Interview with Matt Leacock, Creator of “Pandemic”
Lately, I’ve been researching game playing as an art practice. I’ve mostly played competitive board games, but I started wondering about what cooperative games might exist. A Google search later I realized that there is a whole world of cooperative board games, and an international community of folks invested in the practice of their play.
I learned that many cooperative games are based on the narrative of the characters involved, and that this allows for the telling and re-telling versions of stories in which players work together. It was also through this research undertaken during quarantine that I learned about a particularly popular cooperative board game, ironically entitled Pandemic. Pandemic was created years before COVID-19 but is being re-examined in light of it. The game’s creator, Matt Leacock, describes the game like this, “In the game, all players work together in an attempt to save humanity from four deadly diseases. Everyone takes turns moving around the world, treating infected populations to address short-term threats, in an effort to buy enough time to complete your ultimate long-term objective: the discovery of the needed cures.”[1]
I started to think about the communities that engage in cooperative game playing as a practice and was curious if it was having any effect on their relationships. I purchased Pandemic and started playing it with my daughter and I have to say that, for us, it was a bonding experience. I started reading and watching interviews in which Leacock discussed the development of Pandemic and reached out to see if I could ask him some questions. This was our conversation:
Ariyeh: I read that you redesigned games when you were a kid, maybe with an uncle?
Leacock: Yeah, I remember specifically getting a game based on Space Invaders and we played it and there were absolutely no decisions in the game, you just rolled the dice and saw what happened. So, I tried to make the game better with the components that came in the box.
Ariyeh: Do you think in that way, were you always sort of a UX [user experience] designer at heart, always redesigning things?
Leacock: Yeah, I guess so and certainly with games initially, but early on games had their appeals in a separate channel, not just making things usable, but they’re games and games are fun.
Ariyeh: So, what initially drew you was more just the pure fun of it?
Leacock: Yeah, yeah, I think so. It’s hard to really pinpoint exactly what I get out of it. There are opportunities for great creativity. You get to make something with your hands and then you get to put it in front of other people, and if you’re lucky, they enjoy it. And then it’s like an experiment. You can also be like a scientist, so it combines art and science.
Ariyeh: What do you wish people understood about the draw of gamer culture?
Leacock: Board games have really caught on quite a bit in the past ten, twenty years. It surprised a lot of folks who thought that video games would take over, and I think the secret there is that board games create this sort of space for people to gather around and have a social experience together. It sets this safe context for social interaction, where you don’t have to be a clever conversationalist.
Ariyeh: I know that you said that you originally were playing competitive board games with your spouse and maybe there were some negative feelings, and that became part of your motivation for designing Pandemic.
Leacock: Yeah.
Ariyeh: Did it work? I assume you all probably play other cooperative games too, but do you feel like this is a source of relationship improvement?
Leacock: Yeah, I think…I really do think it is. I’ve had people come up to me and say that the game has improved their marriage. My colleague, Rob Daviau, has had a few people say that these games have saved their marriage.
Ariyeh: I wonder what would happen if a marriage counselor “prescribed” a cooperative game for couples?
Leacock: I don’t know, I don’t know. Yeah, I’m not sure I want that pressure…
Ariyeh: [laughs] I mean, you know…it can’t hurt it, I wouldn’t think.
Leacock: Yeah, I wouldn’t think. I would hope not.
Ariyeh: I know your background was at AOL, Yahoo, doing social media type stuff before you did this, what types of projects were you working on?
Leacock: I actually spent a lot of my time working in community applications. So, things like Yahoo Groups, and AOL Groups before that, a lot of topical interest groups, where you get people who are related to each other through interest. Later years, I was doing more on things that looked more like Facebook feeds, but prior to that, it was really designing systems to help people interact. Then after that, I did a lot of communication applications for teams to communicate with each other.
Ariyeh: Were there things that you focused on in terms of user experience that changed the quality of how people related to one another…ways to make people’s engagement more pleasant or, you know, less aggressive?
Leacock: Yeah, there’s a fair amount of overlap. I mean because you’re trying to figure out how different people communicate within a context according to certain policies, so it wasn’t just like, how do I lay out the buttons on the page? It was really about what kind of behaviors do we want to incentivize and downplay. So, at the higher levels, it was about how can we encourage this sort of prosocial behavior versus this other type of behavior, when do we report abuse, how do we promote good content, how do we encourage people to form new groups or discover groups, things like that. So, it’s the underlying systems design, and I think that’s also really one of the things I like about game design. When you’re developing policies for a community, it’s a lot like writing rules to a game.
Ariyeh: So, when you were making Pandemic, what were the lessons learned in terms of promoting cooperation?
Leacock: Yeah, so initially when I designed Pandemic, I was just trying to make a cooperative game that worked, but now I’ve designed a lot of cooperative games and you try to figure out ways to make it so that it’s not one player taking over the whole thing, and each player has something to contribute. One of the things I like to do is give everybody a role or something that they specialize in so that they have something unique that they can contribute. There’re other things you can do where you’ve got secret information or you’ve got hidden traitors and things like that, or the games might be real time, so you have to play super-fast. The biggest technique that I use is trying to give everybody a little something special so that they can feel…autonomous.
Ariyeh: I just played Pandemic for the first time with my daughter. We cheated a little bit because my daughter was so excited that there was a scientist, so instead of drawing for the role, I just went ahead and gave it to her.
Leacock: That’s awesome. I won’t tell the board game police.
Ariyeh: Appreciated. [laughs] So we were so into her role as a scientist, I kind of forgot for a minute that I had special abilities too and we realized we weren’t taking full advantage of our differences. I wondered, could these games help teach appreciation for difference in a way?
Leacock: Mmm, yeah, I think so. Certainly, the more asymmetrical the game is. If everybody is different, coming at it from a different point of view, I think that could be an interesting area to dig even deeper. If the rules for the way you play the game operate even more differently from the way someone else plays and then you have to kind of figure out the overlap. That may also be a useful way to frame a game where you can work toward a common goal and also work toward your individual goals, while trying to figure out the tensions between them. I think it could be a good way to practice those skills for real life.
Ariyeh: Explain to me what asymmetrical means. You’re referring to game theory?
Leacock: Oh yeah, most games start up completely symmetrical. So, if you play chess, everybody’s got the same pieces. You’ve got a symmetrical board and everybody’s playing exactly the same starting condition, same ending condition and so on. In an asymmetrical game, you might be playing very different characters, or you might have different factions and different rules may apply to you than to me. Because you’re operating from different rule sets, you can get some interesting dynamics emerge from that because you all have to put on a different mindset. Then if you play a different character each time, the game feels very different because you’re taking it from a different perspective.
Ariyeh: In college, one of our professors had us play Monopoly, but some people started out with almost no money and some people started out with a lot to mimic real life, so I guess that’s asymmetrical.
Leacock: Right, yeah, yeah.
Ariyeh: One of the things I’ve been thinking about with this actual pandemic we are in is that politically we don’t seem be working together and it’s like mutually assured destruction. I was wondering, did you pick this topic, pandemic, because it is a really heightened example of the need to work together, or was it just convenient due to the way the virus can spread?
Leacock: You know, I’m not really sure what the original…it was very timely in that SARS had come through, but it also felt high stakes, right? The tagline to the game is, “Can you save humanity?”, so it’s a pretty scary enemy. Also, it seemed like something I could maybe model relatively simply with cards. Now I’m working on a game about climate change, but this time I’m coming at it more from how can I create a game that communicates or does effective framing, so that people understand how to think about the problem? Not really telling them exactly what the solution is but giving them a set of solutions that they can explore, and then by exploring all of that, kind of tacitly understand how the system works.
Ariyeh: I’m just wondering if you had a wand and you could re-engineer, from the perspective of a UX designer, the way the political debates go, the way politicians interact, the way systems interact, like is there something we can learn from the way cooperation is incentivized in game playing, because clearly it’s not incentivized enough in real life, right?
Leacock: Yeah, well, I think a lot of it comes out of this zero-sum thinking that there must be a winner and there must be a loser. You get tons of that with Trumpism, right? It’s difficult to know how much of that is a zeitgeist of people these days thinking like that, or if he’s just modeling such horrible behavior that huge masses of people follow in that line of thinking. But when you think about the history of board games, for so long people thought of games as synonymous with competition. They never really thought of them in any other way, so I’m hoping that maybe life will imitate art as these types of cooperative experiences become more popular. I mean I did Pandemic thinking everybody had to cooperate and just kind of took that for granted. When COVID started spreading, I assumed that we would see similar things from our world leaders. Unfortunately, there’s growing nationalism and all this zero-sum thinking. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing in the other direction.
Ariyeh: That’s what I’m wondering too. I think that’s really where I started thinking about this was when Trump was elected. What really disturbed me was not that his politics were different than mine, but that he really oozed this very dominant model of power control. “You’re with me or against me”, binary thinking. And those people always exist, but we chose him. Do you think all games should be cooperative? Would the world be a better place, or are there valuable lessons in competitive games?
Leacock: Oh Yeah, there’s plenty of lessons there. Right, sure. Plenty of… I don’t feel like I have to be championing competitive games though. They’re popular enough as they are, and I think there will continue to be a place for them.
Ariyeh: Right, but I think there’s value in just challenging the…automatic-ness of it.
Leacock: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think it’s all or nothing. There’re these blends between all sorts of things.
Ariyeh: In your qualitative experience, do you think games have the possibility to change culture, change our ways we relate…is that something you hope for?
Leacock: Yeah, I think so. You know, I think… I think in aggregate, I think they nudge. They push, they influence. I don’t think it’s like you buy this one game off the shelf and it changes your worldview, but I think that like any other kind of art medium it has the potential to influence people.
Ariyeh: There’s this sexual assault preventionist, Dr. Dorothy Edwards, and she talks about green dots.[2] When you see a global virus in a movie, there’s always a scene where like a room of world leaders is watching it spread as a series of red dots on a map. She says culture is contagious too, but we want to be a green dot for positive change instead of a red one. But it’s not like because you are a good bystander in this one instance that you totally change rape culture. You have to be one of many green dots.
Leacock: Yeah, I like that. That is super motivating. Ariyeh: Yeah, for me too.
[1] Matt Leacock, “Opinion | No Single Player Can Win This Board Game. It’s Called Pandemic.,” The New York Times, March 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/pandemic-game-covid.html.
[2] “Green Dot,” Alteristic, accessed March 2021, https://alteristic.org/services/green-dot/.