Psychological Reactions
During my freshman year in college, I took a creative writing class. A big part of the class involved reading a lot of famous authors' work, especially short stories. For one assignment, our professor handed out a list of authors, and each person in the class selected one that no one else had chosen. Then we were assigned five short stories by that author to read. When we came to class the next day, our teacher asked us the following question: what theme ran through all the stories we had read?
Authors, whether consciously or subconsciously, tend to have a theme that runs through their writing. There's some larger important idea that they want to communicate, and their stories will keep returning to that core theme. One by one, we talked about the stories we'd read and made our best guesses about each author's core theme. But what came next was one of the most impactful moments of learning I had at college.
My professor said, "Every writer has a core theme to their work. That includes you. Part of this class will involve discovering your core theme. What greater message do you want to communicate as a writer?"
At this point in my life, I had written a lot of things, so I had plenty to look back on. It didn't take long to find my common theme. Here it is:
People believe that their actions are guided by intellect, but most important decisions are guided by emotion.
Understanding my core theme was very valuable to me as a writer, and it was something I often thought back on when I started getting paid writing jobs. Then I became a game designer. My days of incorporating my central theme as a writer were behind me, right? Yeah, I still wrote, but I was writing about game design, and that was nonfiction.
In 2016, I gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was entitled "20 Years, 20 Lessons" (watch it here), and I talked about the main things I had learned in my 20 years as a game designer. Longtime Making Magic readers will remember that I wrote a three-part series that goes over that talk (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) and recorded 20 podcasts, one on each lesson covered in the talk. My very first lesson of the talk was that "fighting against human nature is a losing battle." I put that lesson first because many of the lessons to come were built on top of that lesson.
The night after my talk, I was thinking back on that lesson, and it struck me. My first lesson was basically my central core theme as a writer. Yes, I approached it from a slightly different angle as I was trying to use it to help explain many game-design tenets, but the core idea was the same. People are essentially driven by internal forces.
One of my later lessons was "don't confuse 'interesting' with 'fun.'" This hits my central theme even more bluntly. Something is interesting because we process it intellectually, but something is fun because we process it emotionally. And the point of the lesson was the best game design comes from finding things for players to process emotionally.
I bring all this up because I was trying to figure out what to write for today's article, and I realized I've written over 1,200 articles in the last 23 years. While I've touched upon my core theme, it's definitely had a huge influence on what I've written about, and it shows up in some amount in almost everything I've written, but I haven't written an article specifically on the topic, so I am today.
When designing an element of your game (for Magic, that can be a card, mechanic, theme, or structure), one of the key things you need to do is understand the emotional impact that element will have on the people playing your game. What psychological reaction will people who encounter your game element have? It's crucial to understand that, because as a game designer, you need to know how people will play with your game pieces and how those game pieces will affect them. When creating a game, you are also creating an experience, and that experience will have a large impact on how the player interacts with your game design. Let me walk through some examples.
Milling
Milling is a keyword action where a player puts some number of cards from their library into their graveyard. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to talk about one player milling the other. Yes, you can mill yourself, but that's you choosing to do something to yourself, so it feels less relevant to what I am about to talk about.
When you cause an opponent to mill a card, you're reducing the size of the opponent's library by one. This matters because when a player is unable to draw a card, they lose the game, so you're incrementally advancing toward winning. There are also effects that work or interact with the graveyard, so those can also apply, but that is less important for this discussion.
If no one knows the order of the milled library (as no one has looked at the top card or a card hasn't been put there by an effect) every card in the library is the same unit. It's sort of a Schrödinger's cat situation. That is, any card could potentially be any spell or land in the library. A card you milled could have just as easily been on the bottom of the deck, meaning you (most likely) would never have seen it during the game. Intellectually, when one of your cards is milled, you're just losing a card unit. Other than being one card closer to milling out (which doesn't happen a lot), it doesn't have much impact on the game. But that's not the emotional experience.
Every card in your library is a potential resource. Whenever you go to draw a card, you can dream that the card you're about to draw is the card you need. I'll label this feeling "hope." No matter how bad the game is going, you can always lean on hope. There are cards you can draw that will save you. Now, let's say your opponent mills you and one of the cards that you're hoping to draw gets milled. You have lost something; not in an actual strategic game sense as I explained above, but you've lost something emotionally. Hope is a powerful emotion. It cheers you up when things are down. The dashing of hope is impactful. It feels bad. And because fun is more about how you emotionally process things than how you intellectually process them, this action is not fun.
What we found from focus-group playtesting is that less-experienced players have a negative emotional reaction to milling that's on par with creature-destruction effects. That is, having my best creature milled away feels just as bad as having my best creature destroyed by a spell. But, strategically, those are so different. Milling my best creature card has a minimal impact on the game, but having it destroyed has a large impact on the game. Still, from an emotional standpoint, less-experienced players react the same to both.
Now, games can and should have emotional ups and downs. My point here isn't that we need to remove emotional downturns. Rather, it's important for designers to know the impact that card designs will have, which lets us understand when those emotional reactions happen and helps us balance them accordingly.
Having this knowledge about how milling affects players changes how we design mill cards. For example, we have greatly reduced the number of small, one-shot milling effects. Those are spells that do nothing but mill an opponent for a handful of cards. Those cards seldom have a large impact on the game as, again, milling out a player requires a lot of effort, but they tend to cause a lot of anguish for the opponent. Likewise, in sets that have a graveyard theme, where you want to use resources from your graveyard, we're much more likely to have you mill yourself than leave it open-ended.
This doesn't mean we can't do any of the things I've listed above. It means we no longer do them as a default. When we do them, it is purposeful, because the set needs them. That's the impact I'm talking about today. Understanding the psychological reaction to an effect helps us position how and when to use them. And when it creates an emotional reaction outsized to the strategic impact it has, we must use it carefully.
Life Gain
Milling is an example of a negative psychological reaction, where the player's emotional response to the effect is greater than the strategic value of the effect. Let's examine the opposite: an effect where less-experienced players are positively emotionally invested in a way that's outsized to the value of the effect. That mechanic is life gain.
Magic's core win condition is life. You start with some amount of life (usually 20 or 40 life) and when you're reduced to 0 life, you lose the game. Losing is an impactful thing, so much that it becomes a focus for a lot of players. They don't want to lose. How can they make losing less likely? Well, it turns out, there's a game action that pushes you in the opposite direction: gaining life.
The emotional reaction here is the opposite. Every time you lose some life, it creates a small emotional reaction. You start to worry. A player doesn't want to lose, so inching closer to 0 life is stressful. Gaining life raises the number and thus reduces their stress. It gives them a sense of relief, which brings happiness.
But, strategically, life is not a great resource to overinvest in. If a player spends their time gaining life while their opponent is improving their board state, they will quickly find themselves losing far more life than they gained. For example, let's say you spend two mana to gain 5 life while your opponent spends two mana to play a 2/1 flying creature. In three attacks, that creature can negate your life gain and still be around to do further damage.
Because instants and sorceries that do nothing but gain you life are attractive to less-experienced players, they're much more likely to put them in their deck when they're not meant to. It increases their game loss without them understanding why. We've learned to be much more careful when making them, usually making them modes of spells that give the player more answers to problems. The life gain will encourage them to put them in their decks, and then the other modes will be in their hand when they need them in the game. We've also used life gain more as fun, small, additional effects on things like the enters effect of creatures as it makes players more likely to play the cards.
Poison
Now that I've talked about how we have to adjust our designs to account for how they'll be emotionally received by the players, let me talk a little bit about how we can use psychological reactions as a tool to add texture to a mechanic. My example for this is poison. Poison first appeared in Legends on two cards:
Both cards were weak, but the poison mechanic attracted attention. If a player has ten poison counters, they lose the game. That's emotionally impactful. We made a couple poison cards here and there, but all of them were low-power designs and didn't particularly jell together. Eventually, we decided to stop making poison cards.
More than two decades later, I was leading the design for Scars of Mirrodin. We were reintroducing the Phyrexians and I wanted to give them a mechanical identity. We identified four words to describe them: adaptive, viral, relentless, and toxic. Our metaphor was that they were a disease. Poison felt like a perfect fit. I had put a few poison cards on the futureshifted sheet in Future Sight to tease poison's return and slowly convinced R&D over the years that we should bring it back. You can read my article on that quest here.
The goal of poison was to make it feel threatening. The Phyrexians are among Magic's greatest villains (they're number one in my book) and it was important to reintroduce them as something players should fear. The problem was that getting beaten by poison is not particularly scary. Ten counters is a lot, so players weren't particularly afraid of it. Was there a way to lean into their psychological reactions to add the emotional response I wanted?
It turned out there was. One of the worries about poison was that it felt too similar to life. Yes, you build up poison counters rather than count down with your life total, but the general gist of it was similar. You have a number that changes and when it reaches a certain threshold, you lose the game. How could we help differentiate poison from life, and could we do so in a way that added emotional stakes?
As part of this solution, I made a rule: nothing removes poison counters. If you get a poison counter, you're one tenth away from dying. That rule gave poison emotional stakes. Most threats in Magic have an answer. If you're low on life, you can gain more life. If you're library is almost depleted, there are spells that will put cards from your graveyard back into your library. Poison counters don't have an easy answer. I should point out we did make some answers, just nothing that removed the poison. It creates a sense of dread, which was exactly what we wanted. It took something that players could often ignore and made them care about it on a psychological level. Poison became scary.
Omen
Here's an example that's the opposite of poison: an addition to a mechanic that created a positive emotional reaction. Tarkir: Dragonstorm was our return to the plane of Tarkir. One of the important themes for us to hit was the role of dragons, as the dominance of dragons was an important element of the plane (especially after the time-traveling shenanigans of Sarkhan Vol). The challenge was that Dragon cards are big, impactful creatures, which means they cost a lot of mana. Most decks simply don't have a lot of slots to allocate expensive cards, so that makes it challenging to up their as-fan.
Our solution was to create powerful Dragons that could also act as cheaper spells. If you draw them early, you can cast them as a cheap spell. If you draw them later in the game, you can cast them as an expensive Dragon creature. We considered Adventures to solve this problem, but because Adventures are so useful, we'd need to balance them by making the creatures more expensive than usual. That's okay if the creatures are smaller, but it's problematic for Dragons, which are already quite expensive. We could shrink the size of the Dragons, but we didn't want to make cards where the Dragons looked weak.
That led us to try having them be either an expensive Dragon or a cheaper spell. If you cast the spell, the card would go to the graveyard. If you cast the Dragon, it would go onto the battlefield. The problem was that this created an emotional reaction we didn't want. A player drew a cool Dragon, then, if they wanted to get other utility out of it, they had to get rid of their Dragon. It was like milling, but you did it to yourself. Our worry was that many players wouldn't do it. Their negative emotional reaction to getting rid of their Dragons would keep them from playing the other spell when needed.
So we examined whether there was a solution that created the positive psychological reaction we wanted without creating balance issues. The solution, interestingly enough, came from what we'd learned about milling many years earlier. The problem with your card being milled was that it took away your dream of drawing the card. What if instead of getting rid of the Dragon, which killed the dream, you shuffled it back into your library? Strategically, your chances of drawing it again are low. But emotionally, it was exciting because it rekindled the dream. Players started using the cheaper spells because they could imagine they'd draw the card again and cast the expensive Dragon.
Shuffling the card in made the card harder to develop, but it was worth it because it gave the mechanic the proper psychological reaction. It increased players' enjoyment of the mechanic and helped them play with it in a way that led to better gameplay.
Once More with Feeling
The big takeaway from today is that design is about more than just walking through how the players will play your cards. It's also very important to understand how they will emotionally and psychologically react to them. I always talk about how it's the game designer's job to make sure the fun is where the game pushes the players to go. Psychological reactions are key to our ability to do this efficiently.
That's it for today. I'm curious on your thoughts. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Join us next week when we hear from the color Green in another installment of "My Words."
Until then, may your games make you feel things.