06 Track 6

Unit 6

A new generation of thinking

Chapter 2

Left Brains, Right Brains and Board Games

Page 101

Left Brains, Right Brains and Board Games

It’s not an easy task to do: You need to whistle the song Stayin’ Alive with enough skill for your teammate to identify the 1970s disco hit. On your next turn, your partner draws a clue with his eyes closed, and you have to guess what it is.

You might also find yourself spelling words backward in order to win around. These challenges are part of the “whole brain” board game that tries to satisfy the world’s intellectual hunger, appropriately called Cranium.

In November 1997, personal experience led Richard Tait to consider this new type of board game that, unlike popular uni-skill games, incorporates a variety of talents. On vacation with his wife and another couple, they found themselves stuck indoors one rainy afternoon and decided to pass the time with the board game.

They first played Pictionary and Tait and his wife badly beat the other team. His competitors then sought revenge and quickly challenged Tait and his wife to a game of Scrabble.

Tait admits his friends were the overwhelming victors in the popular word game.

“I felt terrible and wondered why there wasn’t a game where everyone the place can have a chance to shine − still a competitive, fun board game, but one where everyone can show what they are good at, “explains Tait.

When Tait and his good friend Whit Alexander left their jobs at Microsoft, they vowed to jump at any future opportunities to work together. So Tait approached Alexander to help him examine the possibilities of producing a new board game.

In only nine short months, the two former Microsoft employees conceived a unique game that is designed to include something for everyone, and took it to a market that had been craving something different.

Once they decided to take the proverbial plunge, they began conducting research to further develop the concept of their “whole brain” game. The two gathered as much knowledge as they could about the history of social games, comparing their findings against the criteria for Cranium.

Their conclusion was to develop a left brain/right brain game, but neither knew much about the hypothesis, so they began researching the field of intellectual psychology.

Tait and Alexander would soon discover a Harvard University researcher named Howard Gardner whose “Theory of Multiple Intelligences” postulates that there are eight core competencies where people show intelligence, such as linguistic, mathematical, interpersonal, or spatial.

“We thought it was a really rich framework to try to base the game design on, so we built up from Gardner’s work,” explains Alexander.

The two inventors identified a number of occupations that people might pursue if they are gifted in one if Gardner’s intelligences. They then broke down the findings into subject matters or areas of interest that those same people would be exceptionally strong in, ensuring each player their moment to shine.

After about three months of research, Alexander, and Tait realized the novelty of their approach to the board-game market. In total, they had come up with fourteen different activities, each one innovative in its own right.

One such example is “sculpterades.” As the name suggests, this activity requires players to sculpt clues from Clay while their teammates guess what they are sculpting, bringing out the child in the most mature adults.

The duo’s commitment to research and quality design took them through ten different Cranium Clay recipes and multiple scents before settling on a purple, citrus-smelling clay that boasts a long shelf life.

Tait says that customers often e-mail them for more of the stuff because they like it so much.

Next, they decided upon four unique groups of question cards, including “Creative Cat,” which features sculpting and drawing activities; “Date Head,” which focuses on trivia; “Word Worm,” which includes vocabulary-based questions; and “Star performer” featuring performance-based activities.

It is the team with the best combination of these skills that eventually wins the game.

Cranium avoids play dynamics that allow one group to overwhelm another by limiting each team to one task before passing the turn to the next player. Tait says this is just one example of hundreds of game dynamics they fine-tuned throughout the play tasks.

But, he adds, there was one constant throughout the testing period: People were having a good time. “We originally started with a much broader vision than just a board game,” explains Tait.

He says they looked at the 1980s and how the heart was so heavily emphasized in conjunction with good health. He thinks that the brain is going to be the organ of focus for the new millennium.

“And we would like to be the company that’s at the forefront of providing fun things to do with your brain to keep it happy and healthy.”

This strategy has made Cranium standout among its competitors in the board-game industry, as there simply is no other game that offers such a large variety of activities.

Today, the pair’s main challenge is building the Cranium brand name, and Tait alludes to a potential TV show as well as new Cranium products in the distant future.