Producing the Game

Well, here goes a bit of a story. Many months ago I had a student who like to play Magic the Gathering. This was rather unusual because this nerdiness made him such an outlier on the Island bell-curve that his post-graduation success is not a shocking surprise. Anyway, with the foul geekiness on the island and the relentless boredom our T.V. and drug conditioned students experience, several of them got to playing it out of despair for entertainment. As they did I observed something quite magical. These guys, however difficult a time they had in school, were learning a bit of game strategy but more shockingly some pretty complicated and weird vocabulary. They learned this vocabulary without even realizing it and without any sort of complaint or resistance. It was tough vocabulary too: terms like Incendiary Zubra, or Archaeo Evangel. Anyway, it inspired me as to a way that I might be able to get students to learn more biology, including the big ugly words. You see, I had observed time and again that often the word was the thing. "Why in the world should I go to the effort to even try to sound out, let alone understand a term like Mitochondria or Endoplasmic Reticulum?"

Along with the learning of vocabulary it occurred to me that a great many biological processes work in ways that a game could be designed to model them. For some reason I cannot understand, the vast majority of science education games are designed like Trivial Pursuit or something where the players merely practice regurgitating memorized science facts. I thought it a ridiculous shame to not accomplish the learning of information as well as develop a comprehension of biological processes.

Anyway, I made an initial aborted effort at a game based on the ETC in photosynthesis. That did not fly at all. Eventually I came around to this card game that models cells competing for resources in the environment with reproduction as the ultimate goal. Anyway, I've been working at this for some time and I'm now on my third major revision of the game. The second revision focused on getting more interaction between players. This third revision has been designed to simplify a lot of the game and make the cards less wordy.