Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1156: Fun

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In this podcast, I examine what makes for fun gameplay.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means It's time for their drive to work Okay, so today's topic comes from my blog It's actually on some level a very simple topic and a very complex topic. So the question that I got on my blog was We talk a lot about making making Gameplay fun. That's important that it's fun. What does that mean?

What does fun mean? How do we make things fun? How do we know that something is fun? Uh, and that my friends is like I said, on some level, simple, on some level, very complex. So I want to talk about fun today. Um, so today. So let me put some caveats to start with. First off, there are many different types of players who enjoy many different types of things.

So what might be fun for one player isn't inherently fun for another player. That's one of the challenges of fun, or gameplay in general, is that your audience appreciates different things and your audience finds different things fun. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today are the different kinds of fun that we can put into a set. And like I said, we err on trying to make things fun for the largest audience we can. So there are definitely things that some people find fun. For example, this was noted as a griefer, and a griefer takes fun in others'

pain. And while we make a little bit of griefer cards, we've got to be careful because that's not a, there don't tend to be net funds. We have to be careful with those. Okay. So let's get into fun. Let's talk about what fun is. That's today's topic. So first and foremost, I think most people equate fun with a positive emotional response, usually enjoyment. That I'm doing something and that the act of doing it is a pleasurable thing. That I enjoy doing it.

That it is something that I, you know, that, and once again, fun can be amorphous at times, but in general it means I am enjoying the activity that I'm doing, that it is something that I want to keep doing, that I would come back to. So when we examine fun, there's actually a bunch of different kinds of fun. So I'm gonna walk through the different kinds of things

that can be fun, that are different ways to have an enjoyable experience. So let's start with strategy. Strategy is pretty important. So one of the reasons that a lot of people play games is they like to mentally challenge themselves. One of the things in general is, and so my background for those who don't know,

I used to work in entertainment. I was a writer for many years. And that a lot of the philosophy of entertainment applies to game. In fact, I would argue that games are a form of entertainment. So a lot of what I'm talking about today carries over. So the one unique thing that's a little different about games from a movie or a book or whatever is

that there is a challenge built into it. A lot of times when you're watching a movie or a TV show, it's what they call one-way addressability, meaning they're doing something, you're observing it, you're the observer. And maybe they're evoking things in you or they're doing things that... but it's more that you're the observer. The thing that's different about games is it's you and the game sort of have a relationship and when you're interacting with the game. There's an interaction level that a lot of entertainment doesn't have. There's

something that does. And that the interactions a lot of it. So I talk a lot about iterative loops. When we're designing something, the design iterative loop works as follows. We come up with an idea, we play test the idea, we get feedback on the idea, we adapt the design based on the feedback, and then we will give them a loop again. And the idea is every time we finish that loop, we learn more about the game, and we adapt the game and make the game better. That's a game design iterative loop. But there's also a game playing iterative loop. And a lot of the times, most of the time, there's a strategic component to it. So here's how this works.

I do something. I'm gonna use drafting as my example, because drafting is just a clean example of an iterative loop. I draft. The first time I draft, I don't know a lot, but the mere act of drafting, I learn things. I learn things I don't know a lot but the mere act of drafting I learn things I learn things I didn't know before and what that means is the next time I do it

I've now gotten feedback from my interaction. I've learned something Often the thing I learned is strategic meaning I learned. Oh if my goal is to win the game. Oh This card is better than I thought. This mechanic is better than I thought. This card and that card go well together. You know, this theme requires this kind of card. So I should prioritize that. So every time you draft,

each time you draft itself is an iterative loop. So once again, you sit down, you draft, you learn things from drafting, you apply that, and then you continue. In the next loop, you are now acting information you got from the previous loops. And that each loop is interesting to you because you get to apply what you learn

and try to learn more. That is a strategic iterative loop. Now a lot of essentially the idea is when you're playing a game you want yes there are sort of larger overall fun things in general but a lot of what you want if you want to capture individual moments where the player it's important for the game player to recognize they're getting something if that makes sense that a lot of what you want is you want your audience to be aware. Like if the audit is having fun, you want it's valuable to you, to them, to kind of understand why it's fun. You don't want it to be a mystery. You don't want them to play and go, well, I'm

enjoying myself, but I don't know why you want to kind of be interfaced about and strategic complexity is something that can be that you, you play a game, you learn, you play the next game and you're able to apply it. And that's a lot of fun. A lot of the cool things about games is the idea that I can learn from the experience. It's a mental challenge and then I can apply what I learned. Um, now the same thing is true. You go to like sports, sports is a little more physical. There's a similar quality what I learned. Now the same thing is true in good sports. Sports is a little more physical. There's a similar quality of I learned something physical that I can then apply. I learned how to throw something or how to catch

or how to be better at something. So there's an inner thing in sports that's very similar, a little more physical, though obviously there's a mental component to sports as well. But anyway, so first and foremost, the idea of fun can be we the game players the game designers Put things in that have synergies that have connectivities that have themes that we build stuff that you the player

have to sort of learn and grow from and A lot of what we want to do when we design sets is you want to make sure there's a lot of depth there We want to make sure the first draft you do is you learn something from and the 10th draft and the 20th and the 30th and the 40th. The ideally what we want is every time you're drafting the game is deep enough. Now there are definitely games by the way. So my example here is Tic Tac Toe. Tic Tac Toe is a game where early on it's fun. They're in it of loops,

you learn things, but you do like, you can learn all the strategy of something. There's a point with tic-tac-toe where it really isn't fun anymore because there's nothing more to learn. Oh, I now know how to tie every game. I can never again lose at a game of tic-tac-toe. I know what to do, so I'll never lose. Okay, well, so it is possible to eat through the strategy. Now, Magic happens to be a very deep game. It's modular, so a lot of it is you pick and choose what you use, and there's a lot of combinatorics,

meaning a lot of cards interact with a lot of other cards. So one of the nice things is you can play and play a lot of times and keep learning from it because, you know, we are a game of, you know, 27,000 plus pieces, you know, I mean, chess is a deep game and there are six pieces, right? So there's just a lot you can do and there's a lot of interactions and there's a lot there. Okay. So number one, fun can be strategy. Number two, fun can be discovery.

So to clarify these, uh, there's a little bit of an overlap. What I mean by that is sometimes when you're playing, um, sometimes you can, you can get yourself in a situation where you're forced to do something that you hadn't thought of before. Or it's also quite possible that I am playing and I see my opponent do something, or a teammate do something, or maybe in a multiplayer I'm seeing other people do the,

that I'm, so it's a classic example for me, I just, for my own personal experiences. There's a card called Mishra's Factory. It was in antiquities, the second ever magic set. It was a land and the land did three things. One, it tapped for a colorless mana. Two, you could tap it to make target assembly worker plus one plus one. Or three, you can spend one mana and turn this land into a 2-2 assembly worker. Now, one

time I'm playing my opponent and they have Amitra's Factory on their side. So I attack, it's my Grizzly Bear let's say 2-2, they block it then after they activate, after they make it a 2-2, they use the second ability to tap to affect itself. Now it has blocked my creature and it is now a 3-3 rather than 2-2. Now back in the day when I learned this being tapped on a block mean you didn't do damage but it did allow you to block a 2-2 without dying. Nowadays you can actually block the 2-2 and kill the 2-2. But anyway, my point is, my opponent did that. I never thought to do that.

All the component pieces were there, but I never thought of that. And I got very excited because I sort of, I added something to my toolbox of gameplay, right? All of a sudden, because I had some decks with Misha's Factors in them, I sort of, my Misha's Factors now got stronger because I learned something I didn't know before. And there's something really fun, like I say, one of the things that we talk a lot about in gameplay is it's good when your opponent takes things away, when they learn something, when they say, I now know something at the end of this game I didn't know before the

game. That's a very powerful thing. And they say, I now know something at the end of this game I didn't know before the game. That's a very powerful thing. And that discovery is so fun because it's not just a matter that you learn it, that itself is fun, but also I now can apply it. And so, and there's overlap between strategy and discovery. A lot of times the discovery can be of strategy. But the big difference is strategy more comes from learning

things as you play. Where discovery, you can discover things as you play, but a lot of discovery comes from watching other people. One of the reasons it's fun to watch good players play, you know, online and stuff is that they will be better than you. They will do things you don't think of. And so there really is something a lot of fun of watching other players, be it your opponent in the game or just watching two people play that you're a participant of, your spectator. There's something really fun in sort of seeing something,

understanding what you're seeing, and then applying what you're seeing And again, there is on some level an iterative loop going on here a little bit different the idea essentially is that as I watch magic as I play magic as I interact with magic There's so much to learn there's so much there that I get to see things and find things that I did not know and while it is possible to learn strategy watching other people definitely the discovery element is very

very like there's a lot of fun watching other people just to see what other people do like I used to run the feature match areas of the pro tour and the reason it was a lot of fun to watch the pros play like these are the best people in the world playing magic is I always like to figure out what they were up to what they were doing. Like there's a classic example where I'm at a local store I think and Mark Justice had come to town. So mark justice was the u.s. National champion in 1996 He was he came in third at worlds one year the next year. He came in second at worlds

He has many top eights on his name Mark justice in his prime as someone who watched a lot of magic players was one of the Magic players to ever play the game. I mean there's other very talented players, but Justice had a natural flair. The story we always told is he was at a convention and there was another card game, one he had never played, and he asked them how to play, went to a thing to learn, later that day took place in their sort of world championship and won it. Anyway, so the story is I'm watching Mark Justice and he's making play. He's playing a game and he's doing things I just don't understand.

Like I like sometimes you watch somebody and you're like, okay, see what they're doing. Sometimes he is doing like he's just playing in a very weird way, just in what he's doing and he's discarding cards, like he's discarding cards he could play, like I'm trying to understand. And then, I don't know, six turns later, seven turns later, he finally does something in which he wins the game. And what happened was he had looked ahead,

he had figured out his route to victory. His only route to victory was this very obscure play and so he set seven turns Setting himself up to win that way and I not understanding his route to victory not known to the win condition I was baffled but once I sort of understand what's going on I'm like wow, like I really understood the idea of look part of what you have to do as a game player as a magic player Is figure out your route to victory and then you have to whatever that route is you move toward that if you're right to victory seven turns away but that's your route to victory that's what you do anyway it's very

illuminative and it really came from just watching somebody that was really good better than me and sort of seeing how they did and what they did and learning from it. Okay, next up, experience. So it can be fun to, like a lot of times there are things. So my story here is, I was at the world championship in Memphis, Tennessee. There was a new set coming out and what we decided to do that would be fun is

each of us, each R&D member that was at the event was given a card from the upcoming set and we were told, we were playing in a multiplayer event. What we were said is, play this card, build your deck around this card, during the game, play the card, and then just try to make as big a play with it as you can. Just make a splash. And the idea is people will never seen this card before, so you know. So I chose a card called Kavu Chameleon

that could double its power and toughness. And then I got in a mold, and then my whole deck was designed around I just making as much mana as possible. And then I got in a mold and my whole deck was designed around just making as much mana as possible. And then I got in a game where I were it's a very group hug game, as they say, where a lot of people were doing a lot of things that was helping other people. And so I had the ability to produce lots and lots and lots of mana, so much so that basically I was able to make my creature have like power and toughness of something like 26,000 something. And I believe I had lifelink that stacked at the time.

So I was able to, I think I gained like 55,000 life. And right, my whole job of that game was to show off this card. So I don't even really remember if I won or not. I think we were going to, like I think the top two advanced and I believe I advanced. But the point is, the story is anything else that happened in the game was kind of irrelevant. The point is there was a game I played where I gained 55,000 life. Like I remember the judges had me calculated to figure out how much life I had gained And that the point is there are things that you can do. They're just exciting to do maybe just like for example

I used to build I'm a very Johnny deck builder, and I used to love building decks that just won in weird ways one of my classics is you know, I cash tunnel to win. Or maybe I reanimated a force in nature that I put Spirit Link on and then I gave it to my opponent. And they won by being unable to deal with their own force of nature. That there is great glee that comes in just doing something And what that thing is can vary

Maybe you won in a way that you didn't expect or maybe you wanted the way you did expect but just the gloriousness of doing It was exciting that I got to cast this giant creature that I won with battle of wits that I I did something That wasn't easy to do that maybe doesn't happen often, but I did it I made it happen. And there's even lesser things, sometimes it's just, here's a fun, it's just fun to play. Doubling season's fun to do, it's fun to double things. I made a deck where I doubled a lot of things. The idea of experience is that sometimes fun is,

I just let people do things they want to do, that it's exciting to do. Sometimes it can be a challenge, not always, sometimes fun things are just, hey it's just fun to do. And that a lot of sort of creating the fun moment is figuring out what players enjoy doing. What is fun? Okay playing Giant Monsters is fun, we can do that. You know there's and for each of the groups there's different kinds of fun. Timmy likes big splashy things, but Johnny likes clever moments, or just having quirky

things happen. Spike likes really smart moments, like there's a card called Fact or Fiction. So Fact or Fiction is what we refer to as a D diggy card, meaning that the idea is that you have to divide your piles into two piles, and then your opponent picks which pile you keep. So there's a fun game in saying, okay, A, how do I make these two piles as equal as possible? B, how do I make the piles such that I play

into who my opponent is and how my opponent plays? C, can I play into what I know about my my deck and my hand hidden information my opponent might not know? There's a lot of layers there and that a lot of that all the psychographics can have fun that there's ways for them to have fun and it really is trying to do what you want to do, right? The Timmy, Danny just want to do big, exciting, splashy things. The Johnnys and Jennys want to show off what they're capable of, to be clever. The Spikes want to, you know, prove their dominance in the game and outplay people. And so a lot of trying to create fun experiences is just leaning in to what people fundamentally want to do. Okay, next up, social. Magic is

not a solitary game. You can play on Magic Arena and play by yourself, but Magic especially, tabletop Magic, but also digital magic. A lot of the fun of magic is that you are not playing by yourself. You are playing with other people. And that a lot of great moments come not solely from the game itself, but how the game interacts with other people. One of the reasons Commander is a hugely popular format right now is there's a lot of fun of interacting with other people and that a lot of times, so there's a concept I call narrative equity.

I've read articles about it, did a podcast on it, talking about the value of stories. Part of that could be like the experience I said, maybe I did a really cool thing, but part of it could also be how I interact So one of the stories I always tell is I'm playing Ben Hayes in unstable Ben was the lead developer of unstable I I led the design So we are playing and in it There is a car called kind slaver Which is a variant of mine slaver, but instead of you taking over your opponent's turn, you go get a friend, you get somebody else to make the decision for their turn.

So Ben goes and gets Tim Aiden, who's one of our editors at the time. And basically Tim comes, looks at my hand, come playing Ben, and then just attacks for the win and kills Ben. And he was like, yeah, don't bug me in the future. And it's just this moment where, I mean, Ben laughed very, very hard.

There's this moment where the interaction between Tim and Ben, and there was a fun interaction. I've told that story numerous times on this podcast. And then a lot of the thing that can happen is that just the interaction is not I mean, we do try to make the game to allow cool interactions, we do things like voting and we do a lot of social mechanics where there's interplay. But there's just something about itself that the game like trying to do things such that the players have the way to interact with other players. That there's a lot of fun of camaraderie, fun of just we did things or how we interacted

or you know, that there's just a lot of socialness. And that itself, the interaction with other people can be very fun. Okay. The fifth category, I sort of, I'll call it observation. Maybe it is admirations, maybe it is, but what I mean by that is there's a very fun thing of just observing things. And I will divide that into two categories.

I will divide that into flavor and mechanics. So the flavor side of things is the idea that I'm playing and the flavor baked into it becomes something I can play with. There's a bunch of different ways that plays out. Maybe it represents something you know, but it's a fun representation of it. You know, I'm playing Throne of Eldraine and I get the pumpkin carriage and I get sort of our version of Cinderella and I put Cinderella in the carriage and that can be a lot of fun. That I did something that sort of, I mapped the narrative.

Or the opposite's also fun. I got Pinocchio and I put Pinocchio in the carriage. That's not what happened at all. Or for example, when we first started playing with vehicles back in Kaladesh, we realized that there's an opportunity where you can animate one vehicle to then animate another vehicle. And the idea is, you know, I could turn on the car

and the car could drive the train. And we really talked about, was that a good idea? Should we have that happen? And what we realized was it just didn't happen. It wasn't the right way to play. It didn't happen a lot. But every once in a while, you just had the right combination.

I have a small vehicle that I can activate that has a bigger power, that lets me activate the next thing. And we're like in a vacuum, every once in a blue moon, having your car drive your train is fun. That having things happen, you know, also a lot of times the reason we do a lot of stuff with flavor is it's neat when things line up it's neat when I commit a crime

and it it really is a crime I'm casting murder that's a crime that is a crime or it's even fun when I do something like a counter spell you know saying that's not a technical like literal in the real world crime only because you can't counter spells. But, um, but the idea is, well, that is a crime in the game of magic, you know, and that, that a lot of the, um, the experience of observing something is kind of clicking and seeing how the flavor plays in fun, interesting ways. And we spent a lot of time on the flavor end of things, trying to be careful of how we concept things, how we name things, flavor text that we want.

For example, just like flavor text is a great example, how I remember for a long time one of my absolute favorite creatures to play was Lurgoif. Just because every time I got to play Lurgoif, I got to say, ah, come run, it's the Lurgoif. And that there's a bonding, that there is really a way to connect and flavor. And a lot of times, for example, like Fibblefip's a great example where Fibblefip showed up on one car, it just was in the art, and I think we named Fibblefip in the flavor text, and that it just became this thing people loved, and all of a sudden people are putting Fibblefip's and things all over the internet, and we ended up putting him in other sets and made all sorts of objects with him and plushies.

And you know, that there's, or Surak punching the bear, or like there's just moments that somehow supersede. And that just enjoying that moment, interplaying with that moment, interacting on the moment is a lot of fun. Now the other thing of observation, that's sort of the flavor side of things. There is sort of the mechanic side of things.

Sort of the first side is more the Vorthos, right? It's like just having fun with all the flavor side of things, there is sort of the mechanic side of things. Sort of the first side is more the Vorthos, right? It's like just having fun with all the flavor. The second side is the male side of things, which is just observing the mechanics themselves. Like there is, what was the name, there's a Kavu that I made. And the way the Kavu worked, it was a 4-2. When it entered the battlefield, it did two damage to any target, and then it had Echo, and then whenever it died, it did four damage to any target.

Well, one of the fun things about the card is, let's say for example, I need to get rid of a creature with toughness four, or three. I could play this card, do the two damage to itself because it's a four two That would make it die. I don't pay the echo anymore obviously and it would do four damage So there's this neat combination the card like it's fun One of the things that we try to do from a game design is not just build in flavorful things But be clever in the mechanics themselves and there's a lot of fun in watching, observing how the mechanics play out.

So just like it can be fun to sort of see the flavorful thing, it can be really fun to watch and see, or even see mechanicals and understand it and then, you know, able to execute on it, able to show that off. And once again, the other thing to remember is there's a lot of interplay between these. That discovery can interlock with strategy, flavor can interject with social, experience

can interlock, each of these can interlock. It's not as if fun is locked by itself. It's not just only strategic fun. Sometimes it's strategic and social fun. Sometimes discovery and experience. Sometimes it's observation and social. The different things that you can do can meld together. The core idea of today really is that if we want things to be fun, we sort of have to spend a lot of time and energy understanding when people play what they find fun about it. And one of the things we learn, so I use my example here from infinity so on finity we had a card Wicker picker I think it's his name

So the card got designed with kicker sticker So stickers is mechanic in the set kickers mechanic goes back to invasion and we came up with a cool way That you gave all stickers a kicker activation So we called the sticker kicker which is an awesome. And then once we recognized it was called sticker kicker for fun, we called the creature wicker picker. And we would do play tests and every play test people would just go on and on how they love this card. And like, I didn't even know we were gonna call it

wicker picker, it just kind of was a cutesy name. But there's something about it about sticker kicker and wicker picker and like, and just, we ended up giving it flavor text, we put more acres in it. Like there's something about it about sticker kicker and wicker picker, and like, and just we ended up giving a flavor text, we put more acres in it, like, there's something about it that people really responded to. Every time we had a play test, people like, this is one of my favorite things. So we kept it in, you know, a lot of play testing is going through, like, we're trying to maximize and make the mechanics the best they can be, but one of the things we also do is,

we observe what people enjoy. When there are moments of great strategy, of discovery, of experiences, of socialness, of observation. When any of these kinds of fun show up, we see that and we mark it and we are careful with it. That you know, oh that there's this flavor that we really have enjoyed or this cool strategy moment that you get to discover or all these different things. We recognize that and we build that in and a lot of our iterative process on our end is understanding where we might make a fun iterative process on your end and that we are very wary, not wary, very careful of observing that.

And mostly the point of today is, sort of my spiel of the day is that more than anything else, I mean, there's a lot of reasons you play games. Emotional response is one of them. I would think, in my mind, it's one of the most important. Real quickly, I like to tell the story, so I'll tell it one more time. Um, I took a writing class when I was in college and in the class, the teacher had us look at famous authors, we would read famous authors and stuff. Uh, and one point she pointed out how if you took any famous author and looked at all their work

in combination, you'll find that they have a theme that runs through it. combination, you'll find that they have a theme that runs through it. And then she said, here's the cool thing. It's not just famous writers. All writers have a theme that runs through their work. And when I looked at my work and understood the theme that runs through my work is the idea that while we are intellectual creatures, we are actually run by our emotions. That we make most of our decisions not based on intellect, but based on emotions.

And that is carried through with me, not just in my writing. I mean, I did stuff like Lego, My Ego, which is a play. I talked about the main characters making decisions, but it's also emotions making decisions. I made mood swings, which is my best part of the training of game, where you play emotions. Like there's something really that speaks to me of the emotional

experience. And as a game designer, that is what I've leaned into and realized that the ultimate experience as a game designer is you want your players to emotionally experience something. And that main thing that we're talking about today is that sense of enjoyment. It is a sense that I'm real. I mean, there are other emotions we want you to do. It's not the only emotion. But the idea of enjoyment, the idea of fun, the idea that I'm really, it means something what I'm doing and it excites me in a way that makes me want to do it again and makes

me really revel in what I've done. And you know, that is an important part of gameplay. That emotional response is an important part of gameplay and that a lot of the fun. Once again there are other emotions we evoke. It's not just enjoyment. There's things we can do that will push in other directions but the core of it as a game, as a piece of entertainment, is we want to entertain you. We want to make you have a good experience such that you want to come back and do that experience. For those of you who listen to me talk about play testing,

like when you're doing your own sets and stuff, there's nothing more important, there's nothing more valuable of having people play your game, and when the game end goes, I would like to play that game again. That you leave them wanting more. You leave them, that the experience is so much fun, they're like, I can't wait to experience this again. And that, at its core, is really

fun and building fun into the game. So anyway guys, I'm now at work, so I hope that, I hope this was insightful. This is a very complex topic and probably I could talk ages about it, but I only get, I only get one car ride. So I hope you guys enjoyed it. But as I'm at work, we all know what this means, means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed the fun,

hope you had fun today, and I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.