Episode 048 - Max Seidman

In the game Monarch, players compete to the be the heir to the throne. The game is cleverly designed and has amazing art, but what makes it different is that all the characters are women. The dying monarch is the queen, and players are princesses striving to show their wisdom and strength. Monarch upends some traditional stereotypes, and it does so quite intentionally. The game's designer is Mary Flanagan, and when Leading Lines looked her up, we learned that she’s a professor at Dartmouth College, where she runs a game design and research lab called Tiltfactor. Flanagan and her team design games for social change, like Monarch, and they investigate their effects on players’ beliefs and behaviors. In this episode we talk with Max Seidman, senior game designer at Tiltfactor. Seidman gives us a tour of the Tiltfactor lab and discusses more about Tiltfactor’s research into games and social change. Links • Max Seidman on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-seidman-8a017144/ • Tiltfactor, https://tiltfactor.org/ • Pox, https://tiltfactor.org/game/pox/ • Awkward Moment, https://tiltfactor.org/game/awkward-moment/ • Buffalo, https://tiltfactor.org/game/buffalo/ • Monarch, https://resonym.com/game/monarch/ • RePlay Health, http://www.replayhealth.com/ • “Playing Below the Poverty Line,” https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/6176/5906 • Derek Bruff’s Agile Learning blog article “Teaching Board Games #2: The Big Picture,” http://derekbruff.org/?p=3349