I love board games. I especially love collaborative board games because I like working on a team and I hate competition (I blame my twin brothers for this).

My favorite board game is called Pandemic. Maybe you’ve played it.  If you haven’t, imagine that you and your friends work for the Center for Disease Control and you have to work together to stop four diseases from spreading around the world. You have to coordinate how you will share research to find cures, while also traveling around the world to contain outbreaks. Each of you has a role that gives you special skills, so it matters who does what, and when, and where.

Every time I play Pandemic I am struck by how perfectly balanced it is. How the players’ actions balance the rapid spread of disease. How the difficulty of traveling around the board balances with the skills each player gets to use depending on the role they are playing. How even in the expansion pack, where you get to make your own roles and action cards, it’s still really hard to unbalance the game. The thing I really respect about Pandemic is how difficult it is and how satisfying it is to do something really difficult (and stressful) with your pals.

Anyway, I think Pandemic is a masterpiece in game design and I’ve often wondered how Matt Leacock, the creator of Pandemic became such a genius. Well, now I know. He pilot tested it, of course.

Here’s an interview with Matt Leacock from a dude’s blog (www.mediajunkie.com)

How long did it take to design the game?

I started working on Pandemic in January of 2004 and signed off on the final rules in October 2007. I put together a quick-and-dirty paper prototype in about 30 minutes with a couple of sharpies, a standard deck of cards, some wooden cubes, and a few pawns. Unlike many games I’ve worked on, Pandemic showed promise right from the start – I could feel tension in it right away.

What was the process like?

[...] The process I used relied on many iterations. In each trial, I’d jot down a rule set and either try it out myself or present it to a group of playtesters. After playing a game, I’d keep rules that helped make the game more engaging and do what I could to remove any rules that sounded interesting—at the time—but didn’t match up to the core objectives. I also sat out a lot of games and closely observed players to note what behaviors they exhibited during each game. Where did they get confused? Ask questions? Check the rules? I did my best to file off all the sharp, confusing edges by redesigning the game to fit players’ mental models wherever I could.

The two biggest hurdles are finding a novel mechanism that is fun and fine tuning the design for balance and learn-ability. For this game, the mechanism came right away and the bulk of the work was tuning. … I still haven’t found a process for repeatedly discovering fun and novel games, however. I suspect it has a lot to do with loads of fearless experimentation.

As much as I‘m stoked to find out that one of my game design heroes pilot tests his games exactly how we pilot exhibits (except the part about having 3 years to test), what I really can’t get over is when he says, “Pandemic showed promise right from the start – I could feel tension in it right away.”

Stacey and I were trying to articulate this earlier today. We were talking about how to tell if people are engaged with a pilot. That sometimes they’re engaged when they look like they’re having fun, but there’s another kind of engagement that looks totally different. There’s this more elusive kind of engagement that is really easy to over look, describing that kind of engagement as “tension” captures it perfectly.

-dana!

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In the Prototype Lab we use this standard Ikea storage unit to house our milk crates of junk.

When we were testing the Being Human exhibition for some pilot we needed a small private space where people could add personal comments to a time line. In desperation for such a table I turned the top half of one of our shelving units inside out  and created what we’ve always called the carrel.

Here's the carrel when it was used to collect 101 ideas about duct tape. (See, its basically a 16 square Ikea shelving unit with its top and upper shelves turned into a back panel.)

But we moved to a smaller Prototype Lab this week and we no longer had room for the carrel. (He doesn’t store as many bins as the other shelving units, he’s not stackable, and we haven’t had a need for tiny private spaces lately.) So the carrel was sadly waiting by the loading dock to be dismantled when Bill had a brilliant idea to revive it.

Here it is in its new incarnation in the shop as some rad and useful desktop storage.

Nice creative reuse, Bill!

-dana

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I’ve been researching the way Arthur Ganson makes gears for the wind-up kinetics pilot I’m working on this week. I came across a TED Talk where Ganson beautifully describes his art, being obsessed with making things move and how it feels to build things with his hands.

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculpture.html

It makes me proud to be a maker. Check it out.

-dana!

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