Leacock on Pandemic and game design

Continuing my current trend of studying game design more than actually doing it (bad Rob!), after someone shared a link in a thread on BoardGameGeek, I have just watched a nice Google tech talk by Matt Leacock. This was recorded in 2008, when his game Pandemic was still new and hadn't become the phenomenon it grew into, so it is interesting seeing how some of his comments (and questions from the audience) have been reflected in developments since then.  For instance, there was talk of an abandoned line of development where one player controls the diseases, something which basically became part of an expansion a year or so later.

Image grabbed from YouTube.

The title of the talk was "Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?" and there were some very interesting points about engagement (reduce friction and embody the players are key), but an overall theme of the talk seemed to me to be the value of iteration, with a lot of testing and observing how the game gets played.  He had a nice anecdote about a playtest group where a playtester called him out for intervening and correcting players when they got the rules wrong, telling him to shut up, sit in the corner and watch.  This resulted in realising some major flaws in the game as it was currently set up and a big step towards getting Pandemic into its final, published form.

There is a lot for me to think about in this talk, but I think one of the most powerful messages came from a short set of bullet points he showed fairly early on:

• Find a spark.
• Keep it simple.
• Keep it raw.
• Find the core game.