Think Like A Game Designer - Mark Rosewater — Decoding Game Design Principles, The Essence of Interaction, Minecraft's Dual Identity, and Pioneering Magic: The Gathering (#2)

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Mark Rosewater head designer of Magic: The Gathering. Mark is one of the most prolific writers on game design, including his long running column, “Making Magic.” We discuss what it’s like working on Magic, with its millions of fans and decades of content and how this can apply to building your own games with similar goals. Mark taught me more about game design than any other person and he has a lot to teach you too! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I have a conversation with Mark Rosewater. Now Mark's been a friend of mine for the last 20 years, so much so that I even had him write the introduction to my book, Think Like a Game Designer. He's the head of design for Magic the Gathering and has worked at Wizards of the Coast since 1995. Prior to his work at Watsy, he was a writer working on shows such as Roseanne. Mark also writes what is in my opinion the best blog on game design called Making Magic, as well as teaching design through his podcast, social media posts, and more. Mark has probably taught me more about game design than anybody on the planet, and I always love talking to him because I always learned something new. In this episode, we talk about what it's like to work on the same game for 20 years,

What's the secret to magic's longevity? What it's like to be the public face of a game with millions of players? How to manage a huge design team? We get Mark's advice for aspiring game designers. We talk about player psychographics and psychology and oh so much more. Mark is an incredible resource for anyone. Whether you're a fan of Magic the Gathering or you've never heard of it, Mark's insights are valuable for everybody in the game industry.

And I'm sure you're going to get as much out of this as I did. So without further ado, here's Mark Rosewater. Hello and welcome. I am here with Mark Rosewater. Mark, it is awesome to have you here. Oh, thanks. It's awesome to be here. Yeah. You know, so, you know, when I started doing this podcast, it was, you know, my goal was to really help bring the kind of principles of design and the process of design out into the public in a way that, like, people can access, that new aspiring designers can learn from and that people who are just passionate about games can learn from. and having you on is pretty amazing for me and frankly a little bit intimidating because you're probably the most prolific designer I know as far as actually putting that information out there in your articles and your podcasts and you've taught me so much.

So I'm really excited to be able to kind of dig in a little bit and hopefully uncover some things that you haven't already covered, which is going to be the challenge for me. Okay. I have millions and millions of words under my belt. We'll see if you can hit stuff I haven't talked about. Yeah, no, that's going to be the challenge. But a lot of our listeners will probably not have read all of your millions of words. So even if we retread some ground, I think it'll be still pretty valuable.

So one of the things I want to kick off with is, you know, you've been working on Magic now for over 20 years. And the game has been around for even longer than that. And that's a pretty amazing accomplishment. There's very few games that release new content that have been around that long. I'm actually not sure I can think of another one. So what how how do you distinguish sort of designing a game that's, you know, in year 25, year 30 and that's moving towards a lifetime compared to sort of designing a new game? Can you can you sort of illustrate like how that, how that process is different? Yeah, the biggest thing about designing an ongoing game is that there is a, you build up a base of information, meaning you build up a technology that sort of,

there's a craftsmanship that comes to it that when I make a magic set I can't ignore 25 years worth of magic that's already been made and that a lot of what we do is we're building upon what we've already done. When you make a new game, you don't have that baggat. I mean, for good or for bad,

there's good things about having the baggage, there's bad things about having it. But when you're making a new game, you can do whatever you want. You have a lot of freedom. When I'm making a game, I have to make a game that reinforces the game we've been making for 25 years.

So I have, some freedoms, and magic is a pretty robust game system, but I don't have ultimate freedoms, not like someone who's making their own game. You really have the ability to do whatever you want. But I like to think that my job is I keep making new games just within the confines of a rule system that pre-exist. Then a lot of ways, for example, as we record this, you know, unstable is coming out soon, which is a novelty set for magic. And that is really, really different than say Ixelon, the set we had out earlier in the year, which was a more normal magic set that was, you know,

what we call tribal. There's dinosaurs and pirates and stuff. And then later next year, we're making Dominaria. We're going back to our homeworld. And, like, that's completely different as well. And that one of the fun things for what I do is it keeps changing. But it is fundamentally different than making a brand new game. A brand new game has a lot of freedoms for good or for bad that I do not have.

Right. Yeah. One of the things I talk about in my design sort of process and when I've sort of written about design, the small fraction of words I've written compared to years, is that, you know, when you're designing, it's really important to set your constraints, to set your parameters, and that working within those constraints is actually an inspiration for design and not a drawback. I think it's actually a principle you've stated many times that constraints, you know, are an asset and constraints inspire creativity.

So it sounds like the sort of constraints of magic's history. are that aspect for you. You sort of already have those things defined. And then it's how much can you explore and create within that? Yeah, the way I talk when I talked about new designers, the thing I say is you have a blink paper in front of you. And a blank paper is pretty scary because the fact that it can be anything, yes, you have all these possibilities,

but it's also sort of infinite. And what I found is most people have trouble dealing with infinite. And so what you need to do is you need to find some ways early on to put some pegs in the ground to say, okay, well, I want to do something. I have some idea or something that's going to start defining what I'm doing. And the way I describe it, for example, is there's a trick they use in art when people are first doing art. That what they do is they make them make a scribble on the paper. Because as soon as there's something on the paper, they have something to work with.

And that I say the same thing for designers is you need. You need to start with something. You need to have something to begin with. That having no limitations is actually problematic. And so what you want to do is when you first sit down, think of one thing that wants to define what you're doing. Your game is about something. What is the one thing? And then you can change it later.

I'm not even saying it can't change, but you want to start with some bedrock that you build around, that the key to designing something is having some center. And you have to figure out what that center is because no center just means you drift aimlessly and you don't end up going anywhere. Right. And so having that sort of definition and that core of what's going on, you have that almost in multiple ways, right? You have the core of sort of what is magic and as a process to use and what is that game and how is that your core for the things that you design. And then you have the core of your sort of new release, almost sort of the new game within a game that you're building. Do you struggle with that? How do you define the core of math? Well, I mean, one of the things that I always do when I'm doing a new set is what is this set about? Yes, yes, it's another magic set. We've made lots of those.

But it's not just a set. It's specifically about what? What is it about? So, for example, Ixelon, when we started, you know, the creative team and made this really interesting world, but we didn't quite know what it was going to be. And it took me a little while to realize that it was the dinosaur and pirate set. That was a tribal set. That was about, oh, there's things that we haven't done that people are excited for.

let's make this something that people, like, if we're going to introduce dinosaurs to players, if you know what they're going on to do, make a dinosaur deck. So let's make a set that lets them make a dinosaur deck. And that once I understood that I was making sort of dinosaur and pirate world from a mechanical standpoint, it really defined what I was doing. Yeah, it's kind of hard to go wrong with dinosaurs and pirates,

so that's pretty excited when I learned about that team. But here's the interesting thing for magic is not every set's the same thing. Like sometimes it's a resonant thing. oh, we're doing something you haven't seen before. Magic does Greek mythology or Egyptian history or, you know, Gothic horror. And sometimes, hey, we're doing something weird and different. It's a mechanical thing we're playing. Like, it's not always the same thing.

And that part of the fun for me is I like changing it up. I like, well, sometimes the sets about this thing and sometimes about that thing. In fact, we just did what we call a hackathon at work where we spend a week. We stopped doing our normal work. And we broke into groups and we worked on future ideas for magic. design. And it was really refreshing because like 25 years in, you could go, oh, maybe we've just done it all. Like maybe, you know, we've wrap it up, boys. There's nothing else to make. And that I was really exciting for all this new things we haven't tried before.

Some of them are a bit out there, though as the game gets older, we have to be more and more willing to do things that are a little, you know, stretched the boundaries. But it was fun to sort of like say, okay, what could we do? And we really sort of looked at ourselves with no boundaries and some of it was kind of crazy, but some of it was really, I think it would be very compelling magic. I'd love to dig into that a little bit more because the, you know, I find the process of brainstorming and ideating is, is really critical that the way you structure it has a huge impact on the types of results you get out of it. So how do you structure this, this hackathon? What, like, go into detail a little bit if you can. Each our hackathons are not the same.

We did a hackathon earlier in the year to make a product. We were trying to make a supplemental product. We had six ideas and each team had a week to sort of build this prototype. So that's a different. So the one I want to explain is the current one, which is a little bit different than that one. The one we did for mechanics was we broke into six groups. Each group had an area it was exploring. And then Monday, we had six one-hour brainstorm meetings, one for each one. And then whoever wanted to come to whatever brainstorm meeting, like you didn't have to go to all of them, pick the ones you're interested in. Then we had a core team for each of them that met on Tuesday to sort of take all of the information we got from the, from the brainstorming,

and figure out what we're doing with it. Then there was another series of brainstorms on Wednesday, but changed off so they were in a different order. And then Thursday and Friday, we worked on those, and then we made some concrete stuff. And then we had a, the end state was we had to make a 10-minute pitch to sort of show the ideas we were doing. And then we had a document everything we came up with so that I could look through it on the mechanical side. I could see all the stuff that we have. So that we're looking for the future, I have a document of all this ideas that we can play with. So let me, this is great.

Let me dig in even a little bit more. So you had individual teams that were assigned to work on their own mechanic ideas. Right. Three or four person teams depending on the group. Okay. And then when they, and then the first brainstorming sessions that were on Monday, you said anybody could come to? So it's not just that group, but other groups?

Yeah. The session depended to have between, I think the lowest was 12 and the biggest was 30. And it was based on like a, a write-up, an initial write-up of what that mechanic was. So it was like a sort of opt-in. It wasn't a mechanic. They were areas. Okay.

For example, one of the areas was card frames. Okay, let's assume we can do anything we want to the card frame. What mechanical space is there if we can read, if we can change, like, magic has done some card frame stuff in the past. You know, we did double face cards or split cards or level operative, it's different things we've done that changed the card frame. And we're like, oh, well, if we have the freedom and change the card frame. a card frame, what can we do? So one of the teams, that's what they were brainstorming.

What new things can we do with the freedom of we can change the card frame? Gotcha. Gotcha. And then those, then the transition between that first brainstorm and the second, or the second is there was a, they, they worked down the path based on that or it's the small team meeting again? Oh, the way mine worked was, I took the group that was going the farthest away from normal magic. Okay. So what we did during the brain. The brainstorm session is I had a lot of areas I was interested to explore. And so my group actually generated the most unique ideas, probably because I had the biggest thing I was asking. So on Tuesday, we looked at, we had pages and pages and pages and pages and pages's ideas.

So what we did is we figured out how many groups we could group them into. And it ended up being 17 groups. There were 17 groups of ideas. We took all the ideas and sort of clumps with them together. We had 17 ideas. or 17 categories of ideas. And you distinguish out your sort of like the freeform kind of brainstorm, put as many ideas as possible out,

and then the sort of organizational grouping phase, or is that just all fluid? Brainstorm was very open-ended. I'm looking for things in category X. Name me things in category X. And then I did a little bit of prodding. Someone would say some, I might ask questions.

We actually had a really good article that we handed out before we did this, where it talked. about how there's this idea in brainstorming that you're not supposed to be critical, but actually all the science says that being critical gets you better ideas than not being critical. So we let people fit ideas, but we also were critical on the ideas to see if we could spur other ideas. But we generated, in my meeting, for each person got to run their meeting their own way.

I did a lot more widespread brainstorming because I had the largest area to cover. But I basically would put up a page, imagine like a giant, it's a, have you seen, seen the, they're like big no pad you write on, but they're sticky. They're kind of like giant post-it notes. Right on it that you'd post it on the wall. So I would come up to the topic. We'd fill one or two sheets up. Go to the next topic, fill them up. So on the next day, on Tuesday, I filled up one wall with all these sheets. And then I and my team sort of figured out how to consolidate everything. And then once we had 17 things, we then looked at four categories. So category one was design space. How many cards could you make with this?

Like how many, you know, how fruitful is this space? Can I make a thousand cards? Can I make 10 cards? Like, you know, what is the design space? Second is something we call design weight. What design weight means is how much does it dictate the design? Like, if you have a really heavy design weight, it means you must design around it. If you have a very light design weight, oh, you could just throw it into set.

Nature doesn't dictate the set. So the heavier the design weight, the more it kind of dictates what you need do. Neither are bad, but it matters on how you can design it. Third is we looked at how far away from the norm is it? How much would players accept this? The farther away from the norm it is, the harder it is to get players to accept it because it's not what they're used to. And the fourth things we looked at sort of production capabilities, like how hard would it be to actually make this? You know, because some of the ideas were really out there. You know, if we wanted to produce us, how hard is to actually produce. So we graded everything on those, those, those,

for measurements. And then what we did is, we said, okay, there's two vectors. We're going to make a chart on two vectors. Vector one is what I call potential, which is how exciting is it? How much, you know, how, if we did this, the top end of potential is, oh, my God, people would lose their minds. And this would be what we call a key selling point, a KSP. You know, it would be the thing that you just show people, I'm buying this set.

This is amazing. I got to buy it. Low potential is kind of like, maybe it is structurally. It would do something to help the same. but no one's going to be excited by it. It's not something that's going to be a selling point. It's just maybe there's some structure there. I mean, low potential aren't bad.

It's just it's not something that's going to be something you're going to entice people with. The other vector was obstacle, which is how many obstacles are in the way of making this? Low obstacle means we can make it tomorrow. There's nothing we can't overcome. High obstacle is, oh, wow, we have to talk to other people. There's some part of this that would really be tough

to get either the players would have trouble accepting it or be hard for us to produce or design spaces challenging. Something about it would be a big obstacle. So we made a graph with sort of potential and obstacle, one on the X variable,

one on the Y variable. And then we ended up having four vectors. So the best vector for us was low obstacle, high potential. Or high potential low option. I think we put potential parts. So high potential low obstacle means, wow, this will be really exciting

and there really isn't that much in our way from doing it. That was the most exciting category because we could do that tomorrow. Category two was high potential, high obstacle. Okay, it's exciting. It's really cool, but okay, there's a bunch of work we have to do to solve it because there's something in the way that's making it easy to do. But still, high potential, that's something we might want to explore. Next was low potential, low obstacle. Well, it's not going to excite anybody all that much, but we can do it. It's not that hard to do. So maybe there's something there that, once again, might be structural or something that would help us.

It's not going to be the exciting thing, but not everything in magic set needs to be exciting. There's a lot of other functions you need. So that stuff might be valuable. And the final category was low potential, high obstacle. Wouldn't excite people that much and, oh, it'd be really hard to do. So we threw that section out. We're like, I don't care about low potential high obstacle.

That's not something I'm excited by. So we put most our energy in the first category just because we only have so much time to brainstorm. And so like, okay, let's look at the categories that are high potential, low obstacle. And of our 17, five of them fit the category. It turned out that three fit high potential or four fit, high potential, high obstacle, four fit low obstacle, potential, like three fit, low obstacle, high potential. So we threw those out.

And then we really focused on the ones that super exciting and we could do it. And then that's on Tuesday, Tuesday. was spent us separating those things out and figuring out where the potential for us lied. So Wednesday at the brainstorming session, we had five areas that we showed potential. And I picked of the five, the one that I thought we had explored Valise in the past. And probably about 40 of my 60 minutes was brainstorming that one idea because I knew we hadn't spent a lot of time on it. And then I spent the remaining 20 minutes, five minutes apiece on the other four.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And then what we did on Thursday and Friday was for each of the five ideas, the five areas, I looked at something we had done before, and I looked at something, and then we made a new thing. So in my talk, I said, here's how we've explored this in the past, although not printed it. They're all things we hadn't printed yet. And then here's new ideas to explore other ways we could do this that the team had come up with. So here's five areas that are high potential, low obstacle, things we've tried.

tried and things we could try in each of the categories. And that took 10, that was my 10 minute talk. And then that led to rapid prototyping? I mean, what's it called exploratory design? We're working on a set in which multiple ideas from this hackathon, we're applying right away to see if we can work in the next set we're working on. It's early. I don't know whether we're actually used any of them, but there's a few that show real

potential, so we might. So this is, I appreciate the sort of breakdown. And is this style of kind of hackathon? process something you've used before. This is a new thing you've just tried out. This one was new. Like I said, we've only done hackathons twice.

This is a new thing for us. The previous hackathon was a, we were making a product. So we divided into teams and then your team just worked all week long making a prototype for a Friday play test. You had one week to make a prototype for a play test.

And how you playtest had varied from group to group depending on what their thing was. But my group, we got chosen to be the product, so I was right. Well, that's always good to win even the friendly competitions. So, you know, there's clearly a lot that has developed and a lot has changed over, you know, the 20 plus years that you've been working on magic and your process. I saw you actually, you even recently announced a kind of overhaul that you've done,

actually was a few years ago, on how your teams are organized and how these, sort of handoffs work. Working with a big team and managing a big team is something not a lot of designers get to experience. Can you talk a little bit about that process and why you made the change you did? Well, basically what happened

was when Magic first got made, the nature of how it worked was outside people would make a set and then inside people would be the second set of eyes to make sure it was okay. And eventually we brought that in-house. Like early magic, all the sets were made by people external to the company.

And then once I started there, we started making, the very first set we made internally I made, it's called Tempest. And we started doing internal. And what we realized was that a lot of the reasons we had chosen for the separation between the handoff, between the first part and the second part, were based upon things that were no longer true. And this is something that happens a lot and something what happens over time is you make decisions based on things that are true when you make the decision, but then things change. And some of those decisions might not be true anymore because the reasons you did them aren't valid. And one of the people I work with is a guy named Eric Lauer, who is insanely, insanely smart. And he loves questioning, hey, hey, why did we do this? And he really brought to my attention, he said, we have the handoff at this time period. Is that the right time to have the handoff? And what we came to realize was, no, it wasn't.

It was the wrong time. And so we changed up our system. We still have multiple eyes, because one of the key parts of how we make the game is we like the idea that the ownership changes hands because it's really hard sometimes to call your own baby ugly. And so the way we do it is we allow multiple people to look at stuff so that if something,

someone could fall in love with something, but if it doesn't pass somebody else, it might not get made. And so it's a system, given, we're making a lot of products in the same family tree, you know,

again and again and again and again. So we have some needs that a brand new game might not have, you know. If you're making a brand new game, it's a brand new exciting game where I'm making the, you know, 98th expansion or something.

I have to differentiate from the 97th the game before it. So I have some constraints that the average new game, designer just does not have. Well, but the principles, I just want to pause is the principle of saying we have, you know, sort of, again, working with a large team allowed you to do this, but you have a sort of lead design or design team that creates the initial concept and sort of flushes that out.

And then you have another team of what you call it development or, and now it sounds like maybe some multiple phases of design that then takes that and then takes ownership of it with a sort of different set of objectives to move it to the end. goal and that that break allows you to criticize the ugliness of the baby as you put and be able to remove that attachment, the ego attachment to design. Because it's actually one thing I really like to talk about with new designers especially is like, you know, people become so attached to their designs. And it's true for all of us.

We become attached to our creative work. And being able to break free of that and see it for what it is is a really difficult challenge. In writing, there's a, they, they use. the term killing your darlings is what they call it in writing, which is the idea that your ideas have to serve a larger form of what you're making and that, like, my background is in screenwriting actually, interestingly enough. I went to school to study writing for TV and film, and one of the things I talk about in screenwriting classes is the idea that no scene is worth it if it doesn't advantage your movie.

no line is worth it if it doesn't have ended your scene. So you can make the most awesome scene. It's just the best scene ever. But if you remove it from the movie and the movie doesn't notice, remove it. It doesn't matter how good the scene is in the vacuum. And the same thing is true to game design, which is if something can function without it, then get rid of it. It's not necessary.

And that a lot of good game design is saying, what's the heart of what I'm doing? You know, like one of the things I see with young designers is they put too much in it. They add complexity for the sake of complexity and not for the sake of the game. And that a lot of what good game design is saying, what advances my game, you know, what makes my game better? And then the stuff that doesn't do that, pull it out. And there's a whole bunch of ways people get in their way. Sometimes, like I say that the game has a fun center, right? There's something about it that's fun.

Otherwise, why are people playing your game? Now, I will note that you can't have other emotions your games trying to do other than fun. There's a lot of games that stretch in different spaces. But in traditional gaming, the center is you want to enjoy it. And for example, sometimes what people do is they make a game in which they distract you from the fun center, meaning people don't find the fun of the game because they're distracted by something else. And then the game isn't fun because the game, they followed the game and went somewhere else. And that what I say is, look, your job is to get the players to the part of the game that's fun, because that's what the point of the game is.

And if you're distracting them, if you're making new things that aren't fun, get rid of that part. The game shouldn't have that. Right. And even if a deeper point to that is even if the new things are fun, but they're distracting you from the center of fun, that is what your game is about, then they still often should get cut. Oh, absolutely. Like, one of the big things, and this is why playtesting is so important is if the game, if people are playing your game and not having fun, because whatever it's going on

is keeping them from getting to the part that's supposed to be fun, then it's designed incorrectly. Something's in the way. And that's why play testing is really valuable because sometimes you're like, oh, this thing could just be removed. You know, like we do a lot of testing behind, like, two-way glass where we focus testing, where we give them the game, we don't tell them anything about it,

and then we watch them try to play it. And it is frustrating, but it's really, valuable because what you will learn is it is so easy for people to get in the way of themselves. It is so easy. And that really what you have to do is you have to make sure that they have no way but to play the game you want them to play it. That anytime you give them other things, they will just go down paths and they will find ways to make your game not your game.

And that it is a really hard part of making your first game of figuring out what the core essence is and getting rid of everything but the core essence. It's a real hard. It's very, very hard to do. So how do you define that for magic? What is the core essence of magic? Each expansion I make, each set I make, I'm like, what's the point of this set? What is this set trying to do?

What is the fun center of this set? And each magic set is different because we're doing different kinds of things. One of the advantages of working with an unknown system is magic has some inherent fun centers to it that I know what they are. I've been making magic for 22 years. So one of the tools I had that's an advantage is, for example, I just know things at work. And if I'm ever stuck, I can just literally, I can literally reprint a card. I can go, I want to do something. Well, we've done this before.

We've made 17,000 cards. I'm just going to use the card that already did this, that I know did it well. And so one of the things that I get to lean on having done it for a long time is that we can use past things that worked. You can't do that on a new game. but what I often say is when you sort of are looking at your game and playing your game or watching other people play your game, it's really good to say, what is my game about in one sentence?

What is my game about? Is that possible to do for magic more broadly, not just for the individual releases? Oh, I mean, for magic, it's, you know, fighting with magic, you know, at its very core. What is it? It's about you're having a magic. dual and you're fighting, you're fighting with magic.

That's at its core. Now, magic is a complex game. There's a lot of, you know, like, it's, it's also a trading card game. So, you know, this is a whole idea that, you know, it's a game in which there's 17,000 pieces and you can pick the pieces you want to play with. You know, there's a lot of different ways to sort of, the neat thing about magic is, and I'm going to introduce magic with somebody. I learn about the person first, and there's like eight ways to approach it because it's a very

robust game, as you will know. Right. Yes. That's my entire life. Magic is a very complex game. But the thing I think that made people excited and the thing that's kind of cool about it is opening up your very first booster pack

is just very compelling because you get to see all these cards and there's all this art on them and they do cool, flavorful things. And then like, it's just a very neat experience. And then one of the big things we've been learning, like one of magic's issues is it's a hard game to learn. It's a fun game.

It's an exciting game. I mean, it's my... favorite game of all games. But, you know, we've tried to figure out how to get people into the game so they can learn. And there's a lot of it. That's been our challenge in making magic is it's a complex game. How do you teach somebody who knows nothing and gets them to learn how to play the game? That's probably magic's biggest challenge.

Right. There's so many different things I want to pick on here. So one of the ideas is that you're presenting magic in a way that is at first flavorful. It's the story of what's going on, like, oh, where you're, your magicians or using magic to fight. And then in another way, it's mechanical. It's, oh, you actually combine all these 17,000 different cards and build out, you know, whatever strategy or way you want.

When you approach design, I found a lot of designers I've talked to, they tend to lean towards one way or another, meaning they start with the story and the idea and the flavor of what's happening and then they build from there. Or they start with the mechanics and the rules and the story. sort of what's happening on that level, and then they build from there. Do you tend to lean one way or another? Do you go back and forth? Because of the nature of what I do, which is constantly reinventing the wheel, so we refer to those as top down and bottom up. So top down is when you start with the flavor and you start with the flavor and then you define mechanics to match your flavor.

And bottom up is when you start with mechanics and then you create flavor to match your mechanics. What has happened over the years is because I work with a very, very talented creative team. We kind of go back and forth. I mean, we'll technically start on one side, but we go back and forth so much that to the audience, it's hard to tell when it's a top-down set and when it's a bottom-up set, that we're doing our job, and a lot of the times you can't tell because the finished product, the creative and the mechanics meld so wonderfully together that you don't know where. we started with it.

What I've discovered is different designers, their strengths lead in different directions. I've met designers that are all about the top-down design and are really good with flavor and come up with neat, flavorful ideas. And them game design is all about how do I take my neat idea and figure out what mechanics will match to it. And there's others who really are all about mechanical. They're very mechanical-minded. And it's like, well, I have my mechanics.

Now let me figure out a flavor that makes sense of these mechanics. And I know people that have really done both. I've tried really hard to be ambidextrous in this area because of the nature of what I have to do. So I like doing top down. I like doing bottom up. I actually do both of them. I like to mix it up. This is my 22nd year doing this job and I want to get bored.

So I like changing up how I do things. I like the challenge of just trying things different ways. So what on both sides of this, being able to do this job really well, I would sort of categorize myself as more mechanics first. Almost always I start with a mechanics idea and build around it sometimes the other way, but almost always mechanics first. And being able to train yourself to do the job to be ambidextrous on that and also being able to execute so well on wherever you start making it feel like a complete integrated whole.

How do you approach that? What tactics do you use to accomplish that goal? Well, once again, I have the advantage of I work on a game large enough that I have a team. And I mean, not just a little team, a large, large team. How big is the team? Well, for example, just R&D, what are we at now? R&D is somewhere between 15, 55 people. I mean, I'm just talking magic.

I'm not talking like, this is magic. I mean, there's other games Wizards does. I'm not talking about that. Magic has, let's say, 50 R&D people. And that's not talking about other parts of the company. But R&D Wizards means the creative people, the designers, developer people, and the editors, and then there's some people that sort of do transitional stuff for digital. But the people that make the game at the earliest, earliest part of making the game,

not printing the cards, not selling it, not brand, none of that stuff. that's all other teams. So our creative team right now is, I think, 15 people. So for example, when I come up with an idea, so let's say, for example, I will, which would you prefer I use? There's a bunch of recent sets. Kaladesh, Amiket, Ixelon, Unstable,

which of these are you more interested in me using as an example? Unstable amuses me the most, so I'll go with that one. So Unstable is a, us, the whole idea behind Unstable was a set that's sort of stretching boundaries. Magic has a lot of tournaments that we run all around the world, and the gimmick of the Unset is that's a silver border that you can't play in tournaments. So the idea is I can do wacky crazy things because there's never going to be a pro tour with lots of money on the line where some wacky things are going to determine the outcome.

These cards aren't going to be at the pro tour. So I have a lot of flexibility. But one of the things that I wanted to do is last time I made it on set, I didn't have this creative team like I do now. So I went to them and I said, oh, I want to do something cool. So we decided early on that we were going to do a steampunk world, a mad scientist's world. And I decided that I wanted to have factions

because one of the cool things that Magic has learned over the years, it's just a lot of fun to divvy up the set into different identities so that people can self-identify. A really, really famous set that we did at Wizards is called Rafnikov for Magic. And it divided, magic has five colors. So if you take five colors and pair them up into two color pairs, you get ten pairs. And so we built the city world in which there are these ten guilds that embodied each of the color combinations. Super, super popular.

We've done a lot of other set that had factions. So I wanted to introduce factions to Silver Border. So I came up with these five different factions that represented mad scientists. So one of the mad scientists were these cyborgs that were constantly experimenting on themselves. And the reason they were using mad science is that they were constantly making themselves better. But it's a comedy set. So it's the kind of person who said, hey, if I've replaced my left hand with a toaster, I can make toast all the time.

Kind of mindset. So they're called the order of the widget. And they're very honorable. They're trying to do right by the world. They're white and blue, if you know, magic colors. But they're a little nonsense. They have a sense of order, but their sense of order is really weird. And they're all about this sort of sensibility.

They're constantly upgrading themselves. In black and blue, we decided to have these spies that they use technology to make these cool spy gadgets. And so, you know, if you are familiar with this, spy genre, its gadgets are a big, big part of the spy genre. And so they're just making every crazy spy invention you can imagine. And the joke because it's the comedy set is they're really, really bad at being spies. So they're very incompetent spies.

Like their headquarters, their secret headquarters has a sign on it saying secret headquarters. It's the kind of spies they are. But the idea was they're really, really good at making gadgets and just really bad at being spies. Then black red is we made these super villains. that they make their gadgets to like rule the world and they make weather machines and doomsday machines. They're just making things because they're super villains

and they want to rule the world. So they make over-the-top sort of inventions. Then the red-green group, the whole, one of the things we ended up doing the set is many years ago we made a set called FutureSight where we made cards from potential futures. And one of the cards we made as a joke was called Steamflugger Boss where we just made up words.

We just made them up. The cards didn't mean anything. And we thought it was funny. So the card said like, when you assemble a contraption, assemble two contraptions. Now this was 10 years ago. There was no assembly contraptions in the game.

It just didn't exist. So we decided it would be fun. I've been trying to do this for years because people keep asking for it and I couldn't do it in Blackboarder and make something that I felt lived up to the promise of what assemble contraptions would mean. So we decided to try to,

silver-border steamflugger bosses the goblins. I'm like, okay, I need to have a race of goblins because, so the red-green are the goblins. They're super chaotic and magic goblins are very silly and they tend to,

the idea of goblins and magic is they breed so fast that it makes up for the fact that they're dangerous because they try crazy things and blow up a lot. So they're the ones that just make crazy over-the-top contraptions and things that kind of do weird things. And then

the final group, the white green group, we liked the idea of a group that used biology. And so they came with this technology that can make you any kind of animal you want to be. And so they started this kind of commune where you can find your true self and you can be whatever you want to be. So if being part giraffe, part cat, part eagle is what you want. You can be that. And the artist had a great time that the creatures in this guild are just over-the-top bonkers because they're like, it's part raccoon, part turtle, part-ycle.

Eagle, you know, really weird combinations of stuff. Right. So what we did is I came up with the general gist of it, and then I went to the creative team, and then they had what's called a world building where they brought artists in, concept artists, and said, okay, what do the cyborgs like that build themselves? What do the spies look like? What do the supervillains look like? What do the gobbins look like?

What do these animal hybrid things look like? And they spent a couple weeks, and they just came up with crazy awesome stuff. And then that inspired us and we used that inspiration to make some designs and some cards. And we went back and forth. And I worked closely with the creative team to sort of fine-tune this world.

What we called Bablovia is the name of the world. And we made Bablovia this crazy, wacky, mad scientist world. And we ended up with something that's just really, really fun. I'm really happy with the final product. Now, all of that process was, this was, it sounds like clearly a sort of flavor story first. And so the mechanics, did you have mechanics in mind while this was going on?

Or this sort of was happening kind of before that. We did have mechanic. I think that we, yeah, it's a little more top-down than it was bottom-up, but we did have our mechanics. We knew going in that we wanted mad scientists. So we made men-scientists mechanics and made factions and then figured out how to mel them together. So it's a combination. We did do some bottom-up. We just wanted to make contraptions.

I guess that, you can argue that's top-down, that we were making conclusions. but the other big mechanic in the set was called host and augment where the idea is you make creatures and then you could tack creatures onto the creatures so like I've made a kitten now it's a monkey kitten or I've made a jellyfish now it's half squirrel half jellyfish you know and you could sort of make these combinations where you combine the left and the right side together um and that predated us making the factions I guess so there's a little of each in this case I love hearing a lot of the backstories on this. And it's cool that a sort of bizarre constraint from 10 years ago ended up becoming a foundation stone of this whole new process with the contraption card.

Yeah. So the funniest thing is the story is basically we made it as a joke. We had no intention of ever doing it. But then Aaron Forsyth, my boss, used to write a column for the website. And he admitted in a column that, oh, it's just a joke. We have no intention to, doing this. And so what I've learned is don't tell people you have no intention to doing something because that just makes them what. So it just became a thing. Of course you have due contraption. So after getting bugged about it for years and years and years, I finally said, okay, guys, I vow before I retire, not that I'm close to retirement. Before I retire, I will make contraptions. I'm not promising I'll make them tomorrow, but at some point I'll make contractures. I vowed that I would make them.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make the contraptions. And what I found was one of two things were always true. Either it wasn't sexy enough. Like, yeah, yeah, technically, like it works, but it didn't capture it, or it captured it, but it just didn't work within the rules. And

once we made a silver-border set, it was a mad scientist's world, I'm like, oh, wait a minute, this might be the perfect place, because I'll have the freedom to sort of use to stretch boundaries a little bit. And that freedom allowed me to make something that I'm, we made a very, very, it's complex, but it's a very flavorful

representation of what a contraption is. And that we, this Monday, the last Monday, we premiered it to the world. And the response from the world was, yeah, that that's a contraption, which is what I wanted. You know, and it's wacky and it's weird, but it is, you know, you get to build it and crazy things happened. And every time you play, you'll make different contraptions. And, you know, I felt like I was finally able to bring it alive. And it's funny in that I had the restriction of having to live up to what we said it was.

And the lack of restrictions that I put in a set where I had more tools available to me. So it was kind of like I had a lot of restrictions in one way and less restrictions than another. So we've talked about the sort of divide between, as you called it, top down and bottom-up mechanics. There's another thing that I know you and I have talked about in the past. And it's sort of this kind of a more analytical approach versus a more intuitive approach to design. And I know a lot of the magic community and players and people who, ended up working are very analytical people. And you sort of come from a more intuitive background.

And how do you look at that nowadays as a distinction or how do they inform each other in the way that you approach design and that you communicate with other designers? Sure. Okay. So I refer to this as super ego design and id design. So if you know anything about psychology, the idea is within your brain, you have your ego, which is your sense of self. And there's two key components that function. The super ego is about structure, is about sort of like, it's the part of your brain that goes, okay, I have to

organize things and understand what's going on. And I have to sort of look out for myself in a structural sense. I have to use my intellect to make sure that I'm looking out for myself. The end is all about sort of impulse and emotion and like making the part of you happy that just wants things. And the end is, the end is. In the super ego, there's a balance within you that you need some super ego to survive. You need some id to survive. I use this as labels because the super ego approach is a very structural approach, and the id approach is a very intuitive approach.

And I think different designers will design different ways. I am way more in the id camp than I am in the super ego camp, and that I design a lot more by feel than I do by structure. I use plenty of structure. It's not that I don't use structure. And I have my super ego side of me. But one of the things that's interesting is I will design sets differently depending on what the need of the set is.

But I definitely lean toward the intuition side of it. Certain sets, the more top-down sets to me tend to be a little bit more intuitive, where the bottom-up sets tend to be where I'm more structural. Like, for example, when I was doing Rabnika, and there was 10 guilds of the 10 color pairs. Well, that's a super structural. That's a very super ego design because I have to balance that. I can't make, you know, I can't make 40 red white cards and then three red green cards.

I just can't do that. I have to balance it. So that kind of design requires me to be more structural because the nature of what I'm doing is more structural. But on the flip side, when I made it set like Inistrade, which was a gothic horoscope, it's like, okay, I'm capturing horror. What does that mean? Well, I'm going to make zombies. What do zombies feel like? And it was much more about capturing the feel of zombies than it was about, like, each,

each monster that I made works differently because I'm trying to capture what that monster felt like. So I think how I design has a lot to do with the task at hand and what the task requires. So it sounds like there's a pretty strong link between top-down design and intuitive design and that they are the id design and and the bottom up and super ego design. Is that right? It more often leans in that direction. It's not always.

There are examples of each. You can, for example, be topped down to be super structural. If the thing you're leaning on is super structural, for example, like let's say, for example, I'm going to take something that has built into it really strong structure. I think a good example here. I want to make a Harry Potter game or something. Like, look, there's four houses. Like, Harry Potter comes with a divide built into it.

I'm probably going to look at that and say, oh, well, okay, maybe I want you. Maybe I, here's a structure the IP has. Maybe I want to use that structure. Ironically, we made a Harry Potter game and we didn't structure that way, which is funny. But we structured on classes rather than on the houses. Right. So, for example, if your top down comes from a source that's very structured, you might take a more structural approach.

Likewise, if the thing you're doing that's more mechanical-based is something that leans less toward structure, maybe you'll have a more take on it. So they correlate somewhat, but it's not a complete one-for-one 100% of time correlation. Gotcha. And do you look for one type of design or another, or you try to balance your teams with both,

or you find you want the kind of birds of a feather together? How do you think about that at all when you're when you're building design teams? Well, because of the nature of magic, because of the different teams we work with. So for example, right now we divided magic into it's vision design, set design, and play design. My job, I run vision design, is you got a blank page. What is it? What's it going to do? And my team's job is to come up with sort of.

the direction, the vision for the set, and then usually we come up with the mechanics, although set design sometimes will change mechanics. But really what we're trying to do is get the essence of what you're trying to make. But on my team, I normally have the set designer that's going to be making the set so that they can be

there to experience what's going on. I have a play designer. Play design is all about the balancing the environment to make sure that when we get to, Magic has a very robust tournament scene, and we've got to make sure everything's balanced because a lot of what we do is very serious and it's important that's balanced play.

So the play design is about that. But I have a play designer on my vision team. I'll have a representative from the creative team on my vision team. And then usually I have one or two sort of what I call core people that is really good at making cards that are good at vision people that are good at making cards. So we can come up with ideas and mechanics and cards. So a lot of how I structure my team is based upon how we work with other teams,

which is a different animal than probably if you're making your own game and starting out. Yeah, it's really fascinating. You're in a pretty unique space as a designer, you know, having a team this big and working on a product that has this much history. It's pretty fascinating. I will explain how we work. The caveat with, wow, how we work is very unique to how we function.

Like you said, there's not a lot of games that are 25 years old that still make content. There's a few in video games, but there's not a lot. It's a very, so it's a very unique circumstance. The thing I will say if you're going to design your own game from scratch is you want to make sure you understand how the people you're designing with design. It's not crucial that you design the same way. It's crucial that you understand each other and how you work. Because if you are different and don't understand you're different, you will run into problems of you getting frustrated because they're not doing things the way you expect them to do it. Right. I've found in working with design teams, I never worked with anyone quite as big as yours, but, you know, 20, 30 people, you know, the challenges of just good interpersonal communications become as important as the individual skills amongst the team, that being able to properly hear where other people are coming from and properly communicate in a way that they can hear you, ends up becoming so critical to your skills being additive rather than subtractive and, and fight.

against each other. Yeah, so interestingly, when I was in college, I started an improv troupe. And I actually just wrote an article about this recently. One of the things that's very interesting about some of the skills I picked up doing improv is, so the way improvisation works is you get up on stage and you say to the audience, give me suggestions, we're going to make a scene that's never been made before, right in front of you were going to make the scene. And you're going to give a suggestions to prove that we clearly couldn't have made this before.

where you can see that you're giving us the suggestions. And there's a lot of skills of doing good improv because you have to work with people that you're all trying to make a scene and that if you fight with each other, what ends up happening is the scene doesn't work. And a lot of what you learn in improv is, how do I work with other people? My goal is to all of us want to make something, but if we don't listen to each other, if we don't understand what other one's coming from, we're not going to succeed. And game design is a lot like that, especially, you know, team.

game design. And you're right. It's about communication. It's about understanding who's going to make what and where are people's strengths and where are their weaknesses and, you know, like, who do I turn to when I want something done? I need to know who in my team is the strength and any one skill so that I know who to turn to.

I'd like to transition from team dynamics, which is an endlessly fascinating topic, but I'd like to transition to another topic, which I think you've made a, huge amount of progress in, which is player motivations or what you've called player psychographics. So you are famously divided players

into originally three broad categories and then further redefine the sort of Timmy Johnny Spike categories. And I want to dig into those a little bit so maybe you can give like a kind of brief overview of that. So I went to school studying communications

and one of the things you had to do in the communication schools, you had to sample all the classes. Now, I didn't end up going into advertising. I went into broadcast and film. But I had to take some advertising classes. And one of the things they make you do in advertising class is learn about the tools they use in advertising. And one of the things they use is the thing called the psychographic, which is,

okay, you want to sell Tutsi rolls. Who's going to buy them? Who's your audience? Because if you're going to make ads, you have to understand who's buying your product. And so there's some really interesting ads in advertising that they do using a lot of math and science and stuff. But like, okay, who's your audience? And then the reason that's so important is I can't make a good ad unless I understand who's buying my product. That let's say I'm going to sell to.

I bring up Tootsie rolls because we had a class assignment where you picked a product and then you had to figure out your audience. So I picked Tootzy rolls. I don't know why. I picked Tootsie rolls. And it turned out, I ended up advertising. to working black mothers. Okay. I did all the research and that was like,

the biggest buyers of Tootsie Rose was working black mothers. Now, if you would ask me before I started this project, who's my audience? I would not have chosen that. That was the neat thing about the project was, okay, let me do the research. And then I'm like, oh, wow, okay. Well, that is really interesting.

Like, I didn't at all understand who my audience was until I did the research. And that, so what happened was when I got to Wizards, Wizards was full of what I call math people, which were people that studied math-type degrees. It might be actual math, might be engineering, but math-science-y things. And I came from a word background.

I was a communication major. I was a writer. Before I became a game designer, I wrote for television, I was a writer, a comedy writer to boot. And so what I realized was is they were thinking very analytically, they weren't thinking about psychology.

And so probably my biggest contribution to magic is getting people to understand that, like, okay, I want to sell my game. Well, I have to understand who is it for? Right. If I want to sell my Tutsi rolls, who am I selling them to? So I'm making a card. And what I said is, look, there's different audiences. Magic's not one audience.

Who are the audiences? And I slowly work to figure out, okay, who fundamentally are the audiences? I ended up getting three basic categories. Now, the categories are pretty big. I've subdivided them a bunch since then, but there's three major categories. So first category is what I call Timmy or Tammy. Originally, I gave them all male names.

I've come back and give them alternate female names just because gaming is not just a male-dominated thing. There's lots of women who play games, so representation is important. So Timmy and Tammy, the idea is that they play a game for the experience, that they play the game because there's some, something they get out of the game on some emotional level.

It might be the joy of playing with other people. It might be the visceral thrill of just doing something, you know, playing a giant creature, or just having a moment that's just a fun moment. You know, it could be about some sort of satisfaction, but there's some emotional sort of thing that get out of it.

There's an experience they get out of it, that they play and they get to experience something and that experience is really fulfilling to them. Next, Johnny or Jenny. And this is somebody who the game is a means of self-expression. They want to express something. And that the reason they play is this is a way for other people to see something about them. It's a way for them to demonstrate something about themselves and that they like to play the game because they get to express something through the game.

Then we get to Spike. Spike is about proving something. That to them, the reason they play is they want to prove something to themselves or prove something to other people. Now, the most stereotypical version of Spike is they want to prove that they can win. But that's not, that spike is more than that. That's just the most, each one of these is the stereotype. But the whole point of Spike is I play games because I want to prove something to myself or to others about, you know, I want to test myself or I want, you know, a lot of competitive players really like to say,

oh, I want to prove that I can beat other people, that I can make the best deck, and that the spike mentality is the idea that I really want to demonstrate something or prove something. Now, there's many, many different things you can prove. Each of these categories are really wide on purpose. But the idea is, do I want to experience something? Do I want to express something?

Or do you want to prove something? And that was the basic idea that I came with is, okay, well, if I'm making a card, what is this card trying to do? Is it about experiencing something? Is it about expressing something? Is it about proving something? Who am I making happy with this card?

And what I said is, look, you don't need to make everybody happy, but you need to make somebody happy, who you're trying to make happy, and then optimize for that audience. So the key is your game will have different audiences, understand what components for what audience, and then optimize. So if I make a card that Timmy and Tammy love and Johnny and Spike hate, I don't care, as long as the person I'm aiming at loves it, then I've done my duty. So there's an expression I said that one of my quotes is,

if everybody likes your game but nobody loves it, it will fail. And what that means is there's a lot of competition for games, that your game can't just be okay, it has to make somebody fall in love with it. And that if you make decisions that if you're always worried about offending people and worried about, well, I don't want anyone to ever dislike something, you end up in the space where, okay, no one dislikes it, it, but no one really loves it.

And then what makes people passionate about something is going to make other people passionately negative about it, but that's okay. And that really, to make your game succeed, you need to have a passion audience. Understand your audience, build toward your audience, make it the best game it can for the people you're trying to make your game for.

And that's how you succeed, and that's how you make a success, is making the people your game is for, love it. And it doesn't matter if some people don't like it. That's really hard for beginners to get their brain around, that I would make something that makes somebody hate it. But it's not that you're making somebody hate it. You're making somebody love it.

And the side effect is, okay, look, the things that make people fall in love with something tend to be strong. And you're doing something cool. But that means that other people just aren't going to, it's not going to be for them. But that's okay. And that a lot of the psychographics is if you don't understand what you're making your thing for, if you don't know who you're selling your to tutsie rolls to, you're going to fail. You know, and that that's the big lesson that this all came from for me. Right. Yeah, another expression similarly touching on similar points if you're trying to design for everyone, you're designing for no one.

So I want to dig into a bunch of this. You know, so you said when you were looking for, you know, the Tootsie Roll audience, you did some research, found out who was buying stuff, and then said, okay, this is my demographic. When you're, we were researching this for magic, how did you, how do you find out that this is what people were looking for? Were you polling people? Were you doing the blind studies? Were you just intuiting it? How did you get to? This is why people play. So basically one of the things I've done since the very beginning is my background is communications

in writing. So I've always, always been really fascinated with just communication. So when I started working at Wizards, I made it my job to communicate with the public. And in fact, it's funny. I'm now one of the spokespeople. I didn't start as a spokesperson. I just started as someone who was invested in wanting to do the best job I could and really, really wanted to know what the audience thought.

So I've, I've done this my whole career. I interact with a lot of people. Like I started a blog, I think it was five, six years of now. So in the last, whatever, five and a half years, I've answered 100,000 questions. Pretty amazing. Because my whole point is, I mean, I intuit it, but the intuiting just means I've short-handed it. It means I learned it. Well, how did I learn it?

Well, I talk to players, and I want them to communicate with me. And I've created a relationship with the player base where they talk to me all the time, all the time. And I get a lot of feedback. And so part of the way I know things, like, for example, we're talking about unstable's coming out. A lot of, I think, unstable success is there's things players from asking for forever that I can't do in a normal blackboarder set, but I can do in a silverboarder set. And I have 13 years of requests built up that I put in. And so people are like, oh, you, this thing I've been wanting forever, you finally did it, you know, or like I'm talking about Ixelon had pirates and dinosaurs.

I know people want pirates. They've been telling me for years they want pirates and dinosaurs. So it's not like I'm coming up with something out of the blue. I'm doing my research. And one of the lessons from today should be there's research. You have to do research. It is not, you don't miraculously just know something. You have to play test, you have to talk to people, you have to do field work, you know, go talk to people to play other games that are like the game you want to make. You know, you have to do research. And so the reason I'm very knowledgeable is not that I have some like natural intuitive, it's not like I just was born knowing this material. No, I've spent years and years and years doing research. And I, you know, I've been doing, I'm working

in the same game for 22 years. So, you know, I have a lot of research and spend a lot of time on it. So a lot of what I do is very intuitive now because, but I still to this day interact with the public every day. So it's not like I, I stop talking to them. I still talk to them every day. But that's a big part of doing what I do is, you know, having the intuition from building up all this work on doing the research. So the categories that you use is actually something that I know I use in my team as well as countless designers that work, especially in the collectible card game space, but I think really it applies more broadly. And I wanted to get your thoughts on parallels between that, your psychographic breakdown, and some of the other ones that are out there.

I know they're the ones somewhat. I don't know them as well as they know mine. Yeah, so well, we'll go through a little bit here. So Richard Bartle's taxonomy of player types is one of the more popular ones that was created for the sort of multi-user dungeon groups, and they were grouped things into four categories, was achiever, explorer, socializer, and killer. And so I think the, you know, those things broke down, there's some clearly overlap in the way that your, your psychographics categorize people, but I'd be curious. like that idea of sort of exploring and finding out what's out there. Does that,

how do you, how do you fill that one into your, to your categories? I think what I've kind of done is, I think what Bartle was trying to do was, he said, what in game do players want to do? And I was,

I just took a different approach. I'm like, what emotional satisfaction do you get out of it? And so, because we were, looking for different things, we just subdivided a little bit differently, we're actually not super far away. I think that the exploring, for example, there's different reasons you might explore, and there's

different reasons you might want to kill things. Like, I sort of subdivided it differently. I think you could chop up his players and my players, and they overlap some, but it's because we're asking different questions and looking for different things, which is fine. Like, part of categorization is, well, what are you trying to categorize? In my mind, for example, the thing that I'm interested in, and once again, maybe just because psychology has a lot of draw from me, which is, I'm very in on the fun center, right? You want to find the fun center.

Well, the fun center says, what do they find fun? What's satisfying? And what I've learned is the same thing isn't satisfying for different people. You know what one person's finding satisfying is not necessarily. what other people find satisfying. So a lot of what I've been doing, and the reason I chopped it up the way I did was, I was just more psychologically grounded in,

like, what's the emotional thing I'm trying to get? I think in some ways, you can take Bartle's categories. Like, you can make a grid, which is my three psychographics and his four sort of goals, and then you can make a grid between them. And there's, like,

there's Timmy Explores and Johnny explores and Spike Explor, you know what I'm saying? You could actually sort of, okay, here's the end goal and here's the psychological motivation. Now here's where they intersect. So in my mind, it's, it's, it's all about motivation. Right. I mean, your goal, right? As a designer, seems is, is to, you know, you've got to, you want to create these positive experiences for your players. And to do that, you got to figure out, okay, what do they want? How do I give them, how do I give them what they want or frustrate them properly to make it a worthwhile experience? Yeah. And so that, and so that, that, And in my research on this, and similarly, I'm sort of fascinated with human psychology more broadly,

it's, I think that the principles are the same. And the idea that the reasons why I get a joy out of games is pretty broadly the same reasons I get joy out of most things in the world. Right? Your breakdown, it's like, well, I like to experience things. I like to express things. and, you know, I like to prove things and be able to, you know, test myself in the world. You know, that covers a pretty broad swath. You know, I think the thing you don't talk about, I think explicitly is like things like connection

and socializing and other, maybe those just get grouped under experience for you. I put the social stuff under Timmy. Yeah. Because, I mean, to be honest, there's different reasons to socialize. I put the hanging out with my friends under Timmy, right? The

Timmy, Tammy, like, the reason I enjoy games is it's fun to sit around with my friends. To me, that's an experience thing. Now, if the relationship with my friends is one of one-upmanship, then that's spike. That's not Timmy. You know what I'm saying? If the reason that I enjoy

hanging with my friends is, I love the constant one-upmanship of each other, then that's a spike experience. So the social aspect, it depends why you want to be social. For example, there's other people, and this is a very Johnny social thing, is it's about sharing with it. Like, it's really fun of sharing with one another.

The reason I want to be with my friends is they do cool stuff and I do cool stuff and I really want to, we want to sort of have fun showing off to each other what we're doing. That's a very Johnny social experience. So I think the largest social experience tends to fall under Timmy because most of it's just kind of the enjoyment of one another's, you know, enjoying being with each other. but the social aspect does not just fall squarely into one group. Right. I previously did a podcast conversation with Ralph Koster,

who wrote a theory of fun and has been designed the Ultima online and a variety of other projects. He talks about games primarily as being the skill and the joy of games is fundamentally about this learning loop. All these other parts are too, but this idea of learning and training, and that's why we as a species play games, right? They're a safe way for us to kind of explore and learn and try things.

Does that learning growth component fall under your psychographics? And if so, how? Oh, yeah, hold on. What's her name? Hold on that one. Aaron, was it Hoffman? There was a talk in GDC two years ago by a woman. Is your name of Aaron Hoffman?

Yeah, her name's Aaron Hoffman. and she was talking about a new approach to fun, and a lot of what she was talking about was sort of memory, I'm sorry, what's it called? Matryluse. The idea that what fun is, I mean, sort of psychologically, what fun is is being pushed to have to do something. So like a necessity makes you have to do something,

and then the process of finding it, going into the unknown that's scary, but slowly through iteration, finding the answers that sort of help you master these loops. And I don't think she's super far away from what you're saying. Ralph, you said. Raff, yeah, Ralph, yeah. Their work is not super far apart from each other.

But I really think that's interesting in that one of the things she's saying is that part of fun comes from putting people in uncomfortable situations, but then giving them the tools to get themselves, out of the uncomfortable situation. Right. And then a lot of what games are is purposely putting obstacles in people's way, right? Is like, you ever heard me talk about the game lamp? Did you ever hear of this talk?

The game lamp. I'm not sure. Okay, so the idea is design is design, right? That there's a lot of principles of design. And I've talked a lot about how, like, Dieter-Rombs is a famous designer that did industrial design, and a lot of his principles of design apply directly to game design. And he's talking about designing, you know, lamps and radios and chairs and things.

But I was talking about the one difference in design about designing games from designing like a lamp is let's say I'm going to make a game lamp. A normal lamp, the goal of a designer, is to make it crystal clear how you turn the lamp on. You turn the lamp on by here's a very noticeable switch in a very obvious place that is clear which way's on and which way's off.

And because the idea of a lamp is we want to make a lamp easy to use. And what does a lamp do? Well, turns on and off and provides light. But a game lamp, the goal isn't necessarily to make it easy to turn a lamp on. Because what a game is, is part of what makes the game is there's a challenge built into it, that you're testing the person in some way. That a game isn't fun if just, here's the goal and there's no obstacle. Well, then that's not what games are.

A game requires some kind of obstacle. and that one of the things about designing for games is you kind of build in most design you want to make it as easy as possible to do something and in games that's not the case. You're purposely making it hard. And I think part of that is because the need for fun is you need to push people to a point where there's something

that's kind of dangerous to them, there's some discomfort that's there and here's how you get out of the discomfort. And a lot of fun I do think comes from that of, okay, I have a problem. How do I solve my problem? Oh, here's how. Oh, that felt good.

Solving that problem felt really good. And I think a lot of games scratches that itch. Yeah, like, so it's actually a notoriously difficult puzzle to, to really define what games are and what they are. There's a lot of definitions that are floating out there and they all have their, their advantages and disadvantages. Although my favorite on an emotional level is that the games are the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. It's like in chess my goal is like capture the opponent's king Well I could just reach across the table and grab it

But that's not really a lot of fun So I'm willing to accept all these bizarre obstacles About how I'm allowed to move my figures and not In order to quote unquote capture the king Yeah that's a cute definition Richard Garfield The man who designed magic He spent the first 10 years or so I worked at Wizards

He worked at Wizards And he was my mentor and he used to keep a folder we called Kickshaw, which we were just argue about all sorts of game, like super game designery things. And like one of the big arguments we used to have about is Candy Land. Is Candy Land a game? Right.

Because the thing about Candy Land is there's no decisions to be made. You know, so their big question is, you know, is it a game or not? It has a lot of trappings of a game. And there's a goal in some sense, but you don't ever, you never contribute to, I mean, it just happens,

it's an experience that happens. And so under my definition of a game, I don't call it a game just because you don't make any decisions. But clearly under other definitions, it has the trappings of game, clearly. And so I didn't fight on my, on Twitter all the time.

Whenever I bring up Camelan's not a game, people start fighting with me. And I'm like, you know, it has to do with your definition. It is a game under some definitions. It's not a game under others. What is your definition of game? My definition of a game is, it's a good question.

You think I have a snappy answer to it. Only because you brought up that Candyland doesn't fit within it, so I felt like there had to be one. I think my idea is that it's a goal. It's a goal with rules built in with interaction. I think interaction is important to me that like the thing about Candyland and other things like it is

I can make a game quote unquote that you do nothing and it just happens to you and I'm not sure that's a game like it's an experience like for example I sit down and watch a movie is that a game? I like I interact with it and it means things to me

but I don't think a movie is a game and so yeah I think I think rules are key to the to the process process, you know, this interaction of players and rules. To me, there needs to be a goal. There needs to be rules and there needs to be interaction. Those are the three things that kind of like, it's not a game and you don't have those three

things. Like a game or something that has no goal, well, I'm not sure why that's a game. Something that has no rules, I don't know what that's a game. Some of there's no interaction. I'm not sure why that's a game. I mean, I guess they're solitary. When I say interaction, I mean you interact with the game itself, not necessarily interact with other people.

Right, right. Well, and so then the question, I think the, Candyland falling into this. I'm going to nerd out on this because I love these kinds of conversation. You know, Candyland falling into this or not is going to be based on how your definition of interaction because the other components are clearly there. And if I can, you know, roll dice and move a figure, even if the interaction is not choice-based, that it would fall.

Right. Well, there's a great definition, by the way. It is, it is possible that Candyland is a game to small children. Right. And not against adults. Well, yes. But you can make the same argument then. If I take that your reasoning there is that because for them it is,

it is a challenge. Well, because they're interacting. Like, a little kid believes that they have some say to do with how they're going to move. Right. Like, if you ever watch a little kid play Candy Land,

it's a big deal picking up a little, you know, chit with the colors on it because they actually believe that, like, that's them interacting. Like, if I pick a good shit, I'm going to go farther.

Like, they don't think of it as, look, the chits are in order. You're doing nothing to change the order. in the order. That's not how they think. Right. You know, in some level, in some level, they're rolling a dye, you know what I'm saying?

Right. And by the way, there's an interesting question. Let's say you take Candy Land instead of the color chips, you roll a die. Now is it a game, you'm saying? Well, now I'm doing something. I'm actually I'm, you know, what I roll has an impact on the game. Is that enough? Is it, you know,

I'm saying that it's a gray area. It's not, but and I think you're correct. I mean, there's an interesting question about does it matter whether you think you're interacting with the game or that you're technically actually interacting with the game? Because I can concede that if you believe you're interacting, that's enough. So if you're a young kid, maybe Kandlan is a game to you because you actually believe that you're interacting with it, where to an adult that understands they're not interacting with it. But the problem with going on that, and this is the slippery slope is Door the Explorer, kids believe that when they say, you know, open your backpack, open your backpack, that's why she opened her backpack.

They believe that they actually influence the outcome of that. Is Dorah the Explorer now a game because the kid believes they influence the outcome? Right, right. That is challenging. So, I mean, the reason I, the definition I like is, I'm more clean than that. no matter who you ask, it gets into fuzzy world to say, well, to this person, it's a game,

and to that person, it's not a game. So here's another great one. This is one of my favorites. Minecraft. So there's two ways to play Minecraft. There is the creative mode and the survival mode. So I assume you know Minecraft. Yeah, yeah.

So the interesting thing about it is in survival, there are things that are going to get you, right? there's monsters that are going to try to kill you, and you're trying to survive. In creative mode, no one's trying to kill you. It's just do what you want. And so the interesting thing is, in my mind,

survival mode Minecraft is a game, and creative mode Minecraft is a toy. It's not a game. It's Legos. You know what I'm saying? And so that's a very interesting, like, I mean, as a game design person, like it's a really interesting division, right?

It's a game in which you change one facet, and I think it stops being a game. You know, the other thing that Richard did a lot of, which I'm a big fan of, is vocabulary. Like, there's a bunch of vocabulary that I have that I picked up from Richard. Like, for example, there's a concept in a game called Kingmaking that Richard named,

which is when the game ends, I have the ability to decide who wins the game, but it's not me. So I determine the fate of the game, but I can't individually win, but I can determine who else wins. And so Richard made a term so we could talk about it. Is this a king-making game?

And it's not that it's a bad thing. You know, it's just a quality of games. And so one of the things that really, I mean, part of this comes from my own background as being a word guy, and part of this comes from modeling Richard is that I've spent a lot of time and energy labeling things. If you follow my writing at all, I've created a lot of terminology because,

I want to talk about things. So if there's no word, I will make a word to talk about them because I want to discuss them. And I really believe the vocabulary is an important tool for advancing something because if everybody's not talking in the same language, you just don't advance. Okay. So this has been an amazing talk. And I really, I hope we get an opportunity to speak again because there's a lot of deep topics we didn't get into.

But I want to go through. There's a few questions I ask all of my guests. I want to hit those before we close. What advice would you give for somebody that's starting out today? Is there other sort of tips for somebody that's just starting out? They don't know how to program. They don't know how to do anything, but they love games. They really want to get into this industry.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I keep trying to communicate to people in general is, if you want to be a game designer, understand your tools. There's a lot of cool tools to use, and there's always new tools being made, but understand your tools. And most, here's the thing. The interesting thing to me is most of my lessons when I sort of teach game design is boils down to one of two things,

which is either A, understand your audience or B, understand your tools. The thing I say about this industry is, it's a hard industry, it's a tough industry. Get into game design because this is the thing you love. This is not an industry. I'm not saying you can't make money, but that's the poor reason to get into this industry.

that if you want to be a game designer, do this because you love making games. And then what I say to people is, the key to getting good at your craft really is play a lot of games and make a lot of games. That is the trick to becoming good at game design is understand the tools available, so play a lot of games,

so you see what's out there, and make a lot of games. It iterations the way you get better, and the way you're going to be good at game design is make a lot of games. Your first game will probably suck. But maybe your fifth game or your eighth game or your 10th game won't suck. And it's not bad that your first game sucks.

The first of anything sucks. I'm a writer. I've written a lot of stuff. I can go back to look at my early writings. Not necessarily the best writing. But I learned from it. And that a lot of what I would say to young game designers is if you really have a passion and you really love this, then embrace it.

But part of that is doing the work. And doing the work means doing the research, playing a lot of other games, and playing your games and going through it. and playtesting and getting feedback and listening to the feedback and making the hard calls and learning your craft is doing it again and again and getting the feedback and addressing the feedback and listening to the feedback. Making games isn't easy. It's satisfying as something you love, but it's not easy to do. My other big trick is to always have a bull's eye, always have a thing you're aiming for. Even if you change it, like one of my things I find in

is a lot of people, they don't know where they're going, so they kind of go all over the place. And what I'll do is, I'll just pick something. I'll make bold choices. And then sometimes along the way, I figure out,

oh, that's the wrong choice. But because I made a bold choice, I was directed in what I was trying to do, and I advanced somewhere. That's a big productivity thing for me is always have a bull's eye, always be aiming for something. So at least you have a goal.

And I find when you have a goal, it's more easy for you to figure out what you do next. And so, like I said, you know, one of my big things is that restrictions, brief creativity, that if you don't have restrictions, put restrictions on yourself. You know, give yourself something in which try to rein yourself in to just force yourself to think it in a way that you need to. Like, one of the things I talk about is the same, I'm designing a car and I get stuck. I will just give myself a random rule. Like, okay, and the next car is going to be inspired by a donut. What does that mean?

I don't know. And then that just makes my brain thinking a way it hasn't thought before. And just I get to new spaces and I come up with an idea. And as silly as it sounds, it's really helpful. Great. Well, I think we're about out of time. If people want to hear more from you, find out more about you, play your games, read your stuff.

Where should they go look? How can they find out more? I am on Twitter at M-A-R-O-254. If you go on to Tumblr, I have a blog called Blogatog, B-L-O-G-A-T-O-G. You can find me on Instagram as MT-G-M-R-O, M-T-G-M-A-R-O.

I'm on Google Plus as Mark Rosewater. You can read my column every week on the Magic of Gathering website called Making Magic. It's on Mondays. I do a podcast called Drive to Work that you can get through my social media and I also posted every Monday. I posted a social media on Friday,

and the following Monday it's in my column. And the other thing is, if you're a game designer, probably the resource I've made that's the most useful is I did a talk for GDC called 20 years, 20 lessons that's become super popular in the game design circles. It's on YouTube. Search for my name in 20 years, 20 lessons.

You'll find it. It's me sort of condensing 20 years of lessons down into one-one-hour talk. And then also, because of my columns, I have a lot of individual columns that are pretty good. It depends what you want to learn about. But if you type my name and things about game design you want in Google, you'll find some articles.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you for all your work in the field and all the awesome games you've been making. It's really, it's been a huge contribution. And thanks so much for being here. Yeah. Oh, thank you having me on. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share.

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I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game design. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons

from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book Think like a Game Designer.com or wherever find books or sleep.