A life and work motivated by curiosity, an interview with Richard Garfield

In life there are proposals that you can not refuse. That is what happened to our MGG France, Durvil, who has been able to interview Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, about the game in which he has worked most recently. In the world of videogames, it is a legend. Former Mathematics Professor and Game Designer, he created a legendary game that has been with life almost 30 years and brings together more and more people.

Among the recent works of him, we found a beautiful gem: RogueBook. Located between the genre of letters and the challenge Roguelike .

I think that the keywords games, play, curiosity, flexibility and amateur . (Editor s note: Amateur should be taken in the first sense: person who loves something).

Games : It is explained by itself, I like to play in any way, from role-to-sports games. When I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons at the age of 13, I was amazed at everything that could be done through the games and I decided to learn everything possible about them.

Play : When I play or when I get involved in life in general, I do it in a fun way. For some people playing is to win. I play to play. I try to win, but I will always choose to do it in a way that can make my friends laugh or surprise them, if possible.

Curiosity : Much of my life, and especially my design work, is driven by curiosity. When I do not understand something, sometimes I think a game that explores the subject. For example, I recently read a book Radical Markets (Eric A. Posner and Glen Weyl) that had many interesting but new ideas for me. He did not have a good idea of ​​how he would work in real life. To understand it better, I gathered at least a dozen different games that played with some of the concepts. The games created in this way are generally designed for my own learning, however, they can evolve or influence the creations I share with the world.

Flexibility : I like to consider many different solutions to the problems I find in life and games. This is one of the reasons why I like card games and other games that can have many turns. Having a changing situation and adapting to the new one is often more fun for me than having a plan and follow it.

Amateur : I train in all areas of my life to learn to love things. My friends and my family are used to seeing me eat rare foods that I am learning to enjoy. When I start a new game that I do not necessarily like immediately, I will try to go beyond just understand what the players who love the game can see in it. I try to experience something of that joy myself. I have practiced this way of seeing life since I have use.

RogueBook is a digital deck construction game. As the game progresses, you will build a deck that will have enough force and flexibility to beat the bosses. It is a type of game that is difficult to build printed form, al less with the scope and variety we can get with a computer! A way to play Magic who was one of my favorites a long time ago when he left was Leagues, When the letters you had gradually added a little each week. In a way, a deck creator like RogueBook sends me back to this experience , but instead of taking me weeks, it can be done in an hour!

Hey many things that I meet mechanically interesting at RogueBook . For example, the choice of two heroes, each of which has its own card game and how place them in combat . But what I like most is the rewards system we have implemented if you are building a great deck. In most of the bundle builders , a great effort is made to get rid of the letters or for withstand the temptation to add more so that the deck is more homogeneous and specialized.

You can have guessed thanks to my previous keyword flexible I am more interested in decks that have variety, where the player must adapt more to the resources provided. Build a aggressive mallet with few letters remains a viable strategy. However, players who want to add a lot of letters to their mallet and manage it will receive bonuses to reach a certain size of a deck . These rewards help give a different vision of how to play RogueBook.

The collaboration was exciting! We spent a lot of time talking about what we got more of the genre and what we really wanted to see in the future. It is always fun to talk about games and possibilities they have! In practice, for my part, there was a lot of rain of ideas and comments about the prototype, along with many suggestions about How to solve the problems that emerged.

Hey ways to achieve what you want highlight in your game ... The solution is to find exactly that. Once this is done, there are several ways to get there. We wanted the positioning of the heroes being interesting. We wanted that the loss of a hero was something you can recover but you try to avoid. We wanted that the exploration of the map contained important options .

Do that the rest of the team was in charge of the most complicated part to make ideas reality , it was pretty Simple and fun from my point of view . My criticisms were always taken seriously and, although they did not always follow my suggestions, they always found solutions that seemed good to me! Some designers are enclose in specific solutions . I, and I think the team, focus more on Solve problems .

Magic It is definitely the game that means the most for me. It was incredibly fun to work on it and had a great impact ! Even today, I am surprised to see how enormous it has become and it is great to know how important it has had on the players. Keyforge , more recently, has put me in a state of creative enthusiasm. There was so much that it was totally new in Magic and shape the game around their multiple possibilities was exciting .

With Ability to create unique decks E Even more unique letters , there is plenty of space for creation and fun for explore . It is so fun that even years after its creation, while we were in the development and revision process of new sets, Ideas that we feel they were completely new and exciting . For example, it was not until the first game was printed that I realized that a very nice possibility was that you could have letters that modify other letters . In other words, you may have a more powerful witch from which we would normally put into circulation, but said witch converts one of your cards into a toad. You would see your deck and you would say to yourself Oh, what a more powerful witch! Then, looking more closely Why did my gentleman became a toad gentleman? As players learn how the cards were made, combinations can become a story and give them an even more unique deck than before.

It was an idea that the company had. It really was your starting point . It is a strong idea and enough natural. In Magic, you can play with 5 colors, each with your own strengths and weaknesses . The great interest in the construction of decks comes from the colors that the player will use.

From the design point of view , We wanted players to generally choose 2 or 3 colors by the great variety that it offers. Here it is thought in a similar way. In many deck creators, you just have a character that will define the available letters, but ... and if you had two? Well, That would be like playing 2 colors in a Magic de Magic.

Normally, the development of a great procedural game has a lot of repetition in its design. Many cards are created and some suggest strategies and combinations . When you or your players-Testers play with them, they learn what are really funny to develop and add new cards or exchange pre-existing cards to really highlight those strategies. Your goal is not that it is viable all the time , but some strategies will often work with the correct way to play , some will only work if the opportunity is presented and others are there as a Track or a bait ... for a future expansion .

The greater challenge was to choose between several possible solutions and Balance All variables . One of our concerns was not overlooking the players who like very specialized decks . In fact, the fact that we want large decks, does not have to be the only way to play. Even so, one of the solutions was simply letting the player choose what letter add and not give him the opportunity to reduce his deck .

Other solution would have been to create particular letters that reinforce the strategy for large decks , which has already been implemented in other games but has never been interesting enough in my opinion. Among the likely dozens of ideas we had, the idea of a reward for a certain number of letters reached in a baraja we seemed the fairer . If you are new in the world of the construction of digital decks, a gift awaits you. Of course, you must try roguebook and other deck construction games around the world. If you are already a fan of the genre, I hope you have fun exploring the mechanics in which we have focused our efforts, and that includes the two heroes working together and building great decks. And I would add that the wonderful , delicious and capricious world of faleria is a great place to play! Contente of MGG Fr.