The Bubble: Part 2
/[Note: First: “Hey, Andy, I thought the idea was to start doing short posts?” Yes, that’s the plan. Once March rolls around and the new schedule commences, expect shorter, breezier, posts.
Second, I don’t know how clear this post is. If you don’t really “get” what I’m trying to say here, that’s fine. I’m still kind of working my way towards a better way of explaining the concept. This post might be pretty abstract, but tomorrow’s post will have a couple concrete examples.]
Yesterday I wrote about the testing we did that compared the simple handling of a trick against the more advanced handling of the same trick and showed how it significantly increased the audience’s rating of that trick. (Presuming the advanced handling creates a more visual or more convincing illusion.)
I also included this incredibly informative graph to plot the results of where the simple handling and the advanced handling fall as far as people’s rating of the trick goes. (At a 5.8 and an 8.5 respectively.)
The advanced handling scores almost 50% higher than the simplified handling. So the hours you put into working on sleights and the effort you put into carrying around gimmicks is not wasted. How could anyone suggest it’s wasted effort if people enjoy the tricks 50% more?'
Ah…. but that’s not what that chart tells us exactly.
That chart was their rating of the trick against other magic tricks.
But that’s not why you’re showing people magic. At least, that’s not why I’m showing people magic. I want the entire experience to resonate with them. I don’t just want them to like a trick relative to other tricks. I want to show them something that feels incredibly worthwhile on its own.
When we asked people to rate their enjoyment of the experience of watching those ace assemblies, the simplified version got an average score of 6.8 and the more advanced handling got a 7.0
At first blush this might look confusing. The people who rated the trick a 5.8, just on the basis of the trick itself, rated the experience of watching the trick a 6.8? And the people who rated the trick itself an 8.5 rated the experience of watching it only a 7.0?
It almost feels like there’s something counterintuitive going on here. Like the results don’t make sense. Like we need to come up with some psychological theory to explain them. “Maybe people don’t like being fooled.” Or something like that. But actually, the rationale behind this scoring is perfectly logical and mathematical without having to do any mental calisthenics.
The problem is, we’re too close to the subject of magic to understand it.
So let’s imagine we’re talking about something else. Let’s say tap dancing (if you know a lot about tap dancing, then think of some other subject you don’t know about).
Let’s imagine two universes. In both universes I know nothing about tap dancing.
In Universe One, you have me watch someone who has studied tap for a month and ask me to rate their performance out of 1-10, I might say, “They look pretty good. I give them a 6.”
In Universe Two, you put me in front of the greatest tap dancer in the world and ask me to rate their performance. I might not know the intricacies of the art, but I’d sill probably be able to tell this was quite impressive. Let’s say I give it a 9.5.
Now, in both universes, you ask me to rate my enjoyment of the experience of watching the tap dancing presentation. A rating of 10 would mean it’s on par with the ultimate experiences of my life. A rating of 5 would be neutral. And the further you get below 5, the more negative the experience would be for me.
In Universe One I say, “You know, I haven’t seen too much tap dancing in person. That was kind of interesting. I’d give the experience a 6.5.”
In Universe Two I say, “You know, I haven’t seen too much tap dancing in person. That was really impressive. I’d give the experience a 7.”
In that context the numbers make sense, yes?
When I’m ranking the tap-dancing just as tap-dancing, then anything that is in the area of “competent to amazing” will be in the 5-10 range. But when I rank it as an experience, that ranking is going to be bound by the bubble that represents my potential appreciation for tap dancing. That bubble may only exist between 6.5 and 7—that may cover my the full range of my ability to appreciate tap dancing from a competent performer to the best in the world.
The same thing is happening with the magic ratings. The blue graph above represents their ranking of the trick against other tricks. Essentially it represents where in the bubble itself the trick ranks. We’re zoomed in on the bubble. But that bubble exists somewhere on their range of experiences from negative to positive.
So, when we zoom out, we’re actually looking at something like this…
That bubble is going to be in a different position for each person—depending on their innate appreciation for magic—but I feel this is a good representation of where it is on average for a layman.
In my experience testing these things, if you present a naked, unembellished trick to a layman and then have them rate the experience of watching that trick (relative to other life experiences) you will get something that falls into this range, on average. And that’s whether it’s a card trick, cups and balls, linking rings, coins across, or whatever. (This assumes the trick fools them.) Whether people naturally like magic or naturally dislike magic, they’re still going to have some sort of range. And while I’ve never really crunched all the numbers across the board on this mathematically, I estimate that range to generally be around 6.4 to 7.4. That’s the “average bubble” for a magic trick as an experience.
(In a future post I’ll give more details on how we get random people from all walks of life to synchronize their “experiential” rating in a way that makes it an actually useful measurement for us to use. It took some time to figure out how to explain the concept so everyone was applying a similar standard.)
You might say, “A 7.4 is our average ceiling for a trick? That seems kind of underwhelming.”
That’s not how I would look at those numbers. They should actually be seen as encouraging. They suggest just performing a trick competently gets you around a 6.4. Magic is inherently on the positive side of the experience rating when performed with any kind of baseline competence. (Now, what constitutes a competent performance is a conversation for another day.)
Again, keep in mind that I’m talking about the average layperson. It’s different when you’re very familiar with the subject. The bubble that represents your potential level of appreciation for something expands (in both directions) the more familiar you are with that subject because you are able to see and appreciate (or find flaws in) the things the uninitiated can’t.
So what’s the takeaway here?
Here’s how I see it…
Most of the things we get excited about as magicians—the mastery of more demanding sleights; cleverer gimmicks; new methods—are things that tend to only affect an audience’s rating within their bubble of how they rate magic tricks. Within that bubble, the difference may be significant, but when you look at the experience as a whole, it carries much less weight. If your goal is to be the most popular guy at the magic convention, it makes sense to spend 1000s of hours perfecting an invisible bottom deal. But if your goal is to go out and provide regular people more engaging experiences using magic, then it’s probably not a great use of time to “perfect” your methodology much past the point where you have something that already fools people. You’re going to hit the limits of their appreciation for an effect long before you hit the limits of your potential to “improve” on it to a degree they can’t perceive.
I don’t think that’s exactly a controversial point. I think if you’re someone who wants to master the hardest moves in magic because you think it’s going to make you a better magician, you’re a dope. But I don’t really believe that’s how most people think anyways. I think they think, “I want to master the hardest moves in magic because I want to master the hardest moves in magic.” It’s more of an inward focused objective than an outward one. I have no issue with that.
In the description of the testing, I mention that the tricks were performed “naked” with no real presentation other than a description of the effect. So you may think the answer to wringing a higher rating for the the experience of the effect would be to add proper patter and routining. While I believe that can make a trick stronger, I still think it’s kind of limited in the overall experiential impact it can have.
Again, let’s look at an analogy. If I tell you a joke from a joke book, and it makes you laugh, that’s a successful joke. You could rank that joke on a scale of 1-10 and since it made you laugh it would probably be at least a 5. If it made you laugh a lot, it might be a 10.
But that 1-10 ranking is going to exist in your bubble that represents how much you appreciate a joke. For most people that bubble would probably be, I would guess, in the 5-6 area as far as a joke as an “overall experience.” The funniest joke-book type joke you ever heard probably didn’t have a huge impact on you. It was a bright moment in your day and then forgotten.
Now if you work on that joke and make it really punchy and you perfect the timing and the delivery, you will probably push it to the high end of the bubble, but you’re not going to go much beyond that because it’s still “just a joke.” Similarly, a really polished trick with good patter might push the boundaries of the trick bubble. But if it still feels like “a trick” then you’re still going to be somewhat contained by the boundaries of the “trick bubble” of the person you’re performing for.
In Tuesday’s post I mentioned the next book would cover “supplementary presentational ideas…things that aren’t necessarily trick-specific, but concepts you can apply to many different tricks in order to increase the impact they have on spectators.” One of the reasons I want to write that book is because of this testing. The data we’ve collected suggests there’s something of an upper limit to the extent that working on your technique and presentation can increase the strength of an effect. But we’ve found we can affect people’s “experience” scores with some of the extra-presentational ideas (extra as in “beyond”), that I’ve written about on this site. This is how we can consistently push people experiences outside of that bubble.
As I said, this is probably all confusingly written. I think tomorrow’s post will clarify the concept somewhat and then I’ll refine it further in months to come. I think if you perform regularly for real people you may already understand where I’m coming from. You’ve probably had the experience where you performed a trick in a way that got a significantly stronger reaction than it had in the past. And it probably wasn’t because you went from using a double-undercut to using a side-steal. In my own performances (and in our testing) the biggest increase in reactions to the experience of watching magic come from some small thing that makes the effect feel more personal, or more spontaneous, or more surreal, or less like a “just a magic trick.” Those are the tactics I’ll be collecting for the next book.