Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1150: Emotional Center

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about how design needs to evoke an emotional response from the players.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a concept. So last year I celebrated my 20th anniversary as head designer And I realized that I spent a lot of time talking about when I first became head designer I talked a lot about how I wanted to structure blocks better I wanted to make it something that would have more flow to them, be more planned, and not sort of box ourselves in the corners as we had been. But that is not the only thing I've done as head designer.

So today I'm going to talk about a different concept, and a concept known as the emotional center. So this is something else. And also I do believe, as you'll see today, that this is something else. And I'll talk, I do believe as you'll see today that this is something that I cared about all along, but I focused a little more at some point and we'll talk about that. Okay, so before I get into sort of magic,

let me talk a little bit. The concept of an emotional center is one that I borrowed from writing. You'll notice there's a lot of themes in my work of taking things I learned in another field and applying them to magic design. For example, the second graphics I took from my study of advertising when I was in school. So let me explain in writing what an emotional center is. Okay, so let's say I'm writing a scene where a man and woman

are arguing over breakfast. They're having breakfast and they're arguing about the breakfast. Maybe he made the eggs wrong or something. So we'll use that example. Let's say the fight is all about how he made scrambled eggs and she prefers over easy. What the emotional center means is the people in my scene that I'm writing are fighting over eggs, but they're not really fighting over eggs. The idea of an emotional center is you the writer have to understand what is really going on. What is the scene, like what is the actual emotion of the scene?

Now, for example, let's say in talking about eggs, what they're really talking about is maybe they're drifting apart. Maybe their interests are going in different directions. And the eggs are symbolic in this problem they're having in their relationship. So it's not really about the eggs. The eggs are the surface argument but it's not what's underneath. And the idea is when you're writing a scene, any scene, you want to have what's called emotional center which means what are the characters, what do the characters really care about? What is the scene actually about? Sort of the, what is the subtext of

the scene? Um, and the thing that's really important is a lot of what happens is a lot of writing is people don't as a general rule, just say exactly what they're feeling. That is not really how people function. That what tends to say exactly what they're feeling. That is not really how people function. That what tends to happen is how their feeling comes out through other ways. And especially in movies and TV and stuff, there's a lot of, you know, things represent larger things. Because in life, that is how it often happens.

So anyway, I remember taking a class in college, a screenwriting class, and the teacher really wanted to say, was trying to teach us about this emotional center. And the idea was, the exercise we did is he said, we're going to write a fight. This is why I got my eggs thing. We're going to write a fight. So I first tell me the thing they're at. They're fighting about. What is the actual fight? Give me the emotional fight. Then he said, okay, the scene can't be about that. They can't actually talk about that. Pick something more mundane and have that be the fight, but have it be through a mundane argument. This is where my eggs thing came from. So the idea of a couple's growing apart, but they're fighting about that, about the fact that they're growing apart through eggs, right?

So anyway, the reason that's important is one of the things that I spent a lot of time on is if you go back into early magic the creative and the mechanics were very disconnected. In fact what tended to happen is you made the mechanics and then either after the fact you would make the flavor or sometimes independent of while you're making mechanics somebody else was making the flavor. And the classic the classic example of the right and the left hand not working together was Urza Saga block. So Urza Saga block, we were making a block, one of the core elements of the block was enchantments. We had made a few sets that care about artifacts, but we're like, okay,

you know, enchantments have a lot of weight to them, we could care about enchantments. And if you ever stop to look at Urza Saga, like go look at the cards, there is a pretty strong enchantment theme. There's enchantments that grow over time, there's enchantments that come back when they die. There's a bunch of different things going on. We were really experimenting with enchantments. But the team who was writing the story decided they were,

so the Weatherlight Saga had been started earlier earlier and then if you guys follow my blog know Michael and I who had put this together got removed from the project. So they started sort of going in their own direction. So basically what happened was they decided they wanted to tie in Urza, which was not something Michael and I had originally done. I mean, we had some loose ties to Urza like Hannah was Baron's daughter kind of stuff but it was a little bit looser. They wanted like the master plan was Ugin's master plan so they added that that was not part of

our original story and so they went back in time and it's all about Urza's plans to defeat the Phraxians and they literally called the name of the cycle for the story the artifact cycle because I guess Hers is building artifacts to make the legacy whatever and we're like we made a set mechanically mechanically about enchantments and You named the story of the arc the artifact cycle Like this it just couldn't be now interestingly. We made some broken artifacts. So No one actually ever thinks of that time as being enchantments because not all the broken cards were artifacts, but some of them were artifacts.

Like, Teleran Academy was very artifact-centric and was broken. Anyway, there was very disconnect. So one of the things that I was very eager to do, so remember when I became head designer, one of the things that Bill had insisted on is beside being head designer, I had to run the creative team. Not only did that for a couple years, because it turns out head designer and running the creative team are both major jobs, and trying to have one person do both was a bit much. But while I sort of had control of that, one of the things that I thought was really important was I wanted to think of design and creative as being, as working together, not working

against each other, not ignoring each other, not one coming first, that there was a back and take to it. And the very first block that I was in charge of, which was Ravnica block, was very much that. I had the idea of I wanted to do 10 two-color pairs. I wanted to do a block that's all about gold cards but about two-color gold cards. From that, Brady and the creative team sort of came up with the idea of the guilds and that we'd faction.

And then once I had the idea of the factioning I split apart the sets so that there was a block structure there was four then three then three there was a lot of back and forth that a lot of the success of Ravnica wasn't mechanics dictating everything it wasn't creative dictating everything it was working together and the idea of one group would spur the other group. And then a big part of what I wanted was the idea that the set has a feel. This is where we get into the emotional center. That when you come to the set, I want the set to evoke something out of you. And that the mechanics of the set are a tool like names, like flavor text, like art that help evoke something. And one of my big beliefs was, look, we make lots of Magic sets. You know, Magic is a game that constantly reinvents itself. We keep putting more sets out.

And I want the sets to feel distinct, right? I don't want set 50 and set 51 to feel like the same thing. That part of what makes Magic exciting is every time we put out a new set, there's something about it that's uniquely its own thing. That each set feels like it is doing something that is unique to that set. And that way, when you play set A versus set B, or set 50 versus set 51, they feel different. And a big believer of that, of how they feel different, is you can't separate how a set plays from how a set feels. And that is the idea of an emotional center. Now I will admit, I think a lot of the stuff I'm talking about I started into integrating as soon as I took over

You know Ravnica definitely has the sense of the factions and the factions have a strong feel we really leaned into that after that was time spiral block and really Definitely wanted to convey like oh the first set was all aboutiral Block and really definitely wanted to convey like, oh, the first set was all about the past and there's nostalgia and it's kind of feel good. Remember the past. And the second set is a little more, um, look a little more curious about what could have been and what if things were a little bit different. And the last set is sort of looking forward in the sense of hope of all the exciting things that could be coming.

And then Time Spiral Block was followed by Lorwin Block and Lorwin Block definitely had this dichotomy. It's a world that's two different things and they're light and dark versions of each other and one is sort of the happier version, one is the more darker version and trying to get the, have Lorwin and Shadowmore feel connected but opposite from each other. Then we got into Shards of Alara and Shards of Alara was very much about sort of there's five worlds each divorced of colors. What would a world be like if if a color existed with only its allies and not its enemies and in each world we really want to shape in a way that got a feel and once again sort of factiony.

And then we had Zendikar. Zendikar was an adventure world and we wanted to really make you an explorer and how do we make you feel like an explorer and feel like an adventurer. But I will say that while I definitely was thinking about that and those qualities that are there, this idea of the emotional center as a forefront, not like I look back and I realized that it was there. I realized it was something I cared about. But the set that really made me put it on the front burner

where I was very conscious of it was Scars of Mirrodin Block. So a little history for those that don't remember Scars of Mirrodin Block. So originally, so in Antiquities, Magic Second Everset, we introduced the Phyrexians. Magic Second set Antiquities was actually about the Brothers War, but the Phyrexians played a role in the Brothers War. They sort of tainted Mishra. They definitely played a role. They were not the main antagonists like Mishra I guess was the main antagonist, but

They got introduced to magic And really were the first villains. I mean, obviously Urza and Mishra got name-dropped in alpha, but there's a antiquaries is the first real magic story and first time we sort of introduced villains and stuff and the Phyrexians went on to be very popular villains Michael and I use them as like main antagonists in the Weatherlight saga Even though the story changed along the way The phyrexians being the main bad guys didn't that was built in from the beginning of our story and it stayed but at the end of the Weatherlight saga

through the all the things that happened with Urza and the legacy and the Weatherlight, the Phraexians were expunged from the multiverse. They were gone. We no more have the Phraexians to worry about. But we knew that the Phraexians were awesome villains. They're great villains. I think Magix, my actual best villain in magic, my favorite magic villain. So we, Brady, Damruth and I, we're very eager to bring them back.

So when we made Mirrodin, we sort of baked into Mirrodin. So what had happened was, depowered through a time spiral and he ended up going to he made his own world which was Mirrodin and he made his own world back when Mirrodin first existed but the idea we liked was that he attract in some oil on unrealizing that he attracted in and in the very first book I like in the very first couple pages of the original Mirrodin novel, you see Memnarch who's like the bad guy, like find some oil and like goes in the skin. We don't even make a big deal about it, but it's there. And we definitely dropped some very subtle hints

that the Phyrexian oil is there. And that the idea was when we came back to Mirrodin, the original plan was it would just, we'd go to New Phyrexia and it'd be oh New Phyrexia where these Phyrexians come from and that the stinger at the end of the block was it's Mirrodin. Dun dun dun. Kind of inspired by original Planet of the Apes. I'm gonna spoil Planet of the Apes here. I know the movie's like 50 years old so hopefully it's not not ruin anything but basically in the movies Planet of the Apes the main characters are astronauts Charles

Heston is main character and they think they've landed on a foreign planet that they're trapped on this other planet and what they realize at the end of the movie is they didn't actually travel through space as much as they traveled through time and that the planet they were on was Earth, but it was Earth of the future. And the idea of the place where the apes rule is not a brand new planet. They were on future Earth. And he sees like the Statue of Liberty, like he realizes at the end that he's actually on Earth.

We wanted, the idea was we have that moment where at the end, whoever our main character, whoever our Charleston Heston is, like would see and realize, oh no, it's Mirrodin. Now I've done a whole podcast, I really struggled in this block. Eventually the idea we came up with was, what if we went back and it was still Mirrodin and we watched Mirrodin fall to the Phraxians. Like that story seemed very compelling and And we were trying to reintroduce the Phyrexians. We wanted the Phyrexians to be bad guys. We felt like we needed to give them a good villain turn. And the idea that they would take over Mirrodin, which was an artifact planet,

it made a lot of sense for Phyrexians. They have an artifact component to them. So the idea was we would come back. So what we ended up doing was instead of New Phyrexia being the first set, it would be the last set. And then the idea was, okay, we come back, we're on Meriden, but 10% of the cards have a Frexing watermark. Sort of like, oh, the Frexings are here. And the middle set, it would be 50-50. Half the cards be Frexing, half would be Meriden. In fact, we'd have a pre-release where you chose your sides. And then we wouldn't tell you the outcome of the war. In fact, we marketed the last

set as one of two sets. It was either mirrored and pure if Mirrodin won the war or knew Phyrexia if Phyrexia won the war. And it wasn't until preview started that you knew what was going to happen. Now it was during that time, I was really trying to understand the phyrexians. Like I was trying to, once again, I wanted the gameplay to match the feel. And it's really where, this is the part where I remembered the emotional center, the thing I had studied in school. And like I said, the more I look back at the early sets that I oversaw,

I can see that quality still being there. So it wasn't as if it went from zero to a hundred. Like I think it was imbued in me, but it was the period where it sort of, I remembered it and it sort of came out and it became more to the forefront. And the idea I had was we were introducing the Phraxians and what I said in one of our

early meetings is, okay, I want us to define what it means to be Phyrexian and we're going to use that to define them mechanically. So the metaphor that we chose that I really liked was the idea of a disease. That the Phyrexians are essentially a disease. That they do what diseases do. They go and they replicate and they turn healthy cells into sick cells, that they convert things and they grow. And the reason that the phyrexins to me are scary, why disease is scary, is you can't

reason with disease and, you know, the idea that it's going to slowly take you over. The reason that phyrexins are very scary is, hey, if you lose to the phyrexins, you know, the idea that it's going to slowly take you over. The reason the Phyrexians are very scary is, hey, if you lose to the Phyrexians, you become the Phyrexians. Or even if you're fighting the Phyrexians, you might be fighting someone that yesterday was someone close to you. You know, you might be fighting your best friend, your best friend might be a Phyrexian now. And there was something about them that was, there also was an environmental quality of

them that I liked. One of the reasons I think they make the best magic villain is that they they shape to the world they're on and magic at its best tells environmental stories it's just because the nature of a magic set and so having an environmental villain it just it fits the nature of match but anyway I wanted to convey the fact that so we ended up choosing four words They were relentless. They were viral. They were adaptive and they were toxic and so from that the idea that like

They were a disease and how to do that and from the idea of toxic We got the idea of what if we brought back poison because poison had gone away What if this was like I've been looking for a place to sort of, I really wanted to bring poison back and the idea that what better than a disease, a toxic disease, that they're spreading poison. That felt great. We really liked the idea the proliferate came about from an idea of like spreading disease, the idea that they're relentless, they're adaptive, they're viral, like really a lot of what we played into is a sense of this ongoing quality, that they're sort of this unstoppable force.

And then what we really did was I really built the gameplay or the whole team, not me specifically, the whole team. We built it so that the gameplay really was evocative of that. And the idea was, okay, so the interesting thing was, and this was a lesson I got reinforced. So a year later, I'm making Innistrad, and then the second set was Darkest Section. Most of the time I would make the first set,

and then other people would do the second and third set. I'd be off doing the next fall set. But the following fall set was Return of Ravnica. I really wanted Ken to have a large set. He hadn't done a large set at Ken Nagle. So, and Return is a little bit easier. So I had him do that. So I was freed up to do a second expansion,

which I think Dark Ascension might be the only second expansion I ever did. Anyway, in it, I was really trying to capture the plight of the humans and the idea is the humans start in bad shape and they're on their last leg in Dark Ascension. And Tom Lepilie who I was handing off to really pointed out that, well instead of focusing on the depressiveness of the humans, how about talk of the awesomeness of the monsters? And that really sort of my, my, the combination of working on Phyrexia and that idea in Dark Ascension is look, I want to bring, what are you the player playing?

Who are you? And I wanted you the player, one of the fun things of like having Phraxians or having the Monsters or whatever is you get to be that. You get to be the Phraxians. You get to be the Monsters. And that a lot of it was trying to find the like, for example, it's a lot of times we think of disease. We think of disease from the viewpoint of humans, right? There's a lot of scary qualities about disease. Disease is intimidating to the humans, the disease, and facts. But I wanted to get in the mindset of the disease, right?

That's why we picked the words is, I wanted the idea that one of the cool things about being a Phraxian is it's all powerful. Nothing stops you. And you can change things and you can poison people. And it really was this cool thing. And that... Let me take poison for example.

One of the things that I really realized in the emotional center is I want you feeling something. I wanted the Phyrexians feeling inevitable. I wanted the humans fighting the Phyrexians, or the Mirrens fighting the Phyrexians feeling inevitable. I wanted the humans fighting the, or the Mirans fighting the Phyrexians feeling helpless. So for example, I'll just use poison as a good example. One of the challenges of using poison in general is it's a separate track, right?

Like magic has a wind condition. This says ignore that wind condition, care about this wind condition. And that I wanted it to, I wanted a unique quality. I want to point like poison first came out in legends and it was just on two cards. And the thing about poison in its early life was that poison was this wind condition, but it was, it was like, I was a Johnny deck builder. But it was it was we like I was a Johnny deck builder, so I would build decks to try to win with poison And I did it

But I mean I did it like 2% of the time like it was really really hard to win with poison and when I won with Poison like that was a great account. I managed one time to win with poison But I liked the idea of what a poison was a little bit more You know It wasn't a 2% win a little bit more than that that could be an't a 2% win. It was a little bit more than that. That could be an actual threatening thing. And we wanted to feel different in life. Like we wanted to give its own identity. But that's where we stumbled across the idea is,

what if we made poisonous inevitable thing? Meaning, once you had one poison, you were one tenth along the way to death. There was no removing that poison. I know there was a card called leeches, which was very weak, but leeches, luckily not a lot of people played it. It was a very, very weak card.

What if when we made poison, we personally didn't give you ways to get rid of poison? And the important part of that was, I mean, it did a few things like make it feel different from life, which is important, but also it added an emotional quality to it. That now when you get one poison, like if poison was something you could easily get rid of, it's like whatever, I just got to draw my poison removal card before I get enough poison. But if poison couldn't get removed, if when I got one poison, I'm one step closer to death, there's a feel to that, right?

And that one of the things that I was looking for, one of the things that scars have mirrored and really centered in my brain is, can we make decisions in how we design that have an emotional impact? Can we make things, like, can we choose to do things that you, the player, it makes you feel something? Like, in Inderstrad the next year, one of the things I was really trying to do was, especially in the first set,

I liked the idea of how do I capture the essence of humans? I want to evoke fear. And how do I do that? One way, for example, is the reason we put double-faced cards in, transforming double-faced cards, was I liked the idea that this is this, but you know it will become something else.

So you have to, even though you see the thing that's more benign you have to fear of a less benign this benign thing It's coming something less benign and like with werewolves For example, which were the main ones we use for double-faced cards You kind of knew that if I had an army of werewolves like I'd RV humans when they turn to werewolves That was a problem. You did not want them becoming werewolves and all of a sudden You know we gave gameplay for you to start thinking about werewolves, right? And you have to start changing your gameplay because oh, I don't want werewolves like you are afraid of the werewolves or

Like the morbid mechanic the more mechanic said when things die problems can happen death can be scary So all of a sudden my opponent attacking with their two-t in my 3-3, I'm like, oh, what's like... Normally I... Maybe I think there's a combat trick or something, but now I get a little more afraid. Like, you know, because sometimes you'll run the 2-2 in the 3-3, not because I have a combat trick, but because I just need something to die. So like now I attack with my 2-2, you can block with your 3-3.

Even if my hand is empty, even if I don't have a trick, you're like, do I, well, I guess your hand being empty is a problem because you want to have spells that care about morbid. But let's say they have some spells in their hand. Are they, you know, is killing their creatures helping their plan? You know, it just made blocking scarier and made combat just, there's other elements you had to think about. And that's a lot of the idea of the emotional center is can we make decisions in how we

craft our mechanics that just make people emotionally react in a way that reinforces what you're trying to do. When I was making Theros for example, Theros, so Theros is our Greek mythology set, I really like the idea of that this is a set about going on adventures, about becoming something, about proving yourself. And that it really was a set about building up and that there was gods, heroes, and monsters. And we made sure that no matter what you were you're playing gods You want to get devotion you want more people to believe in you in fact You need enough people to believe in you that you become tangible you that you the God take form

Or if you're playing a hero you want to make sure that you get your heroic triggers and that you can you build up and get Plus one plus one counters and that you know, you're your you build up and get plus and plus one counters and that your simple townsfolk become truly a hero. Or if you're the monsters that you have your monstrosity and you're upgrading and you're making the monsters into the most scary version of the monster, that you wanna make sure that you are being the most monstrous you can be.

And the idea there was that there's just a sense of progression and that we we wanted you the player to feel adventurous. We wanted you to feel like you are accomplished in something and you're building towards something. And that that's really the core of this idea. Which and like I said that it was there because like for anybody that knows my history I'm fascinated by emotions My mom was a psychologist The big one of the plays I wrote in college was called Lego

My ego was about the main character and his his emotions arguing about what to do The game that the math market trader game I'm trying to make together called mood swings it involves with emotions fighting each other. Like I there's something really about the psychology emotions that really hit upon me. It's why I made you know the the psychic graphics to understand why players what they care about. So I think a big part of better enhancing the design process was incorporating emotion into the design process. And it is, in fact, one of the things, so I took a writing course many years ago in college, one of the first classes I took. And the teacher said something

really interesting. He said, if you go back and you read an author and you read all the works by that author What you will see is there's a theme that comes through that every writer has kind of a thesis they have the right to And then she said and you do too and the idea is what is your thesis? So I spent a lot of time thinking about that was really interesting and I think my thesis is this following which is we as humans Like to feel that we function intellectually But in reality we are more driven by our emotions than our intellect and that is been reoccurring work by our emotions than our intellect. And that has been a reoccurring work.

And interestingly, not just through my writing, obviously you can see it in stuff like Lego My Ego, but through my game design, through all my creative endeavors. And so I think the idea of the emotional center is just me following through on that, which is like game playing is entertainment, right? The reason I play games, I mean, there's many things,

I guess it's not the only reason, but the reason I play games though, is I want to feel something, to experience something, I want to do something, and that, for a game to succeed, for entertainment to succeed, and in some level, this is just as true about writing as it is about game design. And once again, this is where like studying screenwriting

proved to be a little more applicable than I first thought. That part of writing a good script, part of making entertainment is imbuing something in your audience, of making them care. The reason that you want an emotional center in a scene is yeah, it's great you're arguing about eggs, but what are you really arguing about?

What's the human experience that you're hitting? What is the emotion that you're trying to tell? And that what makes a great movie or a great TV show is the audience sits there and they say, oh wow, yeah, I've been there. I know what they're talking about. I understand that. That shines on part of the human experience

I too have felt that way. I have known despair. I've I've been afraid like it Taps into something that's very universal Games are no different that when you sit down to play a game the reason you're going to play that game again is that game evokes things out of you. And, yes, it's important that it makes you think. We do want you to have fun examining and test yourself and, yes, all that is true. But I would argue, because it's my thesis, that more important than making you think, it has to make you feel.

And so when you play a game, the core element of the game is that the game brings out something in you, that it makes you feel something. And that is the idea of the emotional center. That when we're building a set, when we're building what goes onto it, we want, yes, we're building cool creative, we're giving neat names and art and flavor text,

but also we're imbuing the gameplay itself. That you, the game player, are experiencing something. That you are feeling something. And that is that feel. So my final example, I use Outlaws of Thunder Junction because that is the latest set at the time of me recording this. So we were making Outlaws of Thunder Junction. The important thing to me that I conveyed to my team was I wanted you to feel like a criminal.

You are a villain. And what does that mean? What does it mean to be a villain? Why is it awesome to be a villain? What are the things that make being a villain being a villain, right? So number one is like I do things I'm not supposed to I commit crimes and

I get rewarded that I I do things I'm not supposed to do and it's good for me It had you know, like I I the criminal like I robbed things and now I have money and and things happen, right? So we wanted to find a way to make you feel like you were committing crimes And the other cool thing about being a villain, one of the other cool things about being villain is I have people around me. I have my, my gang, my posse. I have henchmen that serve me. So the idea of the outlaw batch, the idea of, uh, the mercenary token, um, and part of being a criminal is I'm smart that I can plan things that I can scheme

That I can you know, I can I can plot things I can go on as a crime spree that I I get to feel smart that that the real the best criminals are real smart And they outwit they outwit the law and they outwit the other people and the idea was and then layered on top of that, the reason we brought the western into it is a lot of the sense of lawlessness, the sense of I'm going to do what I want to do just fit the environment so well. And that the idea of making Allah's the Thunder Junction have a, like why it was something different than something else, why this that set is it's just evoking different things

It's bringing different things to the forefront is making you play in different ways It's making you care about different things and that is not just the next set it is You know the villain outlaw Western set that it all comes together and has this this feel about it And that is the key that is the the important, that every time we make a set we have to understand the emotional center. What are we doing? What what are we making you the player feel? What are we making you the player do to create that feeling? And that is a fundamental, like there's a bunch as head designer there's a bunch of different things that I've really championed.

But this is a big one. That's why I'm talking about it today. That we do want you, we want to make sure that designs in how you play them and how you see them and how you experience them, that they evoke something out of you that is a universal thing that you can understand and relate to and be excited by. And that, that is emotional center. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's talk. It's fun to go back and think bigger picture stuff.

Like I like, I like to do some podcasts that are on more minute specific things. And I like some larger things. So it's a little bit larger. But anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast, but I'm now at work. So we all know that means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to making magic. I'll talk to you guys next time.

Bye bye.