Matt Leacock doesn’t remember exactly how he got the idea for his board game.
“I was a new dad… you’re kind of in a haze when you’re short on sleep,” he tells EXTRA with a laugh. He does remember wanting to create a game that he could play with his wife. He had loved and invented board games since he was a kid and he wanted to share that love with her. It was a romantic idea that spurred this creation, which was odd considering it inspired a game called “Pandemic”.

This game concerns the outbreak of four deadly diseases in four locations across the world. The object of the game is to contain and eventually cure all four of these diseases before they become too big to control. The catch is that as the game goes on and the diseases get more widespread, the game becomes more challenging. Any bad turn may cause a chain reaction and the diseases can win. Luckily, the players of “Pandemic” are not alone. Every player can and must work together.

Matt is a real student of games and he was happy dig into what makes a great game great. He spent much of our interview talking about how to create and sustain challenge, variety and interest in board games.

Matt did not come up with the idea on his own. Besides his wife, whom he cites as his muse, Matt credits a number of other people whose testing and critiquing of his game sharpened and improved it. His wife and family were employed as game testers, but Matt didn’t stop there. He kept taking the game to new people with fresh eyes and perspectives.

One manufacturer said his pieces needed to “map” back to the actual players, and a color blind co-worker told him he couldn’t tell between red and green cities.

Suggestions like these led to changes big and small. Matt made pawns more like individual people with the addition of colors and roles specific to each player, and colors were changed from green and red to blue, yellow and black. Symbols were added so that the cities could be distinguished by two different mechanisms.

The game is designed to be as easy as possible to understand. There are games that are for gamers, people committed to the hobby or the practice of gaming. People like this play games that are often intimidating or inaccessible to the average person. Gamers, though, weren’t the only people Matt wanted to have play and enjoy this game.

“For a game to really come off the shelf for me it’s got to not only be playable with [hardcore gamers],” he says. “What I personally find most gratifying is being able to play it with my aunt, or uncle or my cousin or my nephew.”

For a game as challenging as “Pandemic” is, it’s also accessible. A player can understand the board, cards and pieces of the game without reading English. This was a point Matt emphasized during a speech he gave at Google. He talked about wanting to make sure the greatest number of people could enjoy the game, not just for altruistic reasons but also because the more people who could play the game the more likely it was to be a success.

In terms of the creative process, Matt emphasizes that his idea wasn’t ready right out of the gate.

“If you work too hard on the prototype you become married to it,” Matt says. Instead, he talks about having a strong goal and building toward it.
He collaborated with his family to create a cooperative game and his inspirations were multiple, but one place Matt’s game did not take its inspiration was video games. Matt resists the idea of a cooperative board game springing out of computer games. He is quick to point out that he was never interested in video games, neither from a design standpoint nor as a player.

“I am not a programmer, video games take large budgets and teams to get off the ground,” Matt said. “As a board game novice, I had only seen the idea of playing a game as a certain role in 386 computer classics like Oregon trail, and playing on the same team sounds to me like Mario and Luigi coming together to fight Bowser.” Still, there is actually an entire genre of board games dedicated to cooperation. As a true lover of board games, Matt was influenced by a non-digital world.

When asked why he picked a morbid topic like widespread disease to be the subject for his game, particularly one that he developed with his wife in mind, Matt says simply that it made a good enemy. In a collaborative game where players aren’t monopoly men competing to buy the best stuff or pawns trying to get home on a Parcheesi board, there needs to be something significant for players to beat. That something has to be scary enough to be a believable bad guy. When Matt plays the game with his wife, they are not playing against each other—they are playingto save the world. And that is a pretty romantic idea.

…

Pandemic and Matt Leacock’s other games can be found on his website: http://www.Leacock.com and in many game shops.

This article is available in Spanish here

Sean Montgomery, Doctor of Nueroscience, is fasinated by biofeedback (the body’s external manifestation of thought, feeling, and status).

Your body is constantly communicating with the outside world. Sean’s “Fashion Devices” take these communication (sweaty palms, heartbeats, and neural impulses) and makes a visual representation of them on hats, t-shirts, and bracelets.

To find out more about these fashion devices you can check out Sean’s website here.

People love to talk about the democratizing power of the internet.  They tell us that less expensive distribution and production, means more people can make music.  We also heard that as the internet becomes more important than the radio we are coming to a time where everybody gets to vote.

The problem is nobody votes.

There are a million services that now allow for feedback.  Social media has exploded and now rather than a couple of services that are interactive the whole internet will interact with you.  You can rate songs on iTunes, Ourstage, Spotify, and Pandora, but the majority of people the majority of the time don’t and more importantly don’t want to.

On blogs people who read but don’t comment are called lurkers.  But this evil sounding term applies to most of us most of the time (everybody but Charles).  A regular commenter someone who is:

• Outspoken enough to write
• Comfortable enough with technology to do so
• Interested in the subject enough to have something to say

Even this “regular commenter” does not comment on everything that they read, hear or watch. I would count myself in this class and it is routine for me to look at over fifty pieces of media on the internet in a day and I never write 50 comments I wouldn’t be able to get off the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

So What? This doesn’t mean that we all need to fulfill our civic duty and talk about everything all the time, though if you do that here I promise not to complain.

It means when we are thinking about social media we need to remember that most of the people most of the time don’t want to be social.  Sometimes we want to passively consume.

Today’s interview with Emi Gennis concerns her online comic Owlex.  In it we talk about writing, drawing and producing a comic in an online forum. Emi’s main character, a ghost owl named Owlex, is based on a friend who committed suicide. Despite that Owlex, the comic, is more funny than tragic. The story follows Emi and her owl friend as they deal with life after his death, the afterlife, and the bars they go to after work.

If you want to check out more of Emi’s work you can visit her site at Spazcomix.com.

Jeffery Colman represented four men at Guantanamo Bay.  In this, the second part of a two part interview, Jeff talks about his clients, and being an American lawyer working with the detainees in Guantanamo.

This is my second interview with a lawyer working at Guantanamo, the first was with Candace Gorman.

Because of the seriousness of the subject matter covered here this interview is only lightly edited and the conversation is presented almost in its entirety.  The first part of this interview is available here.

Jeff Colman represented four men at Guantanamo Bay.  In this, the first part of a two part interview, Jeff details his experience at Guantanamo and shares his perspective on the situation.

This is my second interview with a lawyer working at Guantanamo, the first was with Candace Gorman, and you will hear Jeff reference that conversation here.

Because of the seriousness of the subject matter covered here this interview is only lightly edited and the conversation is presented almost in its entirety.  The second part of this interview will be available October 27th, one day after the release of the first part.

In this second part of my interview with Josh Hanagarne we talk about Josh’s Blog, bending steel and being in control of ones body.

This is the second part of my interview with Josh Hanagarne.  The first, longer installment is available here. Josh talks about how he is not only able to live with Tourette’s but how “picking his own battle field”  has allowed him to flourish.

Josh Hanagarne has a blog, bends steal, and works as a librarian, but most importantly (to me) Josh writes about all of these things in a passionate, simple, and immediate way.

I couldn’t wait to interview Josh there was way too much good material.  So, I broke the interview in to two sections by subject.  This podcast concerns living with Tourette’s Syndrome the second podcast concerns bending steal, band books, and Josh’s upcoming memoir.

Notes: 1. I should mention that because of Josh’s Tourette’s you may hear a couple outburst during the podcast.  This is a tick and not something to worry you. 2. This interview was conducted over skype and the sound quality is poor, my apologies.

About Josh: Josh Hanagarne writes World’s Strongest Librarian, a blog with advice about coping with Tourette’s Syndrome, book recommendations, buying pants when you’re 6’8”, old-time strongman training, and so much more. Please subscribe to Josh’s RSS Update to stay in touch.

In this interview Elias Cepeda argues that Mixed Martial Arts is unique in sport, because it more accurately simulates combat than any other form of fight sport.  For years, he argues, students of fighting styles like kickboxing, boxing, and jujitsu have competed only against other students in their own disciplines.  What is exciting about Mixed Martial Arts (from here on referred to as MMA) is seeing all of these styles tested in an environment where all are welcome to compete.  By taking out a lot of the rules MMA has made a more real, and Elias would argue better, fighting scenario.

But, even mixed martial arts has rules.  What rules are good rules? Elias argues that fighters should be allowed to strike each other with elbows anywhere, kick downed opponents and strikes to the groin among other things.

This may sound like a fantastic series of claims, but Elias has well-considered arguments in support of each of them. I have my own opinion on this but, I’d ask you to listen to his interview and draw your own conclusions.

Elias Cepeda is a journalist for Inside Fighting and a friend of mine.  Elias has covered boxing and Mixed Martial arts for UFC.com, Fox Sports on MSN, and numerous other publications.

photo credit: MartialUniversity.org