When I discuss game design, I often end up talking about user experience. Although this makes sense—games are meant to be played, after all—every once in a while someone will point out that the user-centric approach has some problems with it. For example:

Our conception of the “user experience” is something we invent in our heads, and might not reflect reality.

Users often disagree, having wildly different experiences despite playing the same design.

You can always find some user, somewhere, who will like your design—and likewise, you can always find someone who will hate it.

These are completely valid criticisms. No design paradigm is perfect, so it’s important to acknowledge the holes in your thinking. User-focused design has a habit of talking itself in circles. If you’re not careful, you can spend hours mulling over what kind of player will, or will not, respond to your design, only to realize that the only conclusion you’ve come to is that “some people will like it; some people won’t.” You probably knew that from the beginning.

Still, we can take this idea and turn it into something useful. So we know that some people will like it and some won’t. Instead of worrying about whether or not people will or will not respond to our design (since we’ll get a bit of both), why don’t we instead try to think more in depth about all the ways players could possibly experience it? In other words, let’s try to map out all the ways a human being could possibly respond to our design, without worrying about how many people will fall into each response. Let’s look at an example:

Magic: The Gathering‘s Mana System

In Magic, you include land cards in your deck which give you mana. You need that mana to play the rest of your cards. Let’s say you’ve just come up with this idea, and you’re trying to decide whether or not the mechanic will be received well. What are the possible experiences a new player might have with this system?

Case #1: The player starts playing the game, but he doesn’t draw very much land. He feels like he can’t do much each turn and he can never play his cool cards. The game feels slow and boring. If he loses, it also feels unfair.

Case #2: The player draws a nice mix of land and playable cards. Every turn he has something to do, and he can play his cool cards almost right away. The game feels like it has a good pace, and he gets to experience what a game is “supposed” to feel like.

Case #3: The player draws a lot of land. At first he feels rich, but it soon becomes obvious that he has very little to do. The game feels like a lot of waiting around. If the game lasts long enough, he might draw into a cool card that he can play right away. If so, he has some fun.

Case #4: The player draws almost zero land. He can’t play any cards before he loses. The game feels very luck-based and unfair.

Case #5: The player draws almost nothing but land. He loses before he can play anything meaningful. If he’s aware that he can build his own deck with as much (or as little) land as he wants, he’s likely to remove a lot of land from his deck.

It should be clear now why this article is titled “Competing Player Narratives.” Although there are infinite points in between, those five player stories pretty much cover the ways in which a new player could experience this system. A player can only experience one of these narratives at a time, and different players will experience different ones. Thus, these narratives are all at odds with one another. We call this the narrative spread.

So what do we do now? We start thinking about how each case affects the player’s interpretation of your design. We’ve already done a little of that in the case descriptions themselves, which is fine. In Cases 1, 3, 4, and 5, the player had trouble with their mana. If they’re brand new to the game, all they know is that they couldn’t play the cards they wanted to play. What’s interesting is that too much mana and too little mana both slow the game down. This is important to note. Our mana system is at risk for being underwhelming, but it’s not at risk for being overwhelming. We could tweak our design to make it more complicated while evening out the experience, but adding complexity risks introducing a problem that we don’t currently have. On the other hand, we definitely don’t want to do anything that would slow the game down.

There are some other interesting details to be found in our analysis. Getting too much land is marginally more desirable than getting too little land, because it always has the chance to pay off later. And what about Case 2? Case 2 is a gateway. When Case 2 happens, the player doesn’t “react” to the system at all. If everything is going smoothly, the player isn’t thinking about the mana, and he’s instead focusing on other aspects of the game. This is another reason we want to avoid adding complexity. Right now, our goal state is for the player to ignore the mana system. We don’t want to make any changes that call more attention to resource management; if possible, we want to push it to the background. Mana is something we want the player to address during deckbuilding, which is a completely different system that the new player isn’t even exploring yet.

It’s very critical at this point that we don’t label any of our cases as “good” or “bad.” We’re just trying to gather information by projecting how an undetermined group of players might react. It’s very tempting to look at that list and say, “Welp, four out of five of those are bad; guess I better scrap the system.” This process is about understanding, not judgment. Maybe we ultimately will change the system, but we could just as easily use this information in other ways. For example, this information tells us that decks designed for new players should probably skew towards more lands and cards with medium-high costs. New players should also play against slow-paced decks, so that they have time to even out their mana problems. Giving a new player a fast, aggressive deck would exacerbate the problems within our system, but slower decks are likely to play out well.

This narrative spread is specific to new players. We’ve chosen inexperienced users as our frame of reference. An intermediate player—one who has already devoted themselves to the game somewhat—could run into the same situations, but their reactions would be different. They’re more likely to try to fix the problem by tweaking their deck. An advanced player might not only tweak their deck, but try to perfect their mulligan strategy. Deckbuilding and and the mulligan rules are different systems whose design might be informed by the competing narratives we’ve come up with. We want those systems to complement this one.

Creating Context

Competing narratives also help us understand one of the most overlooked aspects of game design: context. By modeling player reactions as stories (i.e., narratives), it’s easy to incorporate outside factors into our analysis. All we have to do is make a small adjustment to our frame of reference. Maybe we come up with the narrative spread for someone coming from Hearthstone, Netrunner, or even HEX. In what situations would they be more critical? What might they prefer? What might they understand better? What might they understand worse? These questions are surprisingly easy to answer when we write stories for our players.

These fictional narratives go on to give us insight into the real-life narratives that will surround our game after release. Every card game made in the past 20 years has been compared to Magic, and we can see that these narratives hold up. Players who prefer alternative systems almost universally believe that Magic‘s land rules make the game clunky and exceptionally luck-based. Players who enjoy what Magic has to offer believe that the system gives way to an elegant game. Even players who’ve never touched the game follow one of these narratives, because they listen to what other people have to say. Again, this isn’t about one side being “right” or “wrong”; this is just a great example of how narrative spreads really do reflect how the public will experience your game.

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My selection of Magic for this article is based off the fact that it’s a very well-known system with well-known controversies. I want to make it clear, as with almost everything I write, that I’m not trying to bash the game. In fact, I consider Magic to be the greatest card game of them all. I definitely fall into the “land system works” group. Its triumphs and failures aren’t as important as the design conversation surrounding them.

– Saul