800-CEO-READ Excerpts

The Medici Effect - Part V

Garfield offers two reasons for Magic’s success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles. “The players in any game go through several different stages,” Garfield explains. First they learn the rules. After that there is an exciting part of the game where the players learn major strategic ideas. In chess, for example, this may be how to protect pieces. If two people are learning at the same time, the person who discovers the next big thing wins; then the second person copies and improves upon the new strategy, and this continues back and forth. Slowly, Garfield says, the game enters the third phase, where strategy is much harder to innovate and the rewards are much smaller. Most players find this phase burdensome, and they either fall out of the game or settle into a more comfortable method of play. During this phase of chess, players may keep at it but do not really improve and are essentially playing the same game over and over. “Magic is a bit different in that this big improvement stage is with you for a long period, since the cards keep changing.”

“In addition,” Garfield continues, “Magic has really created a community, much more so than a regular card game or board game. When you play this game with your friends, you see that they have different cards than you do, so you start discussing strengths and weaknesses of cards and decks. Some cards might be traded . . . and you become a viable part of this community and get sucked in.” In Magic’s case this is a very interconnected group. Players will seek out friends of friends, people they may have never met, just to get a specific card. People in this network, Garfield points out, interact in a much more dynamic way than in a game like Monopoly. If you play Monopoly with friends and they like it, they might buy a copy and play with their friends—but that’s pretty much it.

It all seems so simple and obvious when Garfield talks about Magic and what happened that day at Multnomah Falls. But if it was that obvious, others would have thought of it. What specifically was behind his moment of insight? How, exactly, do we generate intersectional ideas?

The Medici Effect - Part IV

Think about that for a minute. Imagine walking into a game of poker where a player suddenly presents a straight flush in a totally new suit of cards. “These are ovals,” he says. You would probably get confused (or maybe very angry). Games just don’t work that way. For essentially all of history, all the pieces of a game have to be present for fair play. If you play chess, for instance, you expect all the pieces to be on the board in their correct positions before the opening move. Not in Magic.

Once the game is over, the second player may take a closer look at the new Juggernaut card, decide that she likes it, and offer to trade it for one of her own duplicates. It turns out that some cards are common; others, such as Juggernaut, are rare. Rare cards may be difficult to get no matter how many decks you buy, and the only way to acquire them is by trading with other players. This can involve joining a community of players locally or on the Internet, or meeting fellow players at conferences. On top of that, Wizards of the Coast releases new card sets every year, making the card search (and card buying) a continual and fresh challenge.

What is the result? Players buy entire decks simply to get one particular card. Even more interesting, they find a million and one ways to locate other players with whom to trade cards. Soon players begin trading cards for reasons other than to improve game play—perhaps because they predict an increase in the value of rare cards or want to get a complete deck.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that what collectibles are all about? Think baseball cards. Think stamps and coins. Remember the Garbage Pail Kids cards? These items can be bought, collected, and traded, leading to an amazing self-reinforcing and rapidly expanding network of collectors.

That, then, is the secret of Magic: The Gathering. It sits at the intersection of collectible items and ordinary games and is called, not surprisingly, a collectible card game (or trading card game). The intersectional idea that hit Garfield that day in Multnomah Falls in Oregon was a concept from a field other than games—collectibles—but he connected the two worlds. That connection was both unique and wildly successful. “When the game hit the market it was just incredible how fast it was selling . . . it was spreading like a virus,” he says. “When I talked about the game and its rules at conferences, people’s attention was rapt, they were intensely immersed. I don’t know what was so compelling, but I had never seen people so focused on anything before or after. . . . The initial 10 million cards we published were gone in [about] four months.”

The Medici Effect - Part III

Finding Magic

Richard Garfield is a measured talker. He takes his time to think about a question before answering it. “Still here, still here. I’m just formulating my answer,” he says unassumingly during a phone call. His comments are precise, yet also tentative as if he wishes to give a clear answer but still leave some room to revisit it later on. Maybe it was his Ph.D. background in combinatorial mathematics that paved the way for such an exacting nature, or maybe it was his background in game design that kept him open to possibilities. Whatever the reason for his makeup, it is clear that this is someone who loves every aspect of games and gaming.

Magic was Garfield’s hobby for a long time. He would keep it on his shelf only to take it out every couple of months to “tinker with it for a little bit, play with my friends perhaps, and maybe test out new rules.” Then it went back on the shelf, sitting there until the next session. All in all, he had tinkered with Magic for eight years before it actually went to market, although that only represented a couple of months of real work. But Garfield does not directly credit these eight years for coming up with the idea of Magic. He credits it to one day spent in the country. “Everything about my game making is evolutionary. The one exception to that is Magic. The idea that made Magic into something special came one weekend while I was visiting my folks in Oregon—we had gone to Multnomah Falls. I can remember exactly where it happened and exactly when it happened. I had this Eureka. And the idea . . . the idea seemed to come out of nowhere.”

To understand what was so revolutionary about Garfield’s idea we must first understand a little about how the game works. In Magic two players face off against each other with their own sets of cards. These cards are divided into categories such as creatures, lands, and spells. The point of the game is to use your cards in various strategic combinations to destroy your opponent by bringing his or her life-force points down from 20 to 0. So far this seems like nothing spectacular. It may remind you of a slightly more elaborate cards version of chess; in both games you can develop multitiered strategies with pieces that have different functions.

But Garfield’s idea at Multnomah Falls gave Magic a crucial design difference; one that made it distinct from virtually all other games that had preceded it. “The great breakthrough with Magic was when I realized that not all the cards had to be the same for all people,” Garfield recalls. Before a game starts, each player assembles a deck of sixty cards by balancing monster cards, landscape cards, and spell cards. These sixty cards come from the player’s private collection. One player’s collection can look very different from another player’s because there are hundreds, even thousands, of cards in total circulation.

This is how it works: When a player buys a deck of cards he gets sixty, but those sixty represent only a fraction of the available cards in the entire card set. If the player buys another deck, he will probably get some cards he already owns along with a bunch of new ones. This means that when one player uses, say, a Juggernaut monster card, the other player may never have seen it before. Even so, the other player will quickly understand how this new card affects her own strategy and can therefore easily integrate it as the game keeps going. Because players bring their own decks, they can actually play an entire game with cards that none of their opponents has seen.

The Medici Effect - Part II

Chapter Five - Randomly Combine Concepts: Card Games and Sky Rises

In the spring of 1991, a young Ph.D. math student named Richard Garfield met with Peter Adkison, the president of a small game company called Wizards of the Coast. Garfield had designed a board game called RoboRally and he was pitching the idea to Adkison. But Adkison did not bite. “Come back with something less complicated,” he told the mathematician. He suggested that Garfield design a game that was quick to play, portable, and inexpensive to produce.

What Garfield came up with revolutionized the world of games. He created Magic: The Gathering, a card game unlike any other. During the second half of 1993, following the release of Magic, Wizards of the Coast made about $200,000, which isn’t bad for a seven-person startup. The following year, however, that same small company made $40 million, and in 1995, Wizards of the Coast sold over 500million cards. Magic had launched a gaming epidemic. Ten years later there were more than 6million Magic players in more than fifty countries and over 100,000 professionally sanctioned tournaments around the world each year. In fact, Magic created an entire genre of games. When Wizards of the Coast launched the Pokemon card game in the United States, its addictiveness among kids all over the world prompted religious groups to denounce it. Wizards of the Coast’s success soared. Magic, and the industry it spawned, had become part of our culture.

How did Richard Garfield create such an incredible game? And how did he get from RoboRally, an idea that led absolutely nowhere, to Magic, one that made him a legend almost overnight? In order to unravel these mysteries, we have to understand what occurs after the breakdown of associative barriers. We must understand what actually happens at the Intersection.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. Excerpted
from The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. Copyright 2004 by Frans Johansson. All rights reserved.

The Medici Effect - Part I

The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, & Cultures
by Frans Johansson
Harvard Business School Press - October 2004
200 Pages - ISBN 1591391865

Summary:

Enter Innovation's Most Fertile Breeding Ground

Why is it that so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin, after all, was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.

Frans Johansson argues that breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into new, unfamiliar territory. In this space-which Johansson calls "the Intersection"-established ideas clash and combine with insights from other fields, disciplines, and cultures, resulting in an explosion of totally new ideas. The Medici Effect-referring to a remarkable burst of creativity in Florence during the Renaissance -shows us how to get to the Intersection and how we can turn the ideas we discover there into pathbreaking innovations.

From the insight that created the first Cherokee written language to the ideas that enabled scientists to read the mind of a monkey-The Medici Effect is filled with vivid stories of intersections across domains as diverse as business, science, art, and politics.

Johansson reveals the core principles-including breaking down associative barriers, routinely combining unlike concepts, and executing past your failures-that can enable individuals, teams, and entire organizations to create their own "Medici effects" in any arena of work and life.

Fran Johansson is a writer, consultant, and entrepreneur residing in New York City.