Over the last 14 years at Stonemaier Games, many times we’ve asked ourselves why things are the way they are (both in the game industry and within our company). This led to us being one of the first publishers to offer region-friendly shipping, to Stonemaier leaving behind crowdfunding in 2015, and eventually to me hiring my wonderful team of coworkers starting in 2020.

“Why?” is such a powerful question. So why only ask it once?

This is an insight from Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic Robots. On his recent appearance on the Unit Economics podcast, Nariyawala shared that a common practice at Matic is to ask “why” three times in a row to get to the heart of a problem or question.

An example of this came up recently with the success of Wingspan Pocket. Both externally and internally, people have asked if we should make an expansion or a spinoff. “Why?” I asked. Well…that’s what publishers do when a game sells well. “Why? Is the game missing something?” Well…no, but I’ll always take more cards. “Why aren’t there more cards?” Wingspan Pocket’s abilities are depicted as icons, not text, and with icons there’s a limit to the number of unique abilities. “Why not add more text?” That’s counter to the accessible, approachable concept of Wingspan Pocket; rather, Wingspan is already there if you’re looking for a lot of unique, text-heavy powers.

Sometimes the answers might reveal information but need more time. For example, a number of people have recently asked if we will sell games on our webstore for pickup at Essen. The answer is no, but why? We use InsideUp’s POS at Essen, and it doesn’t sync to our Shopify. Why do we use their system? We share a booth with them, and it’s more customer-friendly if customers can buy products from both companies at a single checkout. Why value efficiency over preorder convenience? It’s partially economics: It’s much more expensive to sell games at a convention than on our webstore. Why? Booth rental and personnel costs. Why not find a way to make it work financially? If it best serves customers, I think that’s a worthy goal to pursue.

I really like this concept not only for business discussions, but also for processing playtest data. “This card was useless.” Why? “I never used its ability.” Why? “The ability was too expensive to activate.” The best playtesters provide the third answer right from the start, but even then I sometimes dig deeper to best understand the problem so I can try to identify the best solution.

Why? Why? Why? I’m going to use this approach for more questions in the future. Have you tried something like this?

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