a boardgame mirroring our new reaLiTy

Of various pop culture offerings, a boardgame seems to have captured our new reality quite accurately. Designed in 2008, Pandemic is a cooperative game premised on four diseases that have broken out in different parts of the world. Seven players assume seven different roles — scientist, medic, dispatcher, contingency planner, researcher, operations expert and quarantine specialist — with the aim of finding a cure to diseases that threaten to wipe out populations. In the light of the Covid-19 outbreak, the already-popular Pandemic series has catapulted into popular imagination. And even while many columnists have pointed to the morbidity of children playing these games, Pandemic’s designer Matt Leacock maintains that the purpose of the game is to fight, and not root for, the disease. Edited excerpts from our interview. There is a renewed interest in Pandemic these days. I think it’s natural, given how much of our part of lives it is right now. We have had to adapt to this new lifestyle, and the word is in circulation much more. People may be turning to it because they need something to do right now. It may even be a way for them to confront their new reality. How do cooperative games, such as Pandemic, fare in comparison with competitive games? There weren’t many cooperative games, to begin with. In the 1970s, there were some that were targeted at kids. It was around 2000, when I realised that a cooperative game could be fun. Designers did not know how to do that. Now that we have learnt how to design games like these, the market has responded very well in the past 10 years. What made you design Pandemic? I wanted to come up with a game I could play with my wife, Donna, where we could feel good after we played a boardgame. That was in stark contrast with the other games we had played; there was a negotiation game, in particular, where I won but felt horrible. I wanted to design a cooperative game. It was 2004, and SARS had just come through; it was the first wave. It seemed like a good enemy to challenge. Many find it morbid to play such games during this time. People play games for all sorts of reasons. I wouldn’t want to get behind a project that tried to capitalise on human suffering. But, at the same time, I recognise that people play games as an escape. If you have a family that’s gathering around a table for a game, it’s for fun. Sometimes, you play to confront your fears. It helps, to some extent, that Pandemic is a cooperative game, where the players are working together in order to fight the disease. They are not rooting for it. It shows how important it is for people to work together. Can Pandemic help us understand our current dilemmas better? It’s important to know that the game is not really meant to be a simulation. It just shows that there is a crisis in the world, and players have to react to short-term threats. They cannot set long-term objectives. In order to achieve that, they need to collaborate. How important is it to understand psychology to design a game? It’s like good story-writing. The games I design, which are along the lines of man-versus-environment, I amp up the tension, then give people a break, and then it reaches a resolution. You can find ways of structuring your experience in a way a story is told. Do you consciously incorporate real-world issues into games? I enjoy creating experiences, so that’s never my intention. I don’t start from an educational point of view. I want to create an engaging experience, first because when you turn educational, it gets in the way of fun. Kids, especially, can sense when a game is being educational. How have boardgames evolved over the past decade? I think designers have got a lot more savvy. Most of the games that are popular now have constrained play length. They are not two or three hours long. They tend to keep players involved. You no longer see games like Monopoly, where players are eliminated quickly. There is a lot more sharing now because of the Internet. It’s democratised, a lot more people are designing games and self-publishing them through Kickstarter.