December 19, 2025 • 47 mins
Playing board games and spending too much money are time-honored Christmas traditions, so to mark the festive season, Tim is joined by the creator of Magic: The Gathering - Richard Garfield - for a special Q&A about economics and game design.
How should you go about building the perfect game? Why did the Magic trading card market crash? Why do so many people hate Monopoly? Plus, Richard has a bone to pick with Tim about a previous episode of Cautionary Questions.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
We get lots of emails dropping into the Cautionary Tales inbox,
ideas for shows, reflections on episodes, you know, honest feedback.
By the way, It's tales at Pushkin dot fm, and
do keep them coming. But a few months ago I
spotted an email from a name I recognized. Richard Garfield
is a mathematician, inventor and the game designer behind the
(00:42):
huge game Magic The Gathering and many more since, including
King of Tokyo, Robo Rally, and key Forge. But Richard
had a bone to pick with me about one of
my previous episodes of Cautionary Questions. So of course, of course,
rather than argue with him on email, I'd much rather
(01:03):
argue with him in person and maybe ask him a
few questions yours and mine about games and game design.
I'm very excited, Richard Garfield, Welcome to Cautionney Sales.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Hello, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. The pleasure
is all mine.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I think this is going to be a lot of fun.
I'm very grateful that you have agreed to do this,
and thanks also for being a listener to the show.
Very very kind of you to know you're out there
listening to listening to Causne Sales.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I'm devoted, have listened to everything and easily my favorite podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Wow, well that's I'm blushing now. Richard, you got in
touch following an episode of Cautionary Questions involving me and
Jacob Goldstein. This episode, in fact.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
What are your thoughts on UBI universal basic income as
a solution to an AI crisis and the widespread philosophical
and economic implications of this.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
If what Alex is thinking about comes true, and if
most people just have no economic value, they have value
as human beings, have value as members of society, but
there's nothing that they could actually sell their labor to do,
then that's completely uncharted territory. We've never been anywhere like
that before, so everything we do is kind of speculative.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
The idea of more or less everybody losing their jobs
I'm skeptical of for the simple reason that it hasn't
happened in two hundred years of incredible technological progress. I
don't think we're going to have everybody losing their jobs
to AI. I definitely could be wrong, but that's what
I think.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
No, I think that's a good working assumption. If you
think back a few centuries. Basically almost all the labor
that people did. They might wash their clothes occasionally, well
that's been outsourced to the washing machines. Almost everything we
used to do is now done by machines. But somehow
we still all have jobs. Tell me what you felt
when you heard the conversation between me and Jacob.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I've been interested in the effects of technology on our
economic system for a long time, and I'm particularly interested
in universe basic income as a possible solution. And the
core of my disappointment was that I did I didn't
feel like the universal basic income aspect of it was
(03:19):
being engaged with in the way I wanted to hear
it talked about. Often economists seem to write off some
of the concerns in a way which doesn't seem helpful. Yeah,
I was particularly interested in what you had to say
about it, and that wasn't really there.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, and we didn't do any of that. We mostly said,
don't worry, the robots are'm going to take our jobs,
which you know, we may be right or we may
be wrong, but it kind of left the universal basic
income question to one side. So thank you for raising that, Richard.
We will, we'll talk about universal basic income. Hopefully I'm
going to be able to talk to you a little
(03:57):
bit about games. But before we do any of that,
we are going to play the caution retiales theme. I
(04:26):
am talking to Richard Garfield. Richard, and you're a huge
star in the gaming world. Where when did your love
affair with games begin?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I was always attracted to games, but I don't think
I really became a gamer until Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons
and Dragons blew my mind. It was just it was
just a complete revelation for me. I had no idea
the range of things that could be done with games.
(04:57):
It became really a lifelong obsession with Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
What is it specifically about the tabletop roleplaying games there?
I mean, I'm a huge fan of them as well
that you love so much. Is it the sort of
just the endless possibility like that it doesn't even seem
to be a game in the normal sense.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
What originally drew me to it was that it broke
all the rules I had understood about games. There was
no time limit on them, there was no explicit victory condition,
The responsibility for play was much more in a recognizable
way in the hands of the player rather than a
(05:36):
system of rules, and so its value to me was
really showing the range of what could be done with games.
I just think that role playing is in itself an
amazing pastime because of the endless possibilities. You know that
anything can be done with it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, they are remarkable. I remember quite vividly being told
by a friend about this game, and I couldn't quite
get my head around what he was describing. So was
this a computer game? No, it's not a computer game.
Is there a board? No, not really, there's a app
And I think we should probably help people who don't
(06:13):
know how these games work to conceptualize them. And fundamentally,
you've got in your classic role playing game, you have
a game master or a dungeon master or who is
describing situations, and then the players are adopting roles. That's
why it's called role playing. So they might be a Astronauts,
(06:34):
space explorers, wizards, and they're describing how their characters respond
to the situations.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yes, if you just if you play traditional games and
you first run into role playing games, it really challenges
all your preconceptions about what games are and what they
can be.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
One of the things that interests me, though, is that
you're I mean, you're deep into Dungeon and Dragons. You were,
I think one of the primary play testers for the
third edition.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Is that right, that's cracked up.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
But you're famous for your board games and your card games,
which are more structured, and the tabletop role playing games,
which is so can be so free form. They feel
quite different to board games, so I'm curious as to
why there is such a lot of overlap. I mean,
I love both, You obviously love both, A lot of
people love both, and yet that it seems a little
(07:23):
bit like saying, well, if you love cricket, then obviously
you should love no marathon running. But they're not really
the same thing at all. But why this affinity between
the two.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, that's a really good question. I've asked myself why
I ended up devoted to more traditionally structured games than
role playing, since role playing was my introduction to the hobby,
And I'm not sure what the answer is, but one
difference between the way I looked at games and a
(07:55):
lot of my peers was that my peers found a
game they loved and they became devoted to that game,
and I became devoted to games as a whole. So,
for example, I became interested in classic games like go
and chess and cards, but I also became interested in
sports and what the games were that were being played
(08:18):
within sports, and trying to see the connections between all
these different areas of games. So I'm not sure why
I ended up in that area and specific, but I
do know that there's been sort of a lifelong exercise
of mine to expand and unite games under one umbrella
rather than be a bunch of separate things. Like One
of the things that was very interesting to me when
(08:40):
I was beginning out is I would ask people what
games they played, and they say, often I don't play
any games. And then we'd talk a little further and
it would turn out they played poker they just didn't
consider it a game, or they played chess. Oh no,
that's not a game, that's a sport.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, do we have
a definition of games that satisfies you?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
No? No, I follow the fuzzy definition of games where
where there you know there are things that are more
or less game like, but that you're not going to
have a precise definition, there's always going to be fuzziness,
and often exploring that fuzzy boundary is quite interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
One game that is definitely a game, there's no fuzziness
about it, I think, is Magic the Gathering, which is
your game, and I mean, I think has got to
have a claim to be one of the most successful
tabletop games of all time. It's astonishingly popular game. Tell
(09:39):
us a little bit about that game and how you
developed it.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Magic began with a eureka moment, which is not common
with my game design. My game design is more evolutionary
than revolutionary typically. But I was hiking and had this
thought which overwhelmed me, which was that not all the
players had to have the same equipment in the game.
(10:04):
And I just felt like there was endless possibilities with
this idea that people would bring different cards or different
components of some sort to the game and compete with those.
And it took me a little while before that became
what it is now, which is a game where the
(10:25):
players have cards which represent magic spells and they have
a duel with these spells. And yeah, it was published
in ninety three and it was instantly very hard to
keep enough in print to satisfy the growing and ravenous
player base.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
One of the things about it that I as an
economist and as a gamer, one of the things that
struck me as so clever was that it's kind of
It's got this kind of collectible baseball card quality to it,
this idea of that you would buy packs of cards
in the hope of maybe getting a rare one. I mean,
(11:05):
that's kind of genius, both in terms of gameplay and
of course of economics. I mean, suddenly people have a
reason to buy and buy and buy the game, so yes,
well then you.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
It was a surprise to me as much as anyone
how the idea took off. I knew that it was
a good game because my playtesters were playing it devotedly,
even after two years with the same set of cards.
But I still expected people to buy maybe a deck
or two and then just trade after that. I did
(11:36):
not expect them to buy like they did, and it
has been an ongoing tension with the game. The industry
standard name for them is collectible card games, but I've
always fought that as the name because I don't like
the emphasis of collectible. I like calling the trading card
(11:56):
games because it emphasizes the original intent, which was that
players trade the cards between themselves, and history of the
game is filled with speculators interfering with gameplay because they
drive the prices up so high that people have trouble
getting the cards to play. The economics of the game
(12:18):
is fascinating. I have a friend who's thesis economic thesis
was entirely about magic.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I think this interaction between games and trading it's interesting
as an economist. When I occasionally play Monopoly, I'm always
trying to get people to trade, because there are games
from trade. If you're playing with five six people, any
two people who get together and trade, they're really stiffing
the other players, and they should do it. But in
(12:46):
my experience with kind of non gamey gamers, who are
the kind of people who you're likely to play Monopoly with,
they tend not to mont to trade.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
One of the things i'm designing a game I have
found is that you do have to consider not what
the optimum play is, but how people actually do play.
So if they play in a way which is in
some theoretical sense not optimum and they end up having
a miserable time, that's a fault of the game, not
(13:16):
the players, and one has to take dad into account.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yes, that feels like a lesson for economic policy as
well as for game design. You've got to deal with
how people actually behave rather than how they might behave
in some theoretical world, which I guess brings us onto
the question of universal basic income, so which I've promised
you I'm going to get to. So let's do it.
So the issue on the table was, let's say the
(13:42):
robots take all our jobs, or the robots take a
substantial number of jobs from a substantial number of people.
What would we do about that? And might a universal
basic income be a response? And the basic idea of
a universal basic income, it's pretty simple. It's universal, and
it's an income, and and it's basic. So everybody gets
(14:02):
some cash, maybe not loads and loads of cash, but
they get enough cash. So very happy to tell you
what I think about. But what's your take? You said
you've been thinking about this for an enormous amount of time.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, in fact, I would like to give you the
thought exercise which i'd had so much. I've had so
much trouble getting seriously considered, which I would ask my
economic friends as a thought experiment what would happen if
the jobs went away? It became almost pathological. How often
(14:35):
that wasn't taken as a thought experiment, that was taken
as an opportunity to talk about how that can't happen.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yes, and Jacob and I just did exactly the same thing.
So I apologize for feeding your frustration. I mean, I
understand why that is a response, because I think there's
a long history of people overrating this possible scenario and
getting too worried about it. But sure, let's entertain it.
So I mean, what I'm imagining is we're living in
(15:03):
a world now where most people there's no real economic
value to their labor. It's all being done one way
or another by automation. That's super radical because our work
has always had value in the past, and therefore the
(15:24):
implicit bargain has always been, you know, if you want
to eat, then you've got to work. You trade your labor,
you get consumption, you get good stuff. So in this
hypothetical world, you can't trade your labor for consumption because
your labor doesn't have any value. You still have value
as a human being. So what are we going to do?
Technically speaking, it doesn't seem that hard. I mean, one
(15:46):
way of thinking about it that ties it to today's
economy is you just say, well, the government, which will
assume is still a democratic government representing the citizens. The
government just taxes capital, so levy a tax on companies. Well,
levy a tax on anyone who has a robot, and
we redistribute that income to all the citizens. Everybody gets
(16:11):
twenty thousand dollars a year or whatever it is, and
they just spend that money buying stuff from the robots.
Or if we're talking more Star Trek, more futuristic, maybe
the rule is it's not about income. You just have
a robot who works for you. Everyone's got a robot
who works for them. Everyone gets some kind of voucher
that entitles them to services from this kind of production
(16:33):
system that is all automated. In principle, it's possible because
you've got this tremendously productive economy and you've got a
bunch of people who want to consume stuff. So what
you're trying to do is bridge the gap, Like you're
trying to figure out who has the rights to consume
the output of all of this production, and how do
(16:53):
we assign those rights. So there are other possibilities, which is,
you know, you've got some dystopian state and Elon Musk
controls all the robots and they all have guns and
nobody else gets anything, and you know, then we're in
some nightmare future. But but assuming we still live in
a in a wealthy democracy, it's incredibly radical to say
(17:18):
to people your consumption is no longer tied to your
production at all. But it doesn't seem impossible to set
up that kind of system.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, that describes it very well, and it has engaged
in the thought experiment quite well. I would say that
that is one of the things which I find appealing
about universal basic income is that it seems like a
dial that you can spin it and get some result
which might smoothly bridge that gap rather than change everything.
(17:50):
And the thing is that if you don't, if that
really is a possibility, and we're really on the road there,
then at what point do you actually make a change?
Because I suspect if you don't make a plan for it,
that you're going to end up in a worse situation.
It won't be simply we're going to get to a
point where people say, oh, we need to do something now,
(18:11):
it will already be a dreadful state. Possibly you'll even
get to a place where you can no longer really
take the steps necessary to get a smooth transition.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, we already have a universal basic income
in many rich countries. It's just universal subject to the
condition that you're over the age of sixty five. The
age varies. What worries me, Richard is the transition. And
I think one of the things that is worrying is
(18:46):
people are very concerned, maybe too concerned, but in any case,
it's a fact people are very concerned about the idea
of the undeserving poor, the idea that you're giving money
to people who are they're taking advantage of you. You're
working hard, you're paying your taxes, and then some other
guy is just laughing at you and collecting this money
(19:08):
on benefit and they're just a scrounger. It's a very
powerful rhetoric and very powerful concern. So at the moment,
in a society where most people can work, that concern
is it tends to be fought by people saying, well,
we're going to have type restrictions on who can get paid.
But the shift to a universal basic income in the end,
(19:29):
you're basically saying what everyone's going to get it. So
I imagine at a stage where the robots are doing
all the work and everybody gets this income. Again, it
won't be a problematic there. It's the getting from A
to B that's the problem. And I think it seems
in this hypothetical world where automation takes all the jobs
and they're not going to take all the jobs all
at once. They're going to take some people's jobs first
(19:51):
and other people's jobs later. And so you get you know,
twenty percent of the jobs are automated, and then forty
percent of the jobs are automated, you know, as sure
people are trying to retrain, they're trying to get new jobs,
but it's hard. Then it's sixty percent of people's jobs.
And then you've got the people who remain, who, no doubt,
we'll be telling themselves a story about how incredibly special
(20:12):
they are and how incredibly special less skills are, and
how they're working hard. But in fact it's just going
to be pure chance what stuff is automatable and what
stuff is not. And I can imagine that kind of
those questions as to who deserves to get this income
and who exactly is going to pay for it are
going to loom very large.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
I agree. I think that has definitely been a big
part of the story around universal basic income. But one
way I like to look at it, because I view
everything through a lens of games, I like to look
at it as a catch up feature. In games, when
(20:54):
you fall too far behind, you can feel like you
can't contribute, can't participate in the game in a productive way,
And in game design you can make good catch up
features or bad ones. Catch up feature encourages people to
lean on it rather than do what they're supposed to
(21:16):
be doing, which is playing the game. So when we
start talking about these people get universal basic income, but
these don't, that really opens up this possibility for I
feel like these people are not playing the game. They're
just leaning on the catch up feature, and that feels bad.
But if it really is universal, if it's a citizen's dividend,
(21:38):
then it's something where it raises everybody, and the people
who do have work, they're going to have a better
lifestyle because they're getting paid above and beyond. They won't
feel like, oh, I shouldn't be participating because because I'm
denying myself this dividend.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, I mean there is an argument that the most
successful government programs are always the universal ones. So whether
it's the UK's National Health Service where everyone who lives
in the UK. Actually they're slightly tidening it, but basically
the National Health Services is for everybody, most rich people
for the most part using the National Health Service, And
(22:16):
the same is true for the state pension. I mean,
rich people have private pensions as well, but nevertheless everybody
gets the state pension. Nobody is told, well, you're a millionaire,
you don't get the state pension, and that I think
has been quite important in building support for this sort
of thing. So maybe universal basic income could potentially benefit
from that as well.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, I think that's almost a necessary ingredient of getting
it to work.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Richard, I have loads of questions from our listeners for
you before we do that. Are you happy? Have we
entertained the hypothetical enough?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Absolutely? Yes, thank you. It was very very engaging, very pleased.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I am here to serve, so it's good to hear.
It's good to hear. Right after the break, we will
be dipping into the virtual mail pack. We are back
and here with game designer extraordinary, Richard Garfield to answer
(23:18):
your questions about games. So, Richard, we have a question
from Ronan, who was a member of our Cautionary Club.
He got in touch via Patreon to say, I would
love to hear about the creative process of creating a game.
Is it often a flash of inspiration, refined and polished
and then released or is it much more iterative? Does
(23:41):
the theme arize first or the mechanics the mechanics basically
the rules of the game. You've told us a little
bit about the flash of inspiration behind magic the gathering,
but you said that was unusual.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah. I engage in a very iterative game design process.
And part of the reason for that is the games
are often really complicated systems, and I've found that it
is not worth my time to try to analyze everything
up front, that it is much better use of time
to make a prototype and play it just because you can.
You can think about things forever and just misfundamental stuff.
(24:19):
So I design games, play them, iterate on them, and
then eventually sometimes often actually give up on them and
maybe return to them years later, or take pieces of
them and combine them with other things. There's occasionally a
Eureka moment like I had with magic, but usually it's
(24:40):
much more gradual.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, the theme of magic is your wizards dueling using spells.
But I didn't have to be that theme. It could
have been some other themes. So so how important is
the theme?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So Magic in particular was a mechanics first and then theme,
and I would say more often than not, I do
mechanics first, then theme, but I do it the other
way as well. One of the most extreme examples of
that was that I was playing a quiz game with
my wife Cony, and we were putting together these words
(25:16):
to try to find the answers to these questions, and
two of the words we put together were fat Dracula,
and we started laughing because it was such a immediately
against such a good image, and it's it has a
it has a rhythm to it, so it makes a
good game title. So I started making a game based
on that. The idea was basically that these vampires get
(25:39):
up at night and go out and eat a bunch
of people and try to waddle home before the sun
comes up, because the more people that they eat, the
slower they get. And it didn't actually end up being
even called fat Dracula. It's called The Hunger. The publisher
decided to go with The Hunger as a name, But
that is as close to the beginning with the theme
(26:00):
and ending up with and adding the mechanics as I've
run into. So for me it works both ways, and
for designers, I think it often works both ways.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
On the subject of this iterative process, we had a
couple of listener questions about playtesting, so Andy's been in
touch to say, please tell Richard, I've played a lot
of Treasure Hunter with my son when he was younger.
He's now fourteen. It's a game I intend to keep
on the shelf for the day when I have grandkids.
So I think that's a rave review. But Andy wants
(26:31):
to know how you test your games, and Mike be
has another question similar question. He says, Richard, how much
playtesting goes into a game before it gets released? And
have you ever had a mechanic that you just couldn't
make work or if you solved it?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
How ideally a lot of playtest it's hard to model
in your head what's going to happen with the game
play to begin with, So that's solved by playtest at first,
just playtest with the designer and friends. But then in
the long run you have this other issue, which we
talked about a little earlier, which was that if people
(27:08):
are playing in a way which isn't necessarily optimum, but
that's the way they want to play, then it should
still be a fun game. It should still work. I mean,
there can be some some situations where there's a line
of play which isn't fun and is discouraged, but in general,
you shouldn't design this game for the best players and
(27:31):
assume it's going to work out for everybody else.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Then that must be an issue with the playtesting because presumably,
well maybe maybe this is the wrong assumption. I was
assuming a lot of playtesters are very keen gamers and
are going to play very well. But but maybe you
maybe that's not true.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
No, that's often an issue, and that is true. So
when I play test, I do keep around often the
same playtesters throughout the development, but at the same time
I try to mix in other playtesters, and I try
to mix in, depending on the game, more casual players
(28:06):
and people who you who have no idea what's going on,
and I look at how they play because I want
them to enjoy the game as well, or to have
something to work with. It's very easy to find yourself
designing and designing and designing and iterating until you have
(28:26):
a game which people who have played for three years
love but nobody else can really get their head around it.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, I can imagine, Barbara writes to say, please bless
Richard for the joy that is Bunny Kingdom. Smile. You've
got a lot of fans here, Richard. I've not even
heard of Buddy Kingdom. You've designed so many games that
I can't even keep up with them all. Anyway, Barbara
loves it, and in fact, her cautionary club profile photo
(28:55):
comes from the Ladies Gaming Weekend where she first played it. Anyway,
her question what is the process you like best for
collaboration with the artists that illustrate your board game designs
and is there visual artist in the gaming world or
not that you would really like to work with on
a game.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
My favorite way to work with artists is to give
them as much room to work as possible, because they're
generally in art because they're creative. And so this went
back as to the original work I was doing with Magic.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Which as a whole I mean an amazing visual aesthetic.
I mean that the art is an incredibly important part
of that game.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, the original three hundred cards that were maybe twenty artists,
maybe more, And in the early days there was this
idea of setting up a bible of how to do
the art and description of exactly what you wanted. And
my approach and the way we tried to keep it
for as long as I was around, was to instead
(30:01):
give them as little information as possible and see what
they did. And I liked the variety that would give.
I felt like you got more special things, and I've
tried to keep that in my games in general. In Magic,
at some point they had to really turn up the
prescription part of the art because it was becoming too crazy,
(30:21):
where one artist would draw goblins in one way and
the other one would draw them, you know, as a
completely different species. But still as a philosophy, I like
to give the artist as much room to work as possible.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
That does feel very Jim Henson, though. If all the
goblins don't even look like they're the same species, everything's different.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
But yes, that's true. I think you can make it work.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I think you probably could. I mean, what is a
fantasy universe for after all. And so to answer Barbara's question,
the second part of Barbara's question, any particular visual artist
you'd love to work with? I mean, let's broaden it.
Live or dead. You can have Rembrand, you can have
Free de Carlo, you can have anybody who would you
love to work with on a game?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Oh, Esher? Maybe?
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Why is that?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
I like the graphic sensibility of Esher. I like the
imaginative quality to the work that you know, like He's
was clearly somebody who liked to play with the rules
and sort of see where that took them.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
And these kind of these visual illusions.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Almost a game designer personality that was expressed in the
in the art. Very good.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
So I've got more questions a question from John who
asks Magic the Gathering is more popular than ever, but
digital collectible card games seem to be on the decline.
Do you think there's a necessary component of in person
play for games like this? So before you answer, Richard,
you should tell us what digital collectible card games are,
(31:52):
because this is kind of I think this is going
to be new to a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah. So, so the most popular digital collectible card game
was probably Hearthstone and so yeah, these these games exist
basically the same idea as as Man or Pokemon, where
players build a deck, they construct something, and they bring
it to a game and played against competitors who bring
(32:18):
their own decks. And so this is something which lends
itself very well to the digital world because it's so
easy to modify and add and change cards in your
deck and do all the shuffling and all that great stuff.
And there's a lot of things you can do that
you can't do in paper. So is it important to
be face to face? The face to face quality of
board games is very important, very valuable, and the community
(32:42):
which you develop with it is critical and is much
more critical with these massively networked games like Magic than
it might be for a game which is played more
with in a less networked way. But at the same time,
the digital world brings its own stuff and there is
(33:03):
a digital community as well which people get really real
value out of it. I think right now might be
in a collectible bubble where there's a lot of the
value of these games, these paper games are very high
because the cards are being seen as very valuable.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It's part of the idea that there's a bubble in everything, right,
So there's these bitcoins in a bubble, and you know,
maybe AI's in a bubble, and yeah, everything's in a
bubble at the same time. So these bad cards also
maybe in a bubble.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, And this has been an issue with Magic from
the very early days. In fact, very early on, we
had to intentionally crash the market because we were afraid
that the speculators were just going to drive out the
actual players, and people thought the game was going to
be dead because we printed so much of the Fallen
(33:59):
Empire's expansion and they they said it was the worst
expansion ever and so forth, because they were conflating whatever
the play value was with what the value of their
collection was. But it was very good for the game
to see that crash, and we got a lot more
players and people engaged with the game as they they
were intended to.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah. Interesting, possibly this is all good practice for running
the Federal Reserve, learning, learning when when to pop the bubble.
I hope you're enjoying this games special with Richard Garfield.
I know I am, and Richard and I will be
answering more of your questions after the break. We're back.
(34:44):
Richard Garfield and I are answering your questions about everything
from universal basic income to games, and Garrav would like
to know what are your favorite stories about games, for example, movies,
TV shows, comic books featuring games.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
There are a number of poker movies that I like,
Rounders and Cincinnati Kid. You know, I'm trying to think
of some which which deal with games in general.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
There's Queen's Gambit, it's about chess. There's Tron of course,
and war Games. It's a classic eighties movies about computer games.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah. Well, Queen's Gambit was excellent. I enjoyed that a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And Ian Embanks the player of games.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Oh well, that's amazing. Yeah, that that that that is
that that I'm a big in Banks fan, and that
that is certainly a top draft for me.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
You know, it's an incredible sci fi novel about a
culture where game playing is incredibly important, and and about
a person who's unbelievably good at playing games and becomes
of civilizational importance.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Something that that sort of qualifies. There is also Enders game.
Enders game had the protagonist being taken away and training
to fight aliens, but they were a kid, and so
they played these sort of arena games and it was
very It was very interesting how game like the evolution
(36:13):
was like, how they built up strategies and within the
game they gamed the system, they did meta games and
all that. So when you read it, it feels very
game oriented.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, they see the more I think about it. So
there's a Corey Doctro novel for The Win, which is
all about it's massively multiplayer online games and trading within
those games, and it's all about economics. There's lots Does
the Hunger Games count.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely it does, absolutely does, because
I would say what ends up being counting is I
don't know when they're making moves in it that feel
like they're playing a game, and that's kind of a
fuzzy thing. But they definitely do that in The Hunger Games.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Which, in any chance, Magic the Gathering will ever become
a movie.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
There is a chance. I've seen heard noise and that
it was definitely going to happen many times over the
last twenty five years. So certainly not holding my breath,
but it's always possible.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
And they made a movie of Angry Birds, they can
Magic the Gathering seems a lot more promising than Angry
Birds as a piece of material.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
But there we go. We will see. I wouldn't have
bet on it back in the nineties, where games made
into movies were awful. These days, yeah, it's a die roll.
It might work.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Richard, we have a have a question about a classic
episode of course Metales.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, Susie writes. In the episode Do Not Pass Go,
you talked about how Monopoly doesn't really work as a
critique of capitalism, even though that was the original intent
behind the game. Instead, it ends up being more about
the fun of crushing your opponents and getting rich. So
here's my question. Why is it the games like the
Farming Game actually succeed in teaching how hard and unpredictable
(37:56):
farming is, while Monopoly totally misses the mark when it
comes to critique and capitalism. What is it about the
design or gameplay of the Farming game that helps its
message come through? And why does Monopoly lose its message
and the way people play it?
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I love the question, so just to refresh people's memories
or to inform people who hadn't heard the episode about
the creation of Monopoly. So Lizzie McGee, who created the
immediate precursor to Monopoly and a game looks like Monopoly,
and it plays quite like Monopoly in its capitalist version,
but it was supposed to have two modes, and in
(38:33):
the other mode it was more cooperative. It embodied principles
of georgiast Land taxation and basically, if you played it
that way, everybody got rich together. And that did not
catch on. And I think when you describe it like that,
it's pretty obvious why it didn't catch on, because that
sounds like a really bad game. Everyone just gets rich together.
(38:53):
When people are playing a game, they want to challenge.
So feel free to disagree with me, Richard, but it
hit My theory is that it's not much of a
game unless there's a challenge. Cooperative games do exist, and
some of them are very good, but they are designed
to present the players with obstacles. Whether it's a game
in Dungeons and Dragons or it's a board game like Pandemic,
(39:14):
they're very carefully designed to be difficult, and so when
you succeed, you're cooperating with all the other players, but
you're trying to beat the game. Whereas this kind of
Landlord's game that Lizzie McGee designed seems to be a
game where there is no challenge. The whole point is
to say, hey, if you all kind of reformed capitalism,
(39:35):
then everything would be fine and no one would suffer,
which you know sounds great as a political message, but
sounds terrible as a game.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Am I Am I wrong? No? I think I think
that's correct. One of the reasons why it probably doesn't
work as the critique that you know that she was
intending for is you she did put the players in
the role of being the capitalist, and so I did
this game King of Tokyo. It's a great game by
the way. I put the players in the role of
(40:05):
being monsters tearing down Tokyo and beating each other up.
And if I was aiming to make people see how
bad it is to tear down cities, then I wouldn't
have chosen that approach. But it doesn't mean that they
come out of this thinking, oh, you know, tearing down
cities is great either. It's just people are able to
(40:25):
get into the game. They can watch a horror movie
and not end up thinking horror is a terrific thing. Also,
I actually wonder if it's as bad at showing the
evils of capitalism as she saw them as it's viewed
in the sense that Monopoly. There's a lot of people
who really dislike the game, and those people one of
(40:48):
the things they really dislike is because they fall up
behind and then they're slowly crushed and they don't feel
like they can get out of it. That's not the
only problem with the game, but that is what a
lot of people will take away from it. Yeah, that
kind of is a critique of capitalism.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, I think it probably is. Success breeds success. All
amount of capital early on is often decisive, which I
guess is a critique of capitalism. But it also makes
a terrible game. But there you go. People still play it.
Which on the subjects of Monopoly, I mean that is
a game that brings families together at Christmas, possibly because
(41:28):
it's just the game that everybody knows how to play.
Are there any games that you associate with Christmas that
people might play as an alternative?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Oh? Sure. One of my favorite games for big get
togethers is Hive Mind. The basic idea of HiveMind is
that you ask a question and everybody writes down the answer.
Then you tally up points based on how many people
answered the same way. So if your question was if,
(41:57):
then the question might be, you know, name three planets,
which I guess is properly a question, But that's the
sort of thing which you would do. So the three
planets I would name are Earth, Mars, in Jupiter, and
so I should have let you think of some planets also,
So in retrospect, what would you name? Is your planets?
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Saturn officially the best planet, Uranus the most amusing planet,
and Venus got us of love.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
So I should have said you are allowed to choose
the same. So let's say you said Saturn, which is
a very reasonable answer, and Earth in Mars. Then each
of us would get two points for Earth in Mars
because we both name those, and we would each get
one point one for You would get one for Saturn
and I would get one for Jupiter. And of course
(42:50):
you extend this to the whole group, and whoever scores
lowest gets a strike, and when you get three strikes,
you're out. And the questions can be very open ended,
like you know, name three things that are in the refrigerator,
or name three things that begin with the letter S,
and you just get you get crazy answers and people
(43:11):
trying to sort of get on the same wavelength Anyway,
it's a game which is very social, handles any number
of players, and we've sort of find it endlessly engaging
at holiday time.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, that's a good one. The thing I do every
Christmas is gathered together my tabletop role playing group, and
we always play a Christmas themed game. So in one
way or another, the characters have to save Christmas or
there's something Christmasy about it. The game that I'm running
this Christmas, it's based on a game someone else has
(43:45):
created called The Wastling at Klaus Manor or Clause Manner,
and it's basically a kind of social satire upstairs downstairs,
where all the players are playing the role of the
kind of the domestic staff. It's kind of Edwardian, So
the butler are made whatever at Santa Claus's manner, and
(44:07):
basically everything is fulling apart the night before Christmas in
various chaotic ways, and you're playing the domestic servants and
they can't they cannot afford to lose this job, so
no matter how unreasonable the requests from Santa Claus or
Lady Clause or whatever, they've just got to they've just
got to keep this show on the road and they're yeah,
(44:28):
I'm looking forward to It should be suitably ridiculous, but
we will see. Richard, it's been wonderful to talk to you.
Thank you so much for joining us. One more question,
what are you planning to do next?
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I'm working on a couple of Auto Battlers. Auto Battling
is a fascinating digital game concept where they feel very
much like paper games, but but you're whatever it is,
You're building sort of fights by itself, and so it
unites this. I've been fascinated with games that are played
(45:04):
digitally but feel like they could be paper games for
a while, and this is in that that between space,
which is good. So one of them is Vanguard Exiles
and it's an early release on Steam, and the other
is Chaos Agents.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
And one of the best games I ever played was
actually an Auto Battler, and this is in the nineteen
we've been about nineteen ninety one. I played it at school.
We had a game called Robot Arena where you had
to program your own robot and send it into an arena,
and it used a programming language a bit like logo
which used to be drawn. You know, you move a
(45:42):
turtle around. Great game.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Yeah, I played a game very much like that. Yeah,
I hadn't really thought of them as odd of battlers,
but you're right, they certainly do qualify and it was very,
very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Richard Garfield, thank you so much for joining me on
quartering questions. I hope being roped in hasn't put you
off listening to the show.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
No, not at all. I'm completely caught up and intender
stay caught up. So yeah, please keep them coming. We will,
we will.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Merry Christmas, and thanks again, thank you. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Dallis Fines,
and Ryan Dinner. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music and the work of
(46:38):
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at
Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend ad Af Haffrey edited
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
(47:03):
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does
make a difference to us. And if you want to
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(47:23):
join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon
dot com slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p A, t R,
e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
We get lots of emails dropping into the Cautionary Tales inbox,
ideas for shows, reflections on episodes, you know, honest feedback.
By the way, It's tales at Pushkin dot fm, and
do keep them coming. But a few months ago I
spotted an email from a name I recognized. Richard Garfield
is a mathematician, inventor and the game designer behind the
(00:42):
huge game Magic The Gathering and many more since, including
King of Tokyo, Robo Rally, and key Forge. But Richard
had a bone to pick with me about one of
my previous episodes of Cautionary Questions. So of course, of course,
rather than argue with him on email, I'd much rather
(01:03):
argue with him in person and maybe ask him a
few questions yours and mine about games and game design.
I'm very excited, Richard Garfield, Welcome to Cautionney Sales.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Hello, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. The pleasure
is all mine.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I think this is going to be a lot of fun.
I'm very grateful that you have agreed to do this,
and thanks also for being a listener to the show.
Very very kind of you to know you're out there
listening to listening to Causne Sales.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I'm devoted, have listened to everything and easily my favorite podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Wow, well that's I'm blushing now. Richard, you got in
touch following an episode of Cautionary Questions involving me and
Jacob Goldstein. This episode, in fact.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
What are your thoughts on UBI universal basic income as
a solution to an AI crisis and the widespread philosophical
and economic implications of this.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
If what Alex is thinking about comes true, and if
most people just have no economic value, they have value
as human beings, have value as members of society, but
there's nothing that they could actually sell their labor to do,
then that's completely uncharted territory. We've never been anywhere like
that before, so everything we do is kind of speculative.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
The idea of more or less everybody losing their jobs
I'm skeptical of for the simple reason that it hasn't
happened in two hundred years of incredible technological progress. I
don't think we're going to have everybody losing their jobs
to AI. I definitely could be wrong, but that's what
I think.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
No, I think that's a good working assumption. If you
think back a few centuries. Basically almost all the labor
that people did. They might wash their clothes occasionally, well
that's been outsourced to the washing machines. Almost everything we
used to do is now done by machines. But somehow
we still all have jobs. Tell me what you felt
when you heard the conversation between me and Jacob.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I've been interested in the effects of technology on our
economic system for a long time, and I'm particularly interested
in universe basic income as a possible solution. And the
core of my disappointment was that I did I didn't
feel like the universal basic income aspect of it was
(03:19):
being engaged with in the way I wanted to hear
it talked about. Often economists seem to write off some
of the concerns in a way which doesn't seem helpful. Yeah,
I was particularly interested in what you had to say
about it, and that wasn't really there.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, and we didn't do any of that. We mostly said,
don't worry, the robots are'm going to take our jobs,
which you know, we may be right or we may
be wrong, but it kind of left the universal basic
income question to one side. So thank you for raising that, Richard.
We will, we'll talk about universal basic income. Hopefully I'm
going to be able to talk to you a little
(03:57):
bit about games. But before we do any of that,
we are going to play the caution retiales theme. I
(04:26):
am talking to Richard Garfield. Richard, and you're a huge
star in the gaming world. Where when did your love
affair with games begin?
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I was always attracted to games, but I don't think
I really became a gamer until Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons
and Dragons blew my mind. It was just it was
just a complete revelation for me. I had no idea
the range of things that could be done with games.
(04:57):
It became really a lifelong obsession with Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
What is it specifically about the tabletop roleplaying games there?
I mean, I'm a huge fan of them as well
that you love so much. Is it the sort of
just the endless possibility like that it doesn't even seem
to be a game in the normal sense.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
What originally drew me to it was that it broke
all the rules I had understood about games. There was
no time limit on them, there was no explicit victory condition,
The responsibility for play was much more in a recognizable
way in the hands of the player rather than a
(05:36):
system of rules, and so its value to me was
really showing the range of what could be done with games.
I just think that role playing is in itself an
amazing pastime because of the endless possibilities. You know that
anything can be done with it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, they are remarkable. I remember quite vividly being told
by a friend about this game, and I couldn't quite
get my head around what he was describing. So was
this a computer game? No, it's not a computer game.
Is there a board? No, not really, there's a app
And I think we should probably help people who don't
(06:13):
know how these games work to conceptualize them. And fundamentally,
you've got in your classic role playing game, you have
a game master or a dungeon master or who is
describing situations, and then the players are adopting roles. That's
why it's called role playing. So they might be a Astronauts,
(06:34):
space explorers, wizards, and they're describing how their characters respond
to the situations.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yes, if you just if you play traditional games and
you first run into role playing games, it really challenges
all your preconceptions about what games are and what they
can be.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
One of the things that interests me, though, is that
you're I mean, you're deep into Dungeon and Dragons. You were,
I think one of the primary play testers for the
third edition.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Is that right, that's cracked up.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
But you're famous for your board games and your card games,
which are more structured, and the tabletop role playing games,
which is so can be so free form. They feel
quite different to board games, so I'm curious as to
why there is such a lot of overlap. I mean,
I love both, You obviously love both, A lot of
people love both, and yet that it seems a little
(07:23):
bit like saying, well, if you love cricket, then obviously
you should love no marathon running. But they're not really
the same thing at all. But why this affinity between
the two.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, that's a really good question. I've asked myself why
I ended up devoted to more traditionally structured games than
role playing, since role playing was my introduction to the hobby,
And I'm not sure what the answer is, but one
difference between the way I looked at games and a
(07:55):
lot of my peers was that my peers found a
game they loved and they became devoted to that game,
and I became devoted to games as a whole. So,
for example, I became interested in classic games like go
and chess and cards, but I also became interested in
sports and what the games were that were being played
(08:18):
within sports, and trying to see the connections between all
these different areas of games. So I'm not sure why
I ended up in that area and specific, but I
do know that there's been sort of a lifelong exercise
of mine to expand and unite games under one umbrella
rather than be a bunch of separate things. Like One
of the things that was very interesting to me when
(08:40):
I was beginning out is I would ask people what
games they played, and they say, often I don't play
any games. And then we'd talk a little further and
it would turn out they played poker they just didn't
consider it a game, or they played chess. Oh no,
that's not a game, that's a sport.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, do we have
a definition of games that satisfies you?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
No? No, I follow the fuzzy definition of games where
where there you know there are things that are more
or less game like, but that you're not going to
have a precise definition, there's always going to be fuzziness,
and often exploring that fuzzy boundary is quite interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
One game that is definitely a game, there's no fuzziness
about it, I think, is Magic the Gathering, which is
your game, and I mean, I think has got to
have a claim to be one of the most successful
tabletop games of all time. It's astonishingly popular game. Tell
(09:39):
us a little bit about that game and how you
developed it.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Magic began with a eureka moment, which is not common
with my game design. My game design is more evolutionary
than revolutionary typically. But I was hiking and had this
thought which overwhelmed me, which was that not all the
players had to have the same equipment in the game.
(10:04):
And I just felt like there was endless possibilities with
this idea that people would bring different cards or different
components of some sort to the game and compete with those.
And it took me a little while before that became
what it is now, which is a game where the
(10:25):
players have cards which represent magic spells and they have
a duel with these spells. And yeah, it was published
in ninety three and it was instantly very hard to
keep enough in print to satisfy the growing and ravenous
player base.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
One of the things about it that I as an
economist and as a gamer, one of the things that
struck me as so clever was that it's kind of
It's got this kind of collectible baseball card quality to it,
this idea of that you would buy packs of cards
in the hope of maybe getting a rare one. I mean,
(11:05):
that's kind of genius, both in terms of gameplay and
of course of economics. I mean, suddenly people have a
reason to buy and buy and buy the game, so yes,
well then you.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
It was a surprise to me as much as anyone
how the idea took off. I knew that it was
a good game because my playtesters were playing it devotedly,
even after two years with the same set of cards.
But I still expected people to buy maybe a deck
or two and then just trade after that. I did
(11:36):
not expect them to buy like they did, and it
has been an ongoing tension with the game. The industry
standard name for them is collectible card games, but I've
always fought that as the name because I don't like
the emphasis of collectible. I like calling the trading card
(11:56):
games because it emphasizes the original intent, which was that
players trade the cards between themselves, and history of the
game is filled with speculators interfering with gameplay because they
drive the prices up so high that people have trouble
getting the cards to play. The economics of the game
(12:18):
is fascinating. I have a friend who's thesis economic thesis
was entirely about magic.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I think this interaction between games and trading it's interesting
as an economist. When I occasionally play Monopoly, I'm always
trying to get people to trade, because there are games
from trade. If you're playing with five six people, any
two people who get together and trade, they're really stiffing
the other players, and they should do it. But in
(12:46):
my experience with kind of non gamey gamers, who are
the kind of people who you're likely to play Monopoly with,
they tend not to mont to trade.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
One of the things i'm designing a game I have
found is that you do have to consider not what
the optimum play is, but how people actually do play.
So if they play in a way which is in
some theoretical sense not optimum and they end up having
a miserable time, that's a fault of the game, not
(13:16):
the players, and one has to take dad into account.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yes, that feels like a lesson for economic policy as
well as for game design. You've got to deal with
how people actually behave rather than how they might behave
in some theoretical world, which I guess brings us onto
the question of universal basic income, so which I've promised
you I'm going to get to. So let's do it.
So the issue on the table was, let's say the
(13:42):
robots take all our jobs, or the robots take a
substantial number of jobs from a substantial number of people.
What would we do about that? And might a universal
basic income be a response? And the basic idea of
a universal basic income, it's pretty simple. It's universal, and
it's an income, and and it's basic. So everybody gets
(14:02):
some cash, maybe not loads and loads of cash, but
they get enough cash. So very happy to tell you
what I think about. But what's your take? You said
you've been thinking about this for an enormous amount of time.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, in fact, I would like to give you the
thought exercise which i'd had so much. I've had so
much trouble getting seriously considered, which I would ask my
economic friends as a thought experiment what would happen if
the jobs went away? It became almost pathological. How often
(14:35):
that wasn't taken as a thought experiment, that was taken
as an opportunity to talk about how that can't happen.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yes, and Jacob and I just did exactly the same thing.
So I apologize for feeding your frustration. I mean, I
understand why that is a response, because I think there's
a long history of people overrating this possible scenario and
getting too worried about it. But sure, let's entertain it.
So I mean, what I'm imagining is we're living in
(15:03):
a world now where most people there's no real economic
value to their labor. It's all being done one way
or another by automation. That's super radical because our work
has always had value in the past, and therefore the
(15:24):
implicit bargain has always been, you know, if you want
to eat, then you've got to work. You trade your labor,
you get consumption, you get good stuff. So in this
hypothetical world, you can't trade your labor for consumption because
your labor doesn't have any value. You still have value
as a human being. So what are we going to do?
Technically speaking, it doesn't seem that hard. I mean, one
(15:46):
way of thinking about it that ties it to today's
economy is you just say, well, the government, which will
assume is still a democratic government representing the citizens. The
government just taxes capital, so levy a tax on companies. Well,
levy a tax on anyone who has a robot, and
we redistribute that income to all the citizens. Everybody gets
(16:11):
twenty thousand dollars a year or whatever it is, and
they just spend that money buying stuff from the robots.
Or if we're talking more Star Trek, more futuristic, maybe
the rule is it's not about income. You just have
a robot who works for you. Everyone's got a robot
who works for them. Everyone gets some kind of voucher
that entitles them to services from this kind of production
(16:33):
system that is all automated. In principle, it's possible because
you've got this tremendously productive economy and you've got a
bunch of people who want to consume stuff. So what
you're trying to do is bridge the gap, Like you're
trying to figure out who has the rights to consume
the output of all of this production, and how do
(16:53):
we assign those rights. So there are other possibilities, which is,
you know, you've got some dystopian state and Elon Musk
controls all the robots and they all have guns and
nobody else gets anything, and you know, then we're in
some nightmare future. But but assuming we still live in
a in a wealthy democracy, it's incredibly radical to say
(17:18):
to people your consumption is no longer tied to your
production at all. But it doesn't seem impossible to set
up that kind of system.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, that describes it very well, and it has engaged
in the thought experiment quite well. I would say that
that is one of the things which I find appealing
about universal basic income is that it seems like a
dial that you can spin it and get some result
which might smoothly bridge that gap rather than change everything.
(17:50):
And the thing is that if you don't, if that
really is a possibility, and we're really on the road there,
then at what point do you actually make a change?
Because I suspect if you don't make a plan for it,
that you're going to end up in a worse situation.
It won't be simply we're going to get to a
point where people say, oh, we need to do something now,
(18:11):
it will already be a dreadful state. Possibly you'll even
get to a place where you can no longer really
take the steps necessary to get a smooth transition.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, we already have a universal basic income
in many rich countries. It's just universal subject to the
condition that you're over the age of sixty five. The
age varies. What worries me, Richard is the transition. And
I think one of the things that is worrying is
(18:46):
people are very concerned, maybe too concerned, but in any case,
it's a fact people are very concerned about the idea
of the undeserving poor, the idea that you're giving money
to people who are they're taking advantage of you. You're
working hard, you're paying your taxes, and then some other
guy is just laughing at you and collecting this money
(19:08):
on benefit and they're just a scrounger. It's a very
powerful rhetoric and very powerful concern. So at the moment,
in a society where most people can work, that concern
is it tends to be fought by people saying, well,
we're going to have type restrictions on who can get paid.
But the shift to a universal basic income in the end,
(19:29):
you're basically saying what everyone's going to get it. So
I imagine at a stage where the robots are doing
all the work and everybody gets this income. Again, it
won't be a problematic there. It's the getting from A
to B that's the problem. And I think it seems
in this hypothetical world where automation takes all the jobs
and they're not going to take all the jobs all
at once. They're going to take some people's jobs first
(19:51):
and other people's jobs later. And so you get you know,
twenty percent of the jobs are automated, and then forty
percent of the jobs are automated, you know, as sure
people are trying to retrain, they're trying to get new jobs,
but it's hard. Then it's sixty percent of people's jobs.
And then you've got the people who remain, who, no doubt,
we'll be telling themselves a story about how incredibly special
(20:12):
they are and how incredibly special less skills are, and
how they're working hard. But in fact it's just going
to be pure chance what stuff is automatable and what
stuff is not. And I can imagine that kind of
those questions as to who deserves to get this income
and who exactly is going to pay for it are
going to loom very large.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
I agree. I think that has definitely been a big
part of the story around universal basic income. But one
way I like to look at it, because I view
everything through a lens of games, I like to look
at it as a catch up feature. In games, when
(20:54):
you fall too far behind, you can feel like you
can't contribute, can't participate in the game in a productive way,
And in game design you can make good catch up
features or bad ones. Catch up feature encourages people to
lean on it rather than do what they're supposed to
(21:16):
be doing, which is playing the game. So when we
start talking about these people get universal basic income, but
these don't, that really opens up this possibility for I
feel like these people are not playing the game. They're
just leaning on the catch up feature, and that feels bad.
But if it really is universal, if it's a citizen's dividend,
(21:38):
then it's something where it raises everybody, and the people
who do have work, they're going to have a better
lifestyle because they're getting paid above and beyond. They won't
feel like, oh, I shouldn't be participating because because I'm
denying myself this dividend.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, I mean there is an argument that the most
successful government programs are always the universal ones. So whether
it's the UK's National Health Service where everyone who lives
in the UK. Actually they're slightly tidening it, but basically
the National Health Services is for everybody, most rich people
for the most part using the National Health Service, And
(22:16):
the same is true for the state pension. I mean,
rich people have private pensions as well, but nevertheless everybody
gets the state pension. Nobody is told, well, you're a millionaire,
you don't get the state pension, and that I think
has been quite important in building support for this sort
of thing. So maybe universal basic income could potentially benefit
from that as well.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, I think that's almost a necessary ingredient of getting
it to work.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Richard, I have loads of questions from our listeners for
you before we do that. Are you happy? Have we
entertained the hypothetical enough?
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Absolutely? Yes, thank you. It was very very engaging, very pleased.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I am here to serve, so it's good to hear.
It's good to hear. Right after the break, we will
be dipping into the virtual mail pack. We are back
and here with game designer extraordinary, Richard Garfield to answer
(23:18):
your questions about games. So, Richard, we have a question
from Ronan, who was a member of our Cautionary Club.
He got in touch via Patreon to say, I would
love to hear about the creative process of creating a game.
Is it often a flash of inspiration, refined and polished
and then released or is it much more iterative? Does
(23:41):
the theme arize first or the mechanics the mechanics basically
the rules of the game. You've told us a little
bit about the flash of inspiration behind magic the gathering,
but you said that was unusual.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah. I engage in a very iterative game design process.
And part of the reason for that is the games
are often really complicated systems, and I've found that it
is not worth my time to try to analyze everything
up front, that it is much better use of time
to make a prototype and play it just because you can.
You can think about things forever and just misfundamental stuff.
(24:19):
So I design games, play them, iterate on them, and
then eventually sometimes often actually give up on them and
maybe return to them years later, or take pieces of
them and combine them with other things. There's occasionally a
Eureka moment like I had with magic, but usually it's
(24:40):
much more gradual.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, the theme of magic is your wizards dueling using spells.
But I didn't have to be that theme. It could
have been some other themes. So so how important is
the theme?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
So Magic in particular was a mechanics first and then theme,
and I would say more often than not, I do
mechanics first, then theme, but I do it the other
way as well. One of the most extreme examples of
that was that I was playing a quiz game with
my wife Cony, and we were putting together these words
(25:16):
to try to find the answers to these questions, and
two of the words we put together were fat Dracula,
and we started laughing because it was such a immediately
against such a good image, and it's it has a
it has a rhythm to it, so it makes a
good game title. So I started making a game based
on that. The idea was basically that these vampires get
(25:39):
up at night and go out and eat a bunch
of people and try to waddle home before the sun
comes up, because the more people that they eat, the
slower they get. And it didn't actually end up being
even called fat Dracula. It's called The Hunger. The publisher
decided to go with The Hunger as a name, But
that is as close to the beginning with the theme
(26:00):
and ending up with and adding the mechanics as I've
run into. So for me it works both ways, and
for designers, I think it often works both ways.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
On the subject of this iterative process, we had a
couple of listener questions about playtesting, so Andy's been in
touch to say, please tell Richard, I've played a lot
of Treasure Hunter with my son when he was younger.
He's now fourteen. It's a game I intend to keep
on the shelf for the day when I have grandkids.
So I think that's a rave review. But Andy wants
(26:31):
to know how you test your games, and Mike be
has another question similar question. He says, Richard, how much
playtesting goes into a game before it gets released? And
have you ever had a mechanic that you just couldn't
make work or if you solved it?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
How ideally a lot of playtest it's hard to model
in your head what's going to happen with the game
play to begin with, So that's solved by playtest at first,
just playtest with the designer and friends. But then in
the long run you have this other issue, which we
talked about a little earlier, which was that if people
(27:08):
are playing in a way which isn't necessarily optimum, but
that's the way they want to play, then it should
still be a fun game. It should still work. I mean,
there can be some some situations where there's a line
of play which isn't fun and is discouraged, but in general,
you shouldn't design this game for the best players and
(27:31):
assume it's going to work out for everybody else.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Then that must be an issue with the playtesting because presumably,
well maybe maybe this is the wrong assumption. I was
assuming a lot of playtesters are very keen gamers and
are going to play very well. But but maybe you
maybe that's not true.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
No, that's often an issue, and that is true. So
when I play test, I do keep around often the
same playtesters throughout the development, but at the same time
I try to mix in other playtesters, and I try
to mix in, depending on the game, more casual players
(28:06):
and people who you who have no idea what's going on,
and I look at how they play because I want
them to enjoy the game as well, or to have
something to work with. It's very easy to find yourself
designing and designing and designing and iterating until you have
(28:26):
a game which people who have played for three years
love but nobody else can really get their head around it.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, I can imagine, Barbara writes to say, please bless
Richard for the joy that is Bunny Kingdom. Smile. You've
got a lot of fans here, Richard. I've not even
heard of Buddy Kingdom. You've designed so many games that
I can't even keep up with them all. Anyway, Barbara
loves it, and in fact, her cautionary club profile photo
(28:55):
comes from the Ladies Gaming Weekend where she first played it. Anyway,
her question what is the process you like best for
collaboration with the artists that illustrate your board game designs
and is there visual artist in the gaming world or
not that you would really like to work with on
a game.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
My favorite way to work with artists is to give
them as much room to work as possible, because they're
generally in art because they're creative. And so this went
back as to the original work I was doing with Magic.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Which as a whole I mean an amazing visual aesthetic.
I mean that the art is an incredibly important part
of that game.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, the original three hundred cards that were maybe twenty artists,
maybe more, And in the early days there was this
idea of setting up a bible of how to do
the art and description of exactly what you wanted. And
my approach and the way we tried to keep it
for as long as I was around, was to instead
(30:01):
give them as little information as possible and see what
they did. And I liked the variety that would give.
I felt like you got more special things, and I've
tried to keep that in my games in general. In Magic,
at some point they had to really turn up the
prescription part of the art because it was becoming too crazy,
(30:21):
where one artist would draw goblins in one way and
the other one would draw them, you know, as a
completely different species. But still as a philosophy, I like
to give the artist as much room to work as possible.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
That does feel very Jim Henson, though. If all the
goblins don't even look like they're the same species, everything's different.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
But yes, that's true. I think you can make it work.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I think you probably could. I mean, what is a
fantasy universe for after all. And so to answer Barbara's question,
the second part of Barbara's question, any particular visual artist
you'd love to work with? I mean, let's broaden it.
Live or dead. You can have Rembrand, you can have
Free de Carlo, you can have anybody who would you
love to work with on a game?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Oh, Esher? Maybe?
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Why is that?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
I like the graphic sensibility of Esher. I like the
imaginative quality to the work that you know, like He's
was clearly somebody who liked to play with the rules
and sort of see where that took them.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
And these kind of these visual illusions.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Almost a game designer personality that was expressed in the
in the art. Very good.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
So I've got more questions a question from John who
asks Magic the Gathering is more popular than ever, but
digital collectible card games seem to be on the decline.
Do you think there's a necessary component of in person
play for games like this? So before you answer, Richard,
you should tell us what digital collectible card games are,
(31:52):
because this is kind of I think this is going
to be new to a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah. So, so the most popular digital collectible card game
was probably Hearthstone and so yeah, these these games exist
basically the same idea as as Man or Pokemon, where
players build a deck, they construct something, and they bring
it to a game and played against competitors who bring
(32:18):
their own decks. And so this is something which lends
itself very well to the digital world because it's so
easy to modify and add and change cards in your
deck and do all the shuffling and all that great stuff.
And there's a lot of things you can do that
you can't do in paper. So is it important to
be face to face? The face to face quality of
board games is very important, very valuable, and the community
(32:42):
which you develop with it is critical and is much
more critical with these massively networked games like Magic than
it might be for a game which is played more
with in a less networked way. But at the same time,
the digital world brings its own stuff and there is
(33:03):
a digital community as well which people get really real
value out of it. I think right now might be
in a collectible bubble where there's a lot of the
value of these games, these paper games are very high
because the cards are being seen as very valuable.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It's part of the idea that there's a bubble in everything, right,
So there's these bitcoins in a bubble, and you know,
maybe AI's in a bubble, and yeah, everything's in a
bubble at the same time. So these bad cards also
maybe in a bubble.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, And this has been an issue with Magic from
the very early days. In fact, very early on, we
had to intentionally crash the market because we were afraid
that the speculators were just going to drive out the
actual players, and people thought the game was going to
be dead because we printed so much of the Fallen
(33:59):
Empire's expansion and they they said it was the worst
expansion ever and so forth, because they were conflating whatever
the play value was with what the value of their
collection was. But it was very good for the game
to see that crash, and we got a lot more
players and people engaged with the game as they they
were intended to.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah. Interesting, possibly this is all good practice for running
the Federal Reserve, learning, learning when when to pop the bubble.
I hope you're enjoying this games special with Richard Garfield.
I know I am, and Richard and I will be
answering more of your questions after the break. We're back.
(34:44):
Richard Garfield and I are answering your questions about everything
from universal basic income to games, and Garrav would like
to know what are your favorite stories about games, for example, movies,
TV shows, comic books featuring games.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
There are a number of poker movies that I like,
Rounders and Cincinnati Kid. You know, I'm trying to think
of some which which deal with games in general.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
There's Queen's Gambit, it's about chess. There's Tron of course,
and war Games. It's a classic eighties movies about computer games.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah. Well, Queen's Gambit was excellent. I enjoyed that a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And Ian Embanks the player of games.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Oh well, that's amazing. Yeah, that that that that is
that that I'm a big in Banks fan, and that
that is certainly a top draft for me.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
You know, it's an incredible sci fi novel about a
culture where game playing is incredibly important, and and about
a person who's unbelievably good at playing games and becomes
of civilizational importance.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Something that that sort of qualifies. There is also Enders game.
Enders game had the protagonist being taken away and training
to fight aliens, but they were a kid, and so
they played these sort of arena games and it was
very It was very interesting how game like the evolution
(36:13):
was like, how they built up strategies and within the
game they gamed the system, they did meta games and
all that. So when you read it, it feels very
game oriented.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, they see the more I think about it. So
there's a Corey Doctro novel for The Win, which is
all about it's massively multiplayer online games and trading within
those games, and it's all about economics. There's lots Does
the Hunger Games count.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely it does, absolutely does, because
I would say what ends up being counting is I
don't know when they're making moves in it that feel
like they're playing a game, and that's kind of a
fuzzy thing. But they definitely do that in The Hunger Games.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Which, in any chance, Magic the Gathering will ever become
a movie.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
There is a chance. I've seen heard noise and that
it was definitely going to happen many times over the
last twenty five years. So certainly not holding my breath,
but it's always possible.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
And they made a movie of Angry Birds, they can
Magic the Gathering seems a lot more promising than Angry
Birds as a piece of material.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
But there we go. We will see. I wouldn't have
bet on it back in the nineties, where games made
into movies were awful. These days, yeah, it's a die roll.
It might work.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Richard, we have a have a question about a classic
episode of course Metales.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, Susie writes. In the episode Do Not Pass Go,
you talked about how Monopoly doesn't really work as a
critique of capitalism, even though that was the original intent
behind the game. Instead, it ends up being more about
the fun of crushing your opponents and getting rich. So
here's my question. Why is it the games like the
Farming Game actually succeed in teaching how hard and unpredictable
(37:56):
farming is, while Monopoly totally misses the mark when it
comes to critique and capitalism. What is it about the
design or gameplay of the Farming game that helps its
message come through? And why does Monopoly lose its message
and the way people play it?
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I love the question, so just to refresh people's memories
or to inform people who hadn't heard the episode about
the creation of Monopoly. So Lizzie McGee, who created the
immediate precursor to Monopoly and a game looks like Monopoly,
and it plays quite like Monopoly in its capitalist version,
but it was supposed to have two modes, and in
(38:33):
the other mode it was more cooperative. It embodied principles
of georgiast Land taxation and basically, if you played it
that way, everybody got rich together. And that did not
catch on. And I think when you describe it like that,
it's pretty obvious why it didn't catch on, because that
sounds like a really bad game. Everyone just gets rich together.
(38:53):
When people are playing a game, they want to challenge.
So feel free to disagree with me, Richard, but it
hit My theory is that it's not much of a
game unless there's a challenge. Cooperative games do exist, and
some of them are very good, but they are designed
to present the players with obstacles. Whether it's a game
in Dungeons and Dragons or it's a board game like Pandemic,
(39:14):
they're very carefully designed to be difficult, and so when
you succeed, you're cooperating with all the other players, but
you're trying to beat the game. Whereas this kind of
Landlord's game that Lizzie McGee designed seems to be a
game where there is no challenge. The whole point is
to say, hey, if you all kind of reformed capitalism,
(39:35):
then everything would be fine and no one would suffer,
which you know sounds great as a political message, but
sounds terrible as a game.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Am I Am I wrong? No? I think I think
that's correct. One of the reasons why it probably doesn't
work as the critique that you know that she was
intending for is you she did put the players in
the role of being the capitalist, and so I did
this game King of Tokyo. It's a great game by
the way. I put the players in the role of
(40:05):
being monsters tearing down Tokyo and beating each other up.
And if I was aiming to make people see how
bad it is to tear down cities, then I wouldn't
have chosen that approach. But it doesn't mean that they
come out of this thinking, oh, you know, tearing down
cities is great either. It's just people are able to
(40:25):
get into the game. They can watch a horror movie
and not end up thinking horror is a terrific thing. Also,
I actually wonder if it's as bad at showing the
evils of capitalism as she saw them as it's viewed
in the sense that Monopoly. There's a lot of people
who really dislike the game, and those people one of
(40:48):
the things they really dislike is because they fall up
behind and then they're slowly crushed and they don't feel
like they can get out of it. That's not the
only problem with the game, but that is what a
lot of people will take away from it. Yeah, that
kind of is a critique of capitalism.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, I think it probably is. Success breeds success. All
amount of capital early on is often decisive, which I
guess is a critique of capitalism. But it also makes
a terrible game. But there you go. People still play it.
Which on the subjects of Monopoly, I mean that is
a game that brings families together at Christmas, possibly because
(41:28):
it's just the game that everybody knows how to play.
Are there any games that you associate with Christmas that
people might play as an alternative?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Oh? Sure. One of my favorite games for big get
togethers is Hive Mind. The basic idea of HiveMind is
that you ask a question and everybody writes down the answer.
Then you tally up points based on how many people
answered the same way. So if your question was if,
(41:57):
then the question might be, you know, name three planets,
which I guess is properly a question, But that's the
sort of thing which you would do. So the three
planets I would name are Earth, Mars, in Jupiter, and
so I should have let you think of some planets also,
So in retrospect, what would you name? Is your planets?
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Saturn officially the best planet, Uranus the most amusing planet,
and Venus got us of love.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
So I should have said you are allowed to choose
the same. So let's say you said Saturn, which is
a very reasonable answer, and Earth in Mars. Then each
of us would get two points for Earth in Mars
because we both name those, and we would each get
one point one for You would get one for Saturn
and I would get one for Jupiter. And of course
(42:50):
you extend this to the whole group, and whoever scores
lowest gets a strike, and when you get three strikes,
you're out. And the questions can be very open ended,
like you know, name three things that are in the refrigerator,
or name three things that begin with the letter S,
and you just get you get crazy answers and people
(43:11):
trying to sort of get on the same wavelength Anyway,
it's a game which is very social, handles any number
of players, and we've sort of find it endlessly engaging
at holiday time.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, that's a good one. The thing I do every
Christmas is gathered together my tabletop role playing group, and
we always play a Christmas themed game. So in one
way or another, the characters have to save Christmas or
there's something Christmasy about it. The game that I'm running
this Christmas, it's based on a game someone else has
(43:45):
created called The Wastling at Klaus Manor or Clause Manner,
and it's basically a kind of social satire upstairs downstairs,
where all the players are playing the role of the
kind of the domestic staff. It's kind of Edwardian, So
the butler are made whatever at Santa Claus's manner, and
(44:07):
basically everything is fulling apart the night before Christmas in
various chaotic ways, and you're playing the domestic servants and
they can't they cannot afford to lose this job, so
no matter how unreasonable the requests from Santa Claus or
Lady Clause or whatever, they've just got to they've just
got to keep this show on the road and they're yeah,
(44:28):
I'm looking forward to It should be suitably ridiculous, but
we will see. Richard, it's been wonderful to talk to you.
Thank you so much for joining us. One more question,
what are you planning to do next?
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I'm working on a couple of Auto Battlers. Auto Battling
is a fascinating digital game concept where they feel very
much like paper games, but but you're whatever it is,
You're building sort of fights by itself, and so it
unites this. I've been fascinated with games that are played
(45:04):
digitally but feel like they could be paper games for
a while, and this is in that that between space,
which is good. So one of them is Vanguard Exiles
and it's an early release on Steam, and the other
is Chaos Agents.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
And one of the best games I ever played was
actually an Auto Battler, and this is in the nineteen
we've been about nineteen ninety one. I played it at school.
We had a game called Robot Arena where you had
to program your own robot and send it into an arena,
and it used a programming language a bit like logo
which used to be drawn. You know, you move a
(45:42):
turtle around. Great game.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Yeah, I played a game very much like that. Yeah,
I hadn't really thought of them as odd of battlers,
but you're right, they certainly do qualify and it was very,
very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Richard Garfield, thank you so much for joining me on
quartering questions. I hope being roped in hasn't put you
off listening to the show.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
No, not at all. I'm completely caught up and intender
stay caught up. So yeah, please keep them coming. We will,
we will.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Merry Christmas, and thanks again, thank you. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Dallis Fines,
and Ryan Dinner. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music and the work of
(46:38):
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at
Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend ad Af Haffrey edited
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
(47:03):
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does
make a difference to us. And if you want to
hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode,
video episode, and members only newsletter every month, why not
(47:23):
join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon
dot com slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p A, t R,
e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club
Host
Tim Harford
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