If you can do without it, do without it
Mark teaches that designing a game is a game of resource management. You have limited resources and you have to make the best use of them to make the best possible product. Magic is already a complex game and if they make a set that is overly complicated the chances are that the players are going to turn away. They see this happening in prerelease events because players tend to avoid the cards with the highest count of words. They also notice that players like when cards are straight forward and have simpler aesthetics. The players desire cards that do what they want in a way that is enticing for them.
What this means for design is that they are constantly having to remove things. They have to capture the essence and convey it with the fewest possible resources, which can be words as the textbox is very restrictive in terms of space. But there are also other resources such as time, artists, labour and so on. They have to carefully select what goes in and what can be removed without destroying the essence they are attempting to capture. That is one valuable skill that every designer should have.
Mark posts a picture of his desk and it's pretty cluttered. He tells us that he is attracted by clutter because in his mind, small pieces may be needed someday and he would regret having thrown them away. His lesson is that by keeping too many things at once this gives more problems than discarding the unneeded parts.
The simplest examples come from everyday life. How many things do we have in our daily lives that we could discard and live without it? There are probably lots of examples regarding cars, clothes, accessories, places, food, etc. I guess this is quite hard to judge because often, what we deem essential, is something that relates to our emotions. We become attached to many things, people, places and to leave them behind is not an easy task. I think that Mark's lesson has a hidden meaning. We often don't know how much value we put into something and only when we are under constrains is that we forced to choose what has more value to us, while discarding the rest.
One easy example are diets. The number one reason for a diet is because people want to lose weight. People have to cut out calories and this is hard because people can't just stop eating. They can and should eat, but in the case of a diet they have to choose what to eat and control how many calories they ingest. It's hard to do it because emotions play a big part in what, when and how do we eat. There are tons of other examples such as how many apps we have installed in our smartphones, things that we buy but never use, time that we spend doing something that could had been better spent doing something else. We have to manage ourselves, our time, our money. We all have limited resources and the biggest resource of all is time. Mark, in his position, has to be very conscious with time and I can see that through his social media. There is so much work that goes in making sets that very few people would really suit well to make Magic. One of the most famous lessons that Mark has repeated over the years is that "restrictions breed creativity".
They say that intelligent people tend to have fewer friends. Let's think about Mark's lesson for a minute. It's impossible to be friends with everyone. We can't be there for everyone and everywhere. In the same way Mark has to be very conscious about time and managing his resources to make the game, we have to be very conscious about which people make a positive difference in our lives and which ones are not needed. I may sound harsh but the world is not the safest place. In fact, it's dangerous if one is blind and easily fooled. Some people can be trusted while others just can't. To assess how much importance we give to some people is much harder to do than assessing how much value we put into lifeless objects.
Stretching this discussion a bit we could think on some mental disorders such as hoarding or the dependant personality disorder. Both relate to being attached to things or people in a way that is excessive and harmful. In extreme cases we have addictions. I'm not going to dive into these subject matters because it's out of reach for this page. To stay closer to Mark's lesson let's think on daily life. Can we trade our car with public transportation or even walking to move from home to work and back? Sometimes yes, it depends not only on our willingness but on politics too. Can we stop drinking too much coke, coffee and energy drinks? Probably yes. Can we turn off the TV, smartphones, computers and live without them? It can be done but for a person such as Mark it'd make his job impossible to be done.
This is quite easy to relate to level design. Take textures and environment art for instance. In other pages in this site I mention that one of the most important aspects of level design is readability. Too much is too much. Too many colors, too many objects, too many paths, too many things fighting over your attention on screen. Computers have limited resources too. We can't always do whatever we want to. Our vision has to be constrained by what can be achieved in a target hardware. I've never worked on any comercial title before but I'd imagine that if a level has a set of goals, the level designer has to work within certain constrains. How long the level takes to be completed. How many enemies. How many obstacles. How much skill it requires from the players. In here I have to agree with Mark. Once we understand the core that we want to work on, it becomes clear what can be removed.
As a last comment I'd say that a designer or developer can very well be attached to their creations and, if it's a level for example, it can surely be hard to see it being cut out of the game they are working on. Having to abandon something ties to being better at managing resources, because by focusing on more important things we improve our efficiency. Unfortunately I don't have an answer on how, when and what to abandon. It's very much personal to find an answer for those questions. We all have to make choices everyday. Sometimes we can't afford this product and must choose something else. We may have to move and leave something behind. Those are moments when we have to question ourselves how much value we are putting into something.
Reference: