Add Text to Flavor

I was originally planning to spend this week talking about basic design, but I am going to push that article off to a future week to address an outpouring I received on last week’s column on flavor text. The sentiment was best summed up in a letter by Will Mistretta that was sent to me personally, posted on our Magic message boards, and appeared as an article on StarCityGames.com:

Alright, Mr. Rosewater. This is regarding your recent online article "The Write Stuff." First of all, nice article. All praise aside, I feel that I need to level some fairly harsh criticism at it.

Frankly, the original Magic design teams had it right. Cheap, broad "humor" and the casual tone of modern flavor text is killing the once wonderful tone of Magic: The Gathering. Killing it. For example, let's take this quote regarding your "new" flavor text for the card Drudge Skeletons:

"This flavor text reflects my belief that the undead have great comedy potential."

This is, without a doubt, the single most useful quote for illustrating everything that's wrong with Magic flavor text today.

Let's look at the Skeletons' original flavor text:

"Bones scattered around us joined to form misshapen bodies, We struck at them repeatedly -- they fell, but soon formed again, with the same mocking look on their faceless skulls."

Now, your replacement:

"'The dead make good soldiers. They can't disobey orders, they never surrender, and they don't stop fighting when a random body part falls off.' --Nevinyrral, Necromancer's Handbook"

Frankly, the comparison is pathetic. Just pathetic. An unstoppable hoard of the walking dead intend on your inevitable ghastly demise has been transformed into a gag that could have come from a forth grader's school talent show routine.

Funny undead? Did you really think Magic needed an even less funny psuedo-Jerry Seinfeld? "What is the deal with those Drudge Skeletons? I mean really! What is up with that?"

Even if the lack of a serious tone could be forgiven, the fact that the "funny" that replaced it just isn't funny can't. I'm very sorry to tell you this, as I understand that you formerly worked as a comedy writer. However... well, there's no diplomatic way to point out that there might be a good reason that gig apparently didn't work out, is there?

Another example (which might very well not be yours, but illustrates my point further). Let's take a look at 1993's Phantom Monster:

"'While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh - but smile no more.'
- Edgar Allen Poe, 'The Haunted Palace'"

Now compare that with 2001's Fear:

"Booga booga booga!"

And Dwarven Berserker? A little part of me died when I saw the word "butt" on a Magic card...

It doesn't work. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't. Did Alpha have anything that forehead-slapping awful? Did Arabian Nights? Antiquities? Legends? The Dark?

Frankly, we hate it. I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but we the players hate your storylines and flavor text. Maybe your time in the ivory tower of Magic R&D has isolated you from this, but most of us do not share your punny sense of humor or your love for your pet expansion hog characters. We hate the storyline and we hate the jokes. Check the websites, check the newsgroups and message boards, ask the players face-to-face. We've hated every storyline since Mirage/Visions with a passion. We'd rather have Jar Jar Binks in Magic than Gerrard or Kamahl. These annoying character make the flavor text impersonal and monotonous. They take the focus off the players and thrust it onto a bunch of unlikable, one-dimensional characters and situations that seem like they were drawn from some 16-year-old pothead's half-baked D&D campaign. Magic used to be about putting yourself in the game. It used to be about the dueling mages. Us! Now it's about shoddy wankers with names like "Chainer?" We are not amused.

Face it, Mr. Rosewater: Somewhere along the line, probably right around the time Alliances gave way to Mirage, you guys just started down an unfortunate path and it's only become worse over time. Magic needs its majesty and dignity. Every little joke like this, every little extra bit of focus on pet characters, weakens the once-great atmosphere more and more, and let's face it, without the great atmosphere Magic was created with, it's just a bunch of cardboard. Magic started out so great that it has a long way to fall indeed, but you are still driving it downward at a steady pace, and even Magic will hit rock bottom eventually.

Please stop killing our game like this! Bring back the serious tone. Bring back the literary quotes in expansions. Ditch the puns, slang, and cheap gags. FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE quit quoting these boring characters on every other card. Classical quotes and the floating third person "detached historian" point of view are the way to go most of the time, like in Alpha, Antiquities, etc.

Please just make Magic COOL again. Like it was before. Bring US back to the forefront.

As boomerang once put it:

"'O! Call back yesterday, bid time return.' - William Shakespeare, King Richard the Second"

Please.

Will Mistretta

My reply:

Will,

Let me start be saying that this is an excellent letter that makes several very valid points. (As a quick aside, if you want to see your letter in a future column, make sure to take the time to make it well written and thought out.) I would like to take my column this week to address some of these points one by one.

That’s Not Funny

Let's assume that recent flavor text uses “cheap, broad ‘humor’" and a "casual tone." Do players believe it's “killing the once wonderful tone of Magic?” This question is something that Brady Dommermuth, the Magic creative director, has been trying to answer for some time. Our goal here at Wizards is to create the game that all of you want. The better we satisfy this need, the more you enjoy the game and the happier everyone is all around. To that end, we take polls, we talk to players, and we conduct a huge amount of market research about players' preferences.

As you can guess, attitudes towards flavor, much like those toward card mechanics, vary greatly from player to player. Your letter does an excellent job of representing the attitudes of a particular type of player, but those attitudes aren't universal.

For example, we conduct a particular kind of market research called a "godbook study." A "godbook" is just a printout of all the cards. We ask a statistical sampling of hundreds of players to pick their favorite and least favorite cards in several categories (card mechanics, art, names, and flavor text) from memory. Then we show them a random portion of a set's godbook and ask the same questions. We take the data from the first part (what we call an open-ended survey) and combine the data with the second part.

Here are the flavor-text results from the Odyssey godbook study:

Favorite Flavor Text

Battle of Wits – The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.
Kamahl, Pit Fighter – “I didn’t come to play. I came to win.”
Squirrel Mob – An army of squirrels is still an army.
Cursed Monstrosity – “Run away! It’s an…um…run away!” – Nomad sentry
Gorilla Titan – “I want a banana this big!”

Least Favorite Flavor Text

Gorilla Titan – “I want a banana this big!”
Werebear – He exercises his right to bear arms.
Mind Burst – As haunting as a zombie’s curse.

This survey suggests that players like humor. Of the favorite flavor text, only Battle of Wits could be called not humorous. Kamahl, Pit Fighter and Squirrel Mob are a little subtler in their humor, whereas Cursed Monstrosity and Gorilla Titan are just out-and-out jokes.

Second, not every type of humor is appreciated. Werebear, for example, shows that basic puns seem to be frowned upon (for more on puns, see the sidebar at the end of this article). The Creative Text team (those responsible for names, flavor text and card concepts) has been spending a great deal of time in the last year trying to figure out which styles of humor players do and don’t like. You should see the results of this in upcoming sets.

Third, and this might be the most important one, different players react differently to the same flavor text. Gorilla Titan appears on both lists. Some love it and some hate it, which has caused a lot of discussion here at Wizards. Obviously, we want to do away with the type of flavor text players uniformly dislike. But what do we do with the stuff that polarizes players?

If you would like to see more data, you can click here to see a compiled favorite/least favorite from goodbook studies since Urza’s Destiny.

Different Strokes

In the end, the discussion keeps coming back to diversity. One of Magic’s strengths is that it’s many things to many people. Mechanically, R&D solves this problem by creating different styles of cards for different styles of players. The result of this philosophy is that we create cards that are beloved by some and bemoaned by others. A good example of this is the card Battle of Wits. Players either love or hate the card. R&D believes a card like Battle of Wits enriches the game more for the players that love it more than it detracts from the game for people that hate it.

The same approach Magic has been taken with flavor text. We use many different styles of flavor text for the many different tastes of players. There are lyrical pieces, descriptive pieces, insightful pieces, and yes, humorous pieces. I believe my article falsely implied that we value humor over these other styles. I am but a single writer (and I don’t even do all that much flavor text these days) with a background in comedy writing. The article talked about the pieces that I created. So, of course, they were mostly humorous in style. Humor is just one of the Magic team's options for tone. For every humor writer like myself is another writer than specializes in a different style of writing.

The Rub

Unfortunately, diversity, which works so well in mechanics and art, is not a perfect fit for flavor text. The reason is that flavor text not only addresses different sensibilities, it actually serves a different function for different players. Some players, like yourself, see flavor text as a way to set the tone of the world. Each piece combines with the others to create a larger mosaic. A single misplaced text shatters this work of art.

Others see flavor text as a way to enhance the “fun” of the game. These are the players that like to recite the flavor text as they play the card. Disconnected one-shot jokes are attractive to these players because it enhances the aspect of the game they enjoy most. The flavor text designed for this second group disrupts the first group much more than text for the first group disrupts the second.

This puts the creative director between a rock and a hard place. Making one group happy upsets another. So what can he do? One of his current goals is to find a way to keep a more cohesive tone but still allow elements of lighter humor. Goblins are a good example of where the two groups merge. Goblins are by design humorous and thus are a more palatable way to introduce humor in a flavorful way into the game.