Making Magic sets is really hard
Playing magic is fun if you like the game. But can we say that making it is fun? More often than not, it isn't. Behind each card there is a lot of hard work. Behind each set there is not only hard work, but passion, hatred, every emotion you can imagine is behind a set. The process to bring out a new set is not easy. It's hard and there is a lot that goes on to make it to the stores. Multiple iterations, multiple decisions, arguments, meetings. It's a huge and complex task. One of the most frustrating parts, as Sam tells, is that you create a card or mechanic and after a long time it goes up in flames. For each card that makes to the stores in a set there are dozens of others that didn't make it. Every employee must have at least a handful of personal creations that they really wish could see print, but they don't.
One of the mistakes is to try to make the set perfectly balanced. Perfection is a concept that cannot be attained in magic and that is a good thing. Each set in magic has strengths and weakness. One of the things that is just part of magic is that players are going to become frustrated over one or more things. The players are going to learn how to play better by facing their own frustrations. Mark Rosewater has a lesson that is you are better off making cards that evoke strong emotions than trying to make cards that please everyone. Having players that love a card and players that hate that same card is better than having everyone like it, because there is a difference between a player base that likes the game and a player base that loves it.
You may ask "If making magic cards is hard and not fun, do developers and designers argue when making the cards?". Sam says that yes, it is part of the process. Take what Mark Rosewater says about emotions and imagine that if the card was meant to make players react with strong emotions, those same emotions must have also been there during the process of creating it. Another question may arise here "If making cards is not fun and is hard, how can people make the cards?". I must say that some jobs are not for everyone and some people won't ever adapt to some jobs.
From a personal standpoint I'd say that there is something that I've learned by researching about personality disorders and toxic relationships that relates to game development and what Sam said. Most people learn that good emotions are positive and bad emotions are negative. I'm going to reference to Daniel Martins de Barros, a brazilian psychiatrist that publish a book that is called "The good side of the bad side". In that book he provides a different perspective for each of the basic emotions. Can we think of happiness as being bad? Can we think about sadness as being good? He addresses such questions in his book.
Sam tells that making magic is hard and isn't always about joy and fun, there is a lot of pain and suffering too. That is something that is part of all personality disorders, the inability to understand and/or to cope with all the emotions that are just part of the human being. In the previous lesson I said that you can't expect to perform good if you hate what you do. But what I didn't say is that you cannot feel hatred. Those are two different things. Sam tells that meetings between the developers and designers can be contentious at times, because each person has a different view of what makes a great set. Much like the player base itself is really heterogeneous. Think about all the basic emotions for a moment. They are different from one and another and they all coexist within one's mind. It is hard to manage them, isn't it? Sometimes we don't want to feel sad or want to feel happy be we just cannot force ourselves to control emotions with rational thinking. That's not how the brain works.
In the same way Sam tells that the perfectly balanced set is impossible, to have perfectly balanced emotions is also impossible. After all, what is a perfect person? Does it even exist? Narcissistic personality suffers from that, people who believe that they are perfect. Some people suffer from the opposite, they truly believe they aren't good and will never be. And there are those who are obsessed with perfection, not because they think they are, but because they want to attain perfection in whatever form they see it. Can game design or level design suffer from those issues? Yes. I don't have experience here, but I really don't think that game companies should be seen as places where everyone is always happy. Places where sadness doesn't exist. There is no suffering and nothing goes wrong. No, that place does not exist. What cannot be accepted is an environment where one or more of the emotions are not welcomed and are outrightly denied or rejected. Then we have a problem.
If you do some research about toxic relationships, toxic families, toxic workplaces, you are going to see some patterns. What does all that has to do with level design or game design? Imagine meetings where you feel humiliated because your ideas are being rejected or you are never acknowledged. Imagine that you are so self-centered that you want to defend your beliefs no matter what. Imagine if a coworker is so happy about something of their own that they just can't stop putting their own ideas on top of everything. Imagine if you are feeling so down that you are inadvertently pulling others down. Or there is another person doing this and you are going down with that person. I really do not believe that game companies are free from all that. No, they aren't. Making games or levels is hard but it doesn't need to be burdened by emotions that are out of control.
