Radical Designer Ownership
If the user is confused, it is your fault — so simplify until the thing is self-correcting and write the instructions as if you were in the room.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 92%
Elan credits this to Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog, which he calls the best game design principle he has ever encountered despite it having nothing to do with game design. Before Exploding Kittens, he designed games for friends and found that when he was not in the room, people did not enjoy them — and he kept blaming them. The book flipped the ownership. The fix is a one-two punch: design so simple it is almost self-correcting, then instructions written as though he were sitting there, anticipating and pre-empting confusion. He puts the result at a jump from roughly ten percent of people getting the game to about ninety-five percent.
Origin
Karen Pryor, a populariser of clicker training with a background in marine mammals, wrote Don't Shoot the Dog around the premise that when training goes wrong you change your own behaviour rather than blame the animal. Elan read it before founding Exploding Kittens and it resolved his failure to make friends enjoy his games when he was not present.
Core principles
- 01Every problem that comes up is your problem, not theirs; every responsibility is your responsibility, not theirs.
- 02If people are confused, it is your fault — and in the case of instructions it is literally your fault.
- 03Blaming the user for not having the fun you wanted them to have is the error that keeps a designer stuck.
- 04The design half of the fix: make the thing so simple that it is almost self-correcting, and strip out every complication and nuance.
- 05The word 'except' in a rule is the tell — the moment you say it, you have gone down a wrong path.
- 06The writing half of the fix: write as if you are in the room, anticipating questions and cutting them off before they arrive.
- 07You must split your brain in two — one half holds the information, the other half knows nothing and receives the script.
- 08Reading is the worst way to learn a game, so route people to a video and treat the text as the fallback.
How to run it
- 1
Reassign the fault to yourself
Adopt the rule from the first step of design: every problem that comes up is my problem, not theirs, and every responsibility is my responsibility. Elan says the games designed this way are the most successful ones he has made.
Pro tip Tim's framing is radical ownership — it may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility; and with instructions, it usually is your fault too.
Watch out Any energy spent explaining why the user should have understood is energy not spent fixing the artefact.
- 2
Simplify until it self-corrects
Strip out all complication and remove all nuance so the design corrects the user's mistakes for them rather than requiring a rule to cover them.
Pro tip Elan's companion tenet — if a component does not need to be in the game, remove it from the game.
Watch out Adding a clarifying rule is usually a symptom that the underlying design is wrong.
- 3
Treat 'except' as a design failure
Elan's specific tell: any time he is working through the rules and says 'if this happens then this happens, except…', the moment he says except, he has gone down a wrong path and needs to get rid of all of it.
Pro tip Keep a literal count of exceptions across a draft; the count is a complexity score.
- 4
Write as if you were in the room
Reconstruct on paper what you would do live: explain enthusiastically, answer the question when asked, clarify at the moment of confusion. Elan writes anticipating the questions, cutting them off before they arrive, and correcting behaviour because he knows exactly where people go off course.
Pro tip Fix the misstep at the exact sentence where it occurs, not in a troubleshooting section at the end.
Watch out A complete and accurate document is not the same as one that survives contact with a beginner.
- 5
Split your brain in two
Elan's hardest instruction: one half of you reads the script knowing what information has to come out, and the other half is the recipient who knows nothing. The skill is approaching a set of instructions from the perspective of the things you know you do not yet know.
Pro tip Elan says this makes you converse more effectively out in the world in general, not just write better rules.
Watch out It is genuinely hard and takes practice — the information in your head insists on being assumed.
- 6
Hunt ambiguity, then route around reading entirely
Tim's contribution to Coyote was identifying anything that could be misunderstood, was not yet defined, or carried a broader connotation that would steer people off course — hundreds and hundreds of edits in one Google doc. The instructions then point to a video via QR code, because reading is the worst way to learn a game.
Pro tip Also invite modification — Coyote's rules explicitly permit house rules, which turns edge cases into permission rather than errors.
Watch out Do not use the video as an excuse to leave the text ambiguous; the text is what people fall back to mid-game.
In the wild
Before Exploding Kittens, Elan designed games for friends and had the hardest time: when he was not in the room, people were not enjoying them. He kept blaming them for not having as much fun as he wanted them to have. Reading Don't Shoot the Dog convinced him the fault was absolutely his, and he responded with the two-part fix — self-correcting simplicity in the design, and instructions written as if he were present and pre-empting every question.
→ By his own account the one-two punch moved his games from roughly ten percent of people getting it to about ninety-five percent.
In Exploding Kittens' playtest videos, the diagnostic Elan prizes most is the moment a family opens the instructions and you see eyes go wide, an inhale, and a pull back. He notes there is no survey in the world they could fill out that would tell him that, because they might not even realise they are doing it. When gameplay has already survived internal testing and the video still shows people not having fun, the team assumes the fault is the instructions rather than the game and attacks those.
→ A concrete detection method for instruction failure, and a default assumption that routes blame to the document rather than the player.
Common mistakes
Blaming the audience for not having fun
Elan's own diagnosis of his pre-Exploding Kittens self: he was trying to get people to have as much fun as he wanted them to have, and when they did not he kept blaming them, which he calls so wrong. The blame is what prevents the redesign.
Patching complexity with an exception
Writing 'except if' into a rule feels like precision and is actually a signal that the underlying design has gone wrong. Elan treats the word as a stop sign requiring him to strip the mechanic rather than document it.
Writing accurately instead of writing present
A designer can write a technically complete rulebook that still fails, because in person they would have answered questions, clarified confusion and corrected course. Text that does not anticipate those moments is missing most of what the explanation actually was.
Assuming your expert readers are good proxies
Tim raises the parallel with proofreaders: he does not only use professional writers, because they are too close to the material, like a travel writer who cannot stop looking at travel through a writer's lens. Expert reviewers reliably fail to reproduce beginner confusion.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone shipping something that must be understood without them present — rules, documentation, courses, handoffs, onboarding.
Not ideal for
Expert tools with a trained user base, where stripping nuance would remove the capability those users came for.
From the transcript
“every problem that comes up is my problem, not theirs”
“if people are confused, it is your fault”
“the game has to be so simple that it is almost self-correcting”
“i have to write it as if i'm in the room and i have to anticipate those questions and i have to cut them off…”
From the episode
#821: My Two-Year Secret Project, COYOTE — The Strategies and Tactics for Building a Bestseller from Nothing with Elan Lee of Exploding Kittens