need to find some way to connect it and the idea is remember first and foremost this is not particularly about cohesion but ties into cohesion

which is the simplicity rule, which is never do more on a card than you need to do. If I can take an ability off a card and the card still is a cool card, do I need that ability? And one of the things to always keep in mind is don't overstuff your designs, whether it be Magic or any game. I often talk about in writing how one of the things I learned early on was nothing should be in your story if it doesn't serve the story. That if I can take out a line and the

story works just as well, then take the line out. If I can take out a scene, if I can take out a plot line, anything you can extract and the thing works okay well that's a sign that you know the the goal of art is to do just as much as you need to do that part of what you want and to make something sort of aesthetic and make something as clean and elegant as possible is don't use things you don't need to use. So when we get down to like a card design, it's kind of like, that one of the number one criticisms I'll give when I see new designers is,

less is more. That you have too many things going on. And the idea that I have interesting things and the more interesting things I pile on the card, the better the card will be is just false. That the best magic cards are magic cards that have one really cool thing. And the reason, by the way, that that's so, the reason that simplicity is important is you want to draw the eye to the thing you want to draw the eye to.

You want your card to be about the thing you want it to be about. You want your game to be about the thing you want it to be about. And the more choices you give to somebody, the more choices they have for where their attention goes. So, for example, one of the things, I'll use photography, one of the things they talk a lot about is the idea of contrast and that if you really want your eye, if you want the eye to go somewhere, you have to understand what's going to draw attention and you don't want to compete for attention. So a real common thing in photography is color.

Certain colors, like red, tends to pull the eye. It's a bright color. So if I want you to notice something in my picture, and I make sure the thing I want you to notice happens to be red, and then everything else in the picture is more muted, your eye goes right to the red thing. But let's say my picture has four red things. Well, then what happens is I'm looking at all the red things, and, well, which red thing do I, you know, you lose control of the ability, like, you want your audience of whatever your art is, be it a game, be it a photograph, be it whatever,

you want them to look at the, you want them to notice the thing that is what makes it shine. And in order to do that, you've got to get things that distract from that away from it. That the goal is not to make people hunt down what the cool part of your whatever is. I talk to this all the time is games. My game should have some cool component. I don't want to fight for that cool component.

I want you to see the cool component. I want to make sure that you discover it. My goal is not to make you hunt for the cool component. And that when you're putting together a card or a game or whatever, extrapolate this, you want to think about what you need. And part of cohesion is saying, okay, is everything working toward the thing I want people to notice? And if anything is pulling focus,

if anything is making your audience look at something other than what you want them to look at or think about or consider or whatever then it is doing a disservice and the idea behind cohesion is part of what how you make art work is you need to understand what it is you are doing so let's say I make a card I make a card in magic what is the point of this card what does it represent what is it what role does it play in the set I'm making? What is its job? What is it trying to do? Because I want to maximize what it does. I want it to shine. And the way for it to shine is I want everything moving in the same direction. I need to have a cohesion of design. I need the design to be telling a singular story and creating a singular pool in a singular direction. One of the things that I know is that people, it is easy to fall in love with, I don't know if complexity is the right word, but I think there's this idea that if something is good,

I think there's this idea that if something is good, then that something will only be, you know, like, I have a cool idea. But wait, I have another cool idea. Wow, why do I just put these cool ideas together? And the metaphor here is, I like ice cream. Ice cream is good. My favorite ice cream, probably chocolate fudge ice cream. Baskin-Robbins makes a chocolate fudge. It's just like really rich chocolate. I like really rich chocolate ice creams.

Okay. Also, I love Alaskan king crab legs. On my birthday every year, I get Alaskan king crab legs. So, mmm, chocolate fudge. Mmm, Alaskan king crab plates. So, mmm, chocolate fudge. Mmm, Alaskan king crab plates. Those are both awesome things. Now, let's say I took Alaskan king crab and dumped chocolate fudge ice cream on them.

Is that good? Is that something, you know what I'm saying? Just because each of those in the component are amazing things, you know, I also like ketchup. Should I throw ketchup on it? You know, I like french fries. Should I put some french fries on it?

Just because individual things are cool in a vacuum doesn't mean they're cool in combination. And that part of designing your art is figuring out what things blend with what things. Let's say you're a chef and you're making a meal. Part of what makes a beautiful meal is figuring out what tastes go well with one another. Because remember, in the end, I'm not making a collection of tastes if I'm a cook.

I'm making a singular thing. When I serve food, my guests who are eating my food, I've made blah. I've made something. And all those components are just components for a larger something. What is it I made? And then I think that a lot of people when they design, they are too obsessed in having good things and not thinking about how those good things combine.

What are they making? What is the point of that thing? I'm going to cook a meal. Okay, I'm using flour and eggs and butter, but what am I making? What are they serving? Where are they going? What's the point of what I'm doing?

And what I find for a lot of people is they start designing, not that you can't start designing, but they finish designing before they understand what it is they want. That the idea of design is not just making things in isolation. It is making a collective whole. And this is true of your game as much as it is any component of your game.

When people sit to play your game, your game is not lots of things. It's one thing. When you design something, it's one thing. And so you've got to always keep that in mind, which is what is the one thing? You know, if you're making a story or a painting or a photograph or a game or a card in a game, you are making one thing. What is that one thing? What does it do?

And you need to think in that way of when I make my game, when I make components for my game, I need to think of it as a singular entity because that is how the audience is going to approach it. It's not a component of pieces. It's a thing. It's a singular thing. And if you do your job right, those singular things come together. Your butter and your eggs and your flour come together to make chicken Kiev or chocolate cake or whatever it is you're trying to do. And different ingredients can be put like,

I can use flour and butter and eggs to make all sorts of things. So I got to figure out what I'm trying to make, where I'm trying to make it, what my goal is. And that what I find to be one of the things that I think designers, young designers, inexperienced designers, really don't quite understand yet is that the audience doesn't grade the component pieces. No one eats, you know, I don't serve chicken quinoa and they go, wow, I really like what

you did with butter. You don't get that very often, you know what I'm saying? I really like what you did with butter. You don't get that very often. You know what I'm saying? I mean, sometimes they'll recognize taste in something, but it's not, it's like, this altogether, all the component pieces taste good.

That's what I like about it. So when I'm making a card, for example, I have to figure out what the essence of the card is. What am I trying to do? How is that card functioning? What are people going to see it as? That's why, for example, understanding the creative is important. That what world am I in? What kind of thing am I doing?

What do I think this is going to be? And a lot of time what you want to do is you want to sort of bring the... Now, be aware that just because you have one singular vision doesn't mean there doesn't get to be discovery in it. That if I make a card that does cool things, it's not like... It's not as if the audience

can't play with it and learn about it and discover things. I'm not saying you don't get to have discovery, but what I'm saying is you want your... You want your discovery to be in the direction that you mean for get to have discovery. But what I'm saying is, you want your discovery to be in the direction that you mean for it to be. If I make a card,

I don't want the player to go, what? What's this card? What I want them to go is, ah, I see what this card does. And then get to explore how best to use that. How best to,

okay, this does this cool thing. Ooh, how do I use that thing? And one of the neat things about having a singular vision is, okay, your audience, once they understand what it is, then they can move on to figuring out what to do with it.

I'm not saying necessarily, you know, I talk a lot of time about making cards and magic. It's kind of like being a tool maker. And that, you know, if I make a hammer, I'm not necessarily telling you what to do with a hammer. I'm telling you,

well, here's what a hammer is, and it does this kind of thing, and this is the function it has. But then you can go figure out what to do with the hammer. That just because you're crafting the tools doesn't mean that you dictate. Now, but what you don't want to do is have this device, and it has a hammerhead and part of a screwdriver. You know, like, what do I do with this thing? Where if you have a hammerhead, you're like, oh, I get it. I can hit things with it. It hammers things.

That's what it does. And so the key part of cohesion is making sure that your audience has a direction of what you're doing, understands the essence of it. That doesn't mean that you, that doesn't mean there's not exploration left. It doesn't mean they can't sort of figure things out. That doesn't mean they can't dig deeper and find things.

You know, if you have a game, there could be cool components of the game, but your game has to represent something, and people have to find those components by exploring the natural thing of what your game is. One of the big problems in general about any artistic endeavor is it is so easy to be too busy.

It is so easy to pull your own focus, to get in your own way, to keep people from seeing what you want to see. So for example, I'm going to talk about a related thing, flavor text. So I used to write a lot of flavor text. I don't do as much anymore.

But one of the tricks of flavor text was A, you don't have a lot of space. But B, you wanted to figure out what was the point of the card. I'm going to make a commentary about this. What's my commentary? You know, if it's a joke, where's the funny? If it's pithy, where's the thing that's an interesting observation? You know, what about the flavor text? What is the cool moment? The flavor text gets to do one thing. It gets to make them laugh or make them think or educate them. It does something.

But you have to figure out what you want to do and then how best to do that. The same, for example, I mean, cohesion applies to many things. I used to do stand-up, for example. In your routine, there mean, cohesion applies to many things. I used to do stand-up, for example. In your routine, there was a cohesion. You, as the person up on stage doing comedy, had to have a viewpoint, a personality, that you wanted to present yourself, the comedian, as a singular thing. And then within that, you got to explore that. But if the audience didn't get who you were, if they didn't see your vantage point, if they didn't get where you were coming from as a comedian, they couldn't enjoy you because they were constantly looking to try to find something.

I mean, this is a common bond in any kind of art, wherever the art is, is that the viewer, the audience, they want to understand it. And so they're looking for understandings and they're looking to see what it is. If you confuse them, if you give them mixed signals, instead of them appreciating what you're doing, they spend all the time trying to understand what it is you represent. What is the message? What is the point? And game design, card design, it's all the same thing,

which is you want to be clean and clear. You want to have an identity. You want people to understand your game needs an identity. Your card needs an identity. Whatever your components need identity. Understand an identity. You want people to understand your game needs an identity. Your card needs an identity. Whatever your components need identity. Understand that identity. Understand what it is you're trying to do. And I think a lot of times when people make something, like one, for example, one of the things that I think any artist, regardless, game designer, photographer, stand-up comedian, story writer, painter, whatever, you need to figure out your vision.

You need to figure out what it is you're trying to say. You need to figure out who you are as an artist. You need to figure out what the piece you're doing, what's the goal of the piece you're doing. You need to figure out what the component role is in the overall piece of the thing you're making. You know, if I'm trying to make a set, the set has to be about something. Kaladesh, for example, was a world of invention. I wanted you, the game player, to feel like an inventor.

And that meant at every level, at every piece I was working on, I had to say to myself, okay, how does this piece make you feel like an inventor? How does this piece play into the world of Kaladesh? And I had to say to myself okay how does this piece make you feel like an inventor how does this piece play into the world of kaladesh and i had to keep asking that because if the component pieces didn't mesh the whole thing wouldn't mesh and so you know cohesion is saying it's understanding what it is you're trying to do and then figuring out how each element is pushing in that same direction. And that I know it is very easy when you get caught up in the minutia of what you're doing to just go, eh, whatever. But what you're missing is, in the end, you as an artist will never succeed until you are designing your things full well aware of how your audience is experiencing those things.

And if you design in a way that doesn't take in how the opponent experiences it, you are doing a disservice to yourself and to your audience. You will end up muddled. You will end up unclear. And the overall piece that you're making won't have a point to it, won't have a vision to it, won't have a cohesion to it. And that's the major goal of today's talk, is to talk about how I think sometimes people sort of get caught up and go, I'm just making this card, I'm not going to,

I'll figure out what my set's about later. And the answer is the first thing I do when I make a set is not make cards, is figure out what the set is about. Exploratory design, for example, is a whole period of time where for all intents and purposes, I make zero cards. I mean, we make cards to test concepts, but I walk out of exploratory design usually with zero cards for my design. It is not about making the cards yet. It's about understanding what the design is, what the world is, what am I trying to do? What is the set trying to do? What's the point of the set? Because it's only when you understand what the point is that you then can match it. And then

every component has to follow the thing you're trying to do. You have to think about how does each tiny component fit in the larger picture. So my story is I gave a speech not too long ago at Facebook. And they have artists that come into Facebook all the time. And the way it'll work is they'll bring an artist in for just a couple weeks. And the artist will just pick a spot in the thing that's empty and come up with an idea and just make a piece of art. So one of the pieces of art I loved was, it was a picture of Alan Turing, the inventor of the modern computer. And, you know, if you stood back, it just was like three-dimensional sort of black and white picture of Alan Turing, which is really cool. And when you got close, it was dominoes. Dominoes. It was just a collection of dominoes.

And what I realized was is in some ways when you make something I'll use this as a metaphor that each domino has to sort of you know it's very easy to get caught up

in the individual domino but the reality is this one domino and this one piece, that was going to be a four and a five, with the four on top and the five on the bottom. Why? Because when you stood 20 feet away,

you were going to see Alan Turing. And if that wasn't the right piece, it would break that illusion. It wouldn't create what it wanted to do. And so, you as the artist, you have to understand that all your component pieces are working together to do something. What is that larger thing and how do all your pieces hold together to make that happen? When you make a card in Magic, all the component pieces have to come together to make a card.

Those cards have to come together to make a set. Those sets come together to make a block. The blocks come together to make a format. Those sets come together to make a block. The blocks come together to make a format. The formats come together to make a game. And that, always keep that in mind. That when you're putting something together, as you're crafting and making something, you have to think about what you're trying to do,

where the pieces go, and how all those components make the larger piece. Because if you do that, then you have cohesion. And that was my point of day talk. So hopefully, guys, this was more of a big picture thing, but it's really important. I think if you're into designing anything, making anything, you need to understand this point.

And this is something that really, as an artist, as I got a better understanding of how cohesion work and how I can make things cohesive, I feel like my work got stronger and stronger. But anyway, I'm now at, I'm not in my parking space. So I hope you guys enjoyed today's thing. But as we all know, it means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking about magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time.

Bye bye.