Sports
The Planet Money Game: Test our prototype
In this episode of Planet Money, the team explores the journey of creating a board game infused with economic concepts. They discuss their initial brainstorming session, the challenges of making econo...
The Planet Money Game: Test our prototype
Sports •
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Interactive Transcript
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Hey, it's Mary Childs.
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This first week of October is historic.
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It is the first time in over half a century that NPR and its member stations are operating
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without any federal support.
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It may feel uncertain, but here's what is certain.
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Public media, indoors.
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Independent, resilient, people powered.
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Whatever the moment, you will still find us here telling stories that matter.
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This is Planet Money from NPR.
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Previously on Planet Money.
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We are making a board game.
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Table top game is actually the largest category on Kickstarter.
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Get out of here.
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Yeah, it is.
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If you make games, there has never been more competition.
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This is Orbeal.
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This is Masterpiece.
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This is Coggaard.
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We need help, a partner.
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Welcome to the Exploding Kidding's office.
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Our basic question here is, can we make a board game and where do we start?
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I think what the next step here is, we do some homework and you do some homework.
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Your homework is, give us three themes that are interesting to you.
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I'm curious to see what you come back with.
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So we talked roughly what?
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Two weeks ago, three weeks ago?
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Yeah, somewhere in there.
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That is a voice of a Lon Lee, game designer and co-founder of the Exploding Kidding's game company.
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Because we are making a board game, we are partnering with Exploding Kidding's and we've got big dreams.
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To make the kind of game that anyone would want to play.
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To make a game that has big economic ideas baked into it.
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And Exploding Kidding's had given us an assignment.
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We bring them some economic concepts and themes.
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They see if any of that might have promise for a real game.
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Okay, we took the assignment very seriously.
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We had a full staff meeting where we went deep, we went nerdy.
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And I believe you had told us to come back with about three ideas.
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We've got 17.
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Oh, this is going to be a fun project.
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Okay.
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No, we're all of these 17 ideas like obviously going to be monopoly killers.
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Displace America's most popular games?
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Well, who can say?
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And so we began to pitch.
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Think about this.
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There are elves.
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They live forever.
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But they have to plan for retirement.
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What do they do?
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What do I say to them?
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Okay.
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All right.
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Next idea.
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Apprentice wizards running a bank.
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So they have the power to create money.
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But there are apprentices so it always backfires.
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They mess it up.
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Okay.
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You don't have to respond to everyone.
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No.
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You can let them settle in.
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I'm letting that one settle.
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Okay, they weren't all home runs.
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But some of our ideas did seem to be getting a decent response.
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Like when we pitched a game inspired by compound interest,
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the idea that a small investment can snowball into something massive with enough time.
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You ever play risk?
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Yes.
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Yes.
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You've just described the mechanic by which armies are built in risk.
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Which is great.
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I mean, really, really nice shoulders to stand on there.
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So I would call that half of an idea.
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We also pitched a game called moral hazard where you have to decide which failing banks to bail out.
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But you may be hurting your future self by teaching those banks that you're going to clean up their mistakes.
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What you just said, your future self.
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Like there is an interesting game concept that I've never seen before where you have two players.
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You and your future self.
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We pitched a game called keeping up with the Joneses where you buy things like a boat to make everyone around you jealous.
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Just to learn, I don't know, having this boat card is costing me so much and making me miserable.
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Here's why I hate this idea.
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Let me start there.
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I think what you have just described is a game with no replay value.
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Once you understand the properties associated with each card with each item,
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I don't think you're going to be able to find that same delight when you go through that game again.
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We pitched game idea after game idea.
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It's the same game and you don't know if you're playing within the capitalist system or the socialist system.
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Oh, that's a fun twist.
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After game idea.
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A question though about the inflation game.
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Like, what's legal here?
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Probably that in, I don't know.
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We even thought that one through.
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Yeah, after game idea.
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Procyclicality.
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We don't have to call the game that.
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Yeah, we're not going to call the game that.
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And what became very clear was that we knew very little about what might work for a new game.
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Do you think we brought something to the table here today that is useful?
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Absolutely.
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Yes.
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I mean, look, there's two ways the games are born.
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One is you come up with a gameplay mechanic you absolutely love and then you spend months and months and months trying to find the right theme that will sell properly.
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The other way is you start off with a really strong theme.
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Something that you know there's already an audience for and then you try to find the right game plan and mechanic to match with it.
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It feels like we've done neither here.
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We've just brought.
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We have you've planted the seeds for a path for the latter.
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Yes.
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And in fact, one of the 17 economic ideas seeds that we planted that day would eventually become the planet money game.
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Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
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I'm Kenny Malone.
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And I'm Erica Barris.
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Planet Money is making a game.
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We have a partner.
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We've got some e-con ideas.
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Now we need to figure out how to turn those ideas into a game.
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Today on the show, Episode 2, in our game series, we get to go behind the scenes to see what it takes to make a game, ideally one that is fun and also chock full of economics,
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but doesn't feel like e-con homework, which is perhaps a little harder than we appreciate it.
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By the end of this episode, you listeners will be able to play an early prototype of the planet money game.
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In fact, we need you to play it and help us perfect it.
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But first, the story of that game.
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Support for this podcast and the following message come from a mayor prize financial chief market strategist Anthony Sagglimbeni shares the importance of a goal-based investment strategy.
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You have to know where you're going, right? What's the goal? What's the destination?
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By identifying those goals, you can construct a well-diversified portfolio that hopefully helps meet those goals.
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For more information and important disclosures, visit ameraprise.com slash advice.
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A mayor prize financial cannot guarantee future financial results.
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Securities offered by a mayor prize financial services LLC, member of FINRA and SIPC.
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We noticed that some of the most popular board games out there are about economics.
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Think monopoly, settlers of Catan. So we thought we should make a game.
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And along the way learn about the economics of making a game.
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We want our planet money game to be nerdy, to teach people economics,
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and we want the game to be popular.
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Beloved the world over, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
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Millions even. Millions.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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And to sell all those games, the key is getting into stores like Walmart or Target.
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This is partly why we've partnered with Exploding kittens.
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They know how to make games, the kinds of games that sometimes get picked up by Big Box stores.
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But you know, let us not get ahead of ourselves.
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Step one here is, what even is the game going to be?
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Time for another meeting with Exploding kittens.
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So last time we talked to you, you were the very lucky recipient of 17 incredible economic concepts that we gave to you.
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Yeah.
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That again is Exploding kittens co-founder, Alon Lee.
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But there are a bunch of Exploding kittens folks on this call.
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It's been a few weeks. And we hadn't talked at all since our prolific pitch meeting.
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So we are curious just what happened immediately afterwards.
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What was the conversation that happened right after that?
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Oh, sure.
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So even when you pitch them to us, we were taking notes and we wrote down like, oh, maybe explore this and maybe explore that.
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And so that really quickly got us to like, all right, a lot of these are just not going to work.
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Like they're just, this feels like school.
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It's not going to be fun.
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What do what do we do?
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Yeah.
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However, Alon and one of Exploding kittens is game designers Ian Clayman.
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Tell us that one of our ideas in particular had sparked something special.
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So what was the idea that kind of fit?
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Yeah.
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So the one that we really got excited about was the market for lemons idea.
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Market for lemons.
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Classic.
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Woohoo.
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The market for lemons is an economics paper from the 1970s by Nobel Prize winning economist George Ackerloff.
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He's also famous because he's the husband of the former Fed head and secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.
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And in a nutshell, the market for lemons paper is about the market for used cars and the problems created from what's known as asymmetric information.
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In this case, there is unequal information between sellers and buyers of used cars.
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Right.
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A used car seller knows everything that is wrong with their used car, but the buyers do not.
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And that is a problem.
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But the reason it's a famous paper is because it shows how this ultimately becomes a problem for both the buyers and the sellers in the end.
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What happens is you'll have some dishonest sellers who hide what's wrong with their used cars.
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Eventually, buyers will assume all sellers are dishonest and all used cars are crappy cars.
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And so the buyers will only offer crappy car prices.
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Which then in turn means that the honest sellers who actually do have good cars won't bother trying to sell their cars at all.
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And so we end up with this like spiral where nothing's left in the market, but lemons.
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Just bad crappy used cars.
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The market for lemons is an example of how asymmetric information can destroy a market.
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It can literally lead to market failure.
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And it's not just a problem for used cars.
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Asymmetric information can be an issue in the health insurance market or when a company is trying to hire new employees.
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And exploding kittens like the idea, they light the market for lemons.
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Is it just because the branding is so good?
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Like it is one of the best names of an actual economics paper ever.
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The name was compelling, but also the play pattern of two people trying to make a deal where one person has more information than the other is a pretty well established gameplay pattern.
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Which could be good or could be, you know, wrote at this point. I guess it could go either way.
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Well, understood, but I would say like not overused.
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Exploding kittens had been playing around with some ideas inspired by market for lemons.
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And co-founder Alon Lee was very excited because they had discovered what they thought could be the core part of what could become the planet money game.
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In fact, Alon says they were recording the exact moment that this discovery happened.
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No, it was really like just that is a very rare moment to catch on tape.
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And I kept like staring over at the camera thinking, oh God, please still be recording. Please, please, please.
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We really accidentally captured lightning in a bottle.
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100% yes.
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Yeah.
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Go, go look at the tapes.
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And so we present to you those tapes.
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All right.
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Go for it.
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Okay.
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So we started off by calling it.
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We see exploding kittens in the dining room of a house they'd fronted for a retreat.
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The dining table is covered in game designer accoutrements.
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Yeah, blank playing cards, Sharpie markers, existing games that can be used for parts.
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There are four people around this table, including Alon.
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And they're playing around with some idea that's like, I don't know, what if there's one car seller and everyone else is a car buyer?
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Except there's no car per se.
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There's just four homemade cards that tell the seller whether they have a good car or a lemon.
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That's fun.
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I mean, I did like the asymmetric information there of just like you and I were like, oh, it's a good car.
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And you guys were like, oh, it's bad car.
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But it's just not working.
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They seem to agree.
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Interesting.
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Not fun yet.
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Yeah, but interesting.
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Yeah, maybe we'll be able to review it.
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They take a break to maybe let some new ideas per clay.
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Now, what's important to know about these recordings is that exploding kittens is not testing a game at all.
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Their cards don't have fancy art.
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They're not playing full rounds.
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What they are testing are different game mechanics, the most basic atomic level building block of a game.
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It's the loop that players will do over and over.
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And if the game mechanic is not sparking, there is no game.
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All right.
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What were you saying?
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Yes.
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Stuff.
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The thing that...
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The third of exploding kittens reconvene and this, we are told, is where the magical planet money game moment is caught on team.
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We see co-founder Ilan Lee is now pacing around the room sort of conducting the teams.
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Let's see if we have a deck.
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Someones runs and grabs a deck of playing cards.
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Red cards, bad black cards, bad shirt.
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Yeah, red cards, bad black cards, good, like whatever.
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They're making this up as they go.
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And what they come up with is the following.
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So, okay, well, there's still a seller and that person is going to start by drawing two cards and secretly looking at them.
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And they're going to see that those two cards are either both good or both bad or one is good and one is bad.
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Those are the only three options.
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Then the seller proposes a deal to another player.
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They buyer.
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Like, I want to keep this card and I want you to take this other card.
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Now, the buyer does not get to see those cards.
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They simply have to decide.
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Do they accept this deal or do they reverse it?
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Like, no, no, no.
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You take this card and I want your card.
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And to be clear, the seller doesn't have to offer one card.
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They could offer both cards or no cards.
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It's a little convoluted to explain.
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But it really is a surprisingly basic mechanic.
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But deal or no deal is the seller bluffing or not.
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Yeah, this isn't a flush out thing yet.
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This is trying to see if there's enough social manipulation.
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You need to be interested.
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Yeah.
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And here is the moment exploding kittens was so excited to show us.
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So it happens literally the first time they try this new game mechanics.
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Okay, so the first seller is in.
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He reaches for the playing cards.
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Try us to remember the rules.
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So black is good red.
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That's bad.
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Okay.
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Two.
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He draws two cards.
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He looks at them.
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Looks across the table at his buyer.
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Looks back at his cards.
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Looks at the buyer back to the cards.
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He sort of tilts his head and looks puzzled.
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Almost as if to say, oh, wait, what is the strategy here?
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Alon is watching him and he is delighted.
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Ah!
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Yeah, already interesting.
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Okay, no, what are you doing?
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Ian chooses to split up the two cards.
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He puts one card in front of himself, one in front of his buyer.
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Now it's the buyer's decision.
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Should he reverse the deal?
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No, he keeps it.
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They both flip over their cards.
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Wow.
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Yep, yep.
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Some not radio friendly words about how this all played out.
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Because it turns out both cards were bad cards.
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And Alon is watching all of this fascinated because it has revealed that this mechanic
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is maybe more strategically complex than he thought.
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Ian had essentially chosen to eat one bad card in order to avoid the risk of ending up with two bad cards.
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You split those because you didn't want to take all the risks.
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Okay, I want to take all the risks.
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They run another round to test the mechanic again.
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We're switching cards.
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Ah!
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All right.
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And again.
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F***ing it.
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And again.
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No, keep it.
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No, f***ing it.
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No way.
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Three times.
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I mean, it is so basic.
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So basic.
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But also so clear that it has brought the room to life.
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Yeah, let's not put it in the ass of all the competition.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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So something is happening here, which I like.
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Yep.
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And it's a really good six out of 10 for writing.
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And so that.
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Alon was explaining to us in our Zoom meeting is what a game design breakthrough looks like
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for exploding kittens.
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It started to suddenly work and work really well.
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I noticed that you could sort of graph the intellectual curiosity like, mm-hmm.
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I guess there's something interesting here.
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And then suddenly you're yelling more and saying F word more to each other.
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Yeah.
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Is that.
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I've never tried to plot that out on a graph, but I hope that there is a really nice correlation
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there.
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You've just discovered.
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They were so excited.
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And we were excited that they were excited.
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But how to put this.
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We did not appreciate the simple elegance of the game mechanic.
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That's a nice way to put it.
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No, we were like, that's all like a bluffing game.
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And in our defense, here's what we were thinking at the time.
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We did know this was the earliest stage of development.
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But whatever this was needed to be the seed for the planet money game.
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Yeah.
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Shouldn't it literally teach people the big economic ideas behind the market for lemons?
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Like show players how asymmetric information can destroy a market.
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And what exploding kittens had showed us was like fun looking.
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But it did just look like dealer no deal lying or not lying.
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Like that was the mechanic.
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And so we gently tried to offer this feedback.
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And then a one gently managed our existential crisis and reassured us that he has made a gazillion games.
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We want a game that an economist will pick up and say, oh, this is the greatest game.
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Yeah.
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A high school class can play it.
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And it's like almost like a substitute for reading the paper market for lemons.
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But also like a 10 year old can play it.
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Yeah.
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That is the version we want.
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I love the challenge.
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I think we are certainly not there yet.
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I mean, is it going to be smart?
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Can we make it smart enough so that we can say, here's the economics concept.
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It's hidden there, but it's demonstrating this thing.
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I do.
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Yeah. Well, here's the beauty of this.
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We got a really good game.
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It has a rough outline of this economic principle.
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And now we need to figure out how you can walk away from the game with that delightful sense of nerdiness where you think like,
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oh, you fooled me into learning something.
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But I didn't even realize it at the time.
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And now that I do, that was really cool.
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Like if we can get there with this, will be in a good place.
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And it's better to start with a really fun game and try to get there rather than vice versa, which is a much harder task.
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Basically, a lawn and the exploding kittens crew are like, trust us.
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We have an economic idea from you.
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And we have the beginning of a good game mechanic.
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And in this industry, a good game mechanic, it's rare.
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It's like discovering a new way to power a game.
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It is incredibly hard to come up with.
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And we have that.
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The rest will fall into place.
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And thus began a month's long process of so much prototyping.
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Our friends who wants to learn how to play the Planet Money Board game draft one.
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Exploding kittens would send a prototype.
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And in each draft, they're sending over more than just a game mechanic.
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They're sending handmade cards, usually just repurposed exploding kittens cards.
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And they're sending instructions.
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Your goal is to make deals with other players,
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to collect the good cards and avoid the bad cards.
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The first player with five good cards wins.
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And for each of these drafts,
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Elon seems to also be making like a million tweaks,
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running tests, and apparently keeping audio journals this whole time.
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Okay, we just ran another test of the Planet Money Game.
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And it was good, but not great.
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Okay, so the test last night was interesting.
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The mechanic is so good.
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Okay, just had a great test.
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I need to make some changes.
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Listening to Elon talk to, I guess, Elon in these recordings,
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did perhaps begin to give us more of an appreciation
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for the art of what he's doing.
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Yeah, clearly turning a game mechanic into something that is a game
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comes with all these questions.
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Like, what is the optimal number of good cards versus bad cards?
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The deck was completely unbalanced.
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Would it be more fun if there were super power cards?
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Let you do special things?
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Didn't really work.
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Somewhere overpowered, somewhere underpowered, things like that.
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Okay, maybe tweak the superpowers.
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Make a whole new card.
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Just gonna make six of those, now I think that...
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Wait, uh-oh, are there still enough bad cards in the deck to cause chaos, though?
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Oh shoot, I think only one player can get knocked out of the game.
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Oh wait, it is never ending.
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The version where everyone was getting bored in between turns,
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so Elon tried giving everyone 16 cards in their hands,
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so they did have something to look at.
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So they're not bored.
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That's great.
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But there's just massive decision paralysis.
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Then there was the version where the game took no time at all to finish.
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Like average a game play was like four minutes, and ideally it would be closer to 20.
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So meanwhile, whenever we would see one of these prototypes of the games,
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we were still a little worried to be honest.
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Super power cards, 16 card hands fine,
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but like when is this going to be a game where players live out the experience
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of being inside the market for lemons?
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We would go back to exploding kittens with this, like throwing spaghetti at the wall approach.
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Like what if we introduced monopoly money?
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What if people are constantly bidding or trading?
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What if the rulebook is 15 pages long?
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And exploding kittens was very patient with our flying spaghetti feedback.
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Sometimes they would make tweaks, and sometimes they would have very valuable lessons for us
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on why our suggestions may not fit into the hyper competitive low margin world of game manufacturing.
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So for example, we asked them,
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what the game have more heft if it took a little longer to play, like more than 20 minutes.
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We'd say the sweet spot for us in general is really to try to hit a 20 minute game, maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
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But if we can get maximum entertainment satisfaction, that beautiful sense of mastery start to finish in 20 minutes,
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we know we have a hit on our hands.
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Okay. Why why not go longer?
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That's our executive producer Alex Goldmark.
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Why not go longer? Why is that the special amount?
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You so you want players to be able to go longer?
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You don't want the game to force them to go longer.
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The story of exploding kittens is exactly this.
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We optimize that game to be exactly 20 minutes, almost every time you play.
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Huh. Okay. Another interesting business lesson came for us when we suggested that it was sort of hard
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during one of the prototypes to keep track of who was close to winning, who was close to losing.
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So how fun would it be if there were colorful plastic coins to keep track of all the points, eh?
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The exploding kitten team, like the idea, but Kelly Volpillac, VP of Creative Operations told us,
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we are aiming for a planet money game made entirely of paper.
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So it's not a no on coins, but it's way better if they're not plastic.
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So paper is the cheapest.
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We love an all paper game because that means if we charge $20, we can make them money.
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Cardboard is paper. Yes. Okay.
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Hard stock, the box. We would even consider that paper.
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Okay. So okay, exploding kittens tells us they could add paper or card stock or cardboard coins.
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That's what everyone wanted to do. But yes, mixing materials like having plastic coins would drive up manufacturing costs.
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It might require multiple factories and to sell the game in a store like Target or Walmart,
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we want to keep the price to $20 to $25. So we have to keep costs down and keep it to paper if we want to make a profit.
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Anything you'd get from a tree, you can consider that paper. Okay.
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So off go the exploding kittens to make even more changes.
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And as we saw prototype after prototype, it did start to dawn on us how terrible our idea had been to try and push our game towards a full on simulation of a market for lemons.
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Because you know, the beautiful lesson in that paper isn't just about the challenges when a seller has more information than a buyer.
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It's about how that asymmetry can cause a market to grind to a halt.
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So did we really want a game that ground to a halt in order to teach an economics lesson?
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I mean, honestly, kind of, but we were also beginning to see why that might not have a broadly popular appeal.
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So, okay, but even if the game wasn't going to recreate a market for lemon style collapse, could the game mechanic at least get closer to nailing the feeling of real world asymmetric information correctly?
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Yeah, because remember the game mechanic. You've got a seller who looks at their cards, offers a deal, and then a buyer who just decides without any information whether the deal is good or not.
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That's just a game about bluffing where one person has zero information and the other has all the information.
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But when someone is buying a used car, they can see the car, they get some information, and that's fun.
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It's a more complex, messy version of asymmetric information. We need something that gets closer to that.
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And then exploding kittens sent us a new version with this one key change.
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All right, here we go. Plan a money game, take the 117.
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This is a video of Alon explaining the new game version to his team.
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All right, so let's go over what we just changed.
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Okay, so hopefully the game in general will go much faster.
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And what was this revolutionary change? Well, Alon explains, you're still going to have a seller, they're still going to look at cards, they're still going to offer a deal.
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But this time, yes, the seller now shows one of the cards in the deal.
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Everyone gets to see it. That's it. That's the big change.
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I know it doesn't sound like much, but suddenly instead of the game just being about bluffing, the buyer now has some information.
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Just like the economic dynamic that exists in the used car market.
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And really, honestly, out of nowhere, it did feel more like an economics game.
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We went back to exploding kittens one last time.
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I think the top line note here is we had a lot of fun playing the planet money board game.
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Should we just say it? It was great. It was a lot of fun.
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I love to hear this. This is a milestone. I think this is it. I think we have a game. I think we've got a game.
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I love this. I love this.
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I mean, it was a prototype of a game with handwritten cards and rules that still need a tweaking, but it was clearly a rough draft of a planet money game.
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And we liked it.
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But the real test is to bring it to the taste makers who can get these games into the targets and wall marks of the world.
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That is after the brain.
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Once we had a version of the game that we were happy with, we wanted to bring it to one person in particular.
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How many games have you played in your life at this point?
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Oh, my goodness.
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Over under a thousand.
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Oh, over. Really?
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Yeah, definitely over.
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This is Jamie Willansky.
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She's a game consultant. Her job is to get games into big box stores.
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She is in fact the one who first got settlers of Catan into target, exploding kittens often hires her to pitch their games to the big box stores.
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Ultimately, she is going to know whether this very rudimentary prototype of ours has a chance to achieve one of our wildest dreams, getting the planet money game onto real shelves at real retail stores.
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I mean, this was a huge moment for us.
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Like she was going to play a prototype of the game and render judgment.
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All right.
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So let's actually do the four of us playing.
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So here's the scene.
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We're in a hotel lobby with the exploding kittens crew and Jamie the head of game development for Ritz.
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He runs through the instructions.
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So I'm going to deal everyone five cards.
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We're all crowded around a couple of high top tables.
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Jamie is in fact sitting just to my left.
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Well, I have one too many. I have six.
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Yeah.
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I guess the more in the beautiful artwork on these cards.
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That voice is Carly McGinnis, president of exploding kittens.
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She's being sarcastic here because they are literally just homemade cards.
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There are red cards. They're bad.
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And green ones, they're good.
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Avoid the red ones. Collect enough green ones.
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And you win.
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And of course the way you collect cards is through our deal making game mechanic.
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The game begins.
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Carly, you're going to make it all for Jamie.
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You're going to pick three cards.
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You've got five in your hand.
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So Carly, the seller takes three cards from her hand.
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She places one of them in front of Jamie the buyer.
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Carly, the seller is essentially saying,
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I want you Jamie to take this one card.
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And I want to keep these other two cards.
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But don't forget, we now have that key information asymmetry tweak to our mechanic.
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All that Carly has to do is reveal one of her cards.
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Carly, the seller, chooses to reveal the one card she is offering Jamie the buyer.
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It is a green number two, a good card.
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So now Jamie, you know something about the deal that she just offered you.
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It looks pretty good, right?
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Sure does.
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And now it is all up to Jamie to decide.
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Take the deal or reverse it.
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Does she take the sure thing?
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The green two?
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Where does she reverse the deal in hopes that Carly was hiding something even better
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in the two cards that are still face down in front of Carly the seller?
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You don't know anything about this pile.
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Yeah.
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But this pile, you know, at least has two.
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Yeah, I'll take that pile.
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Okay.
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Now you have to show us.
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What is it?
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I knew it.
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I knew it.
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Yeah, Carly was hiding a much better card.
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I never trust Carly.
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Carly thought you.
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I knew it.
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I also got a red card.
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Jamie should have risked it and reversed the deal.
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So I'm watching this first round.
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Jamie seems into it.
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So I turned to her and I asked her, do you love the plan of any game yet?
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Not yet.
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Okay.
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Does it help to know that it is inspired by a Nobel Prize winning paper about the asymmetry of information in the used car market by Janet Yellen's husband?
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I don't know anything you just said.
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We keep playing the game and Jamie starts dropping these hints that seem like a good sign.
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I love a game that has your strategy changes with every single turn.
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Do you feel like that's happening?
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Yeah.
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At one point, between rounds, Jamie tells us what in general she looks for in a game that will work on Big Box shelves.
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The hallmark of great selling games when you know it's a great game is when you can't stop thinking about it at night when you're going to bed and you're like,
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God damn it.
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I really want to play that game again.
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This game went on and got more heated.
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People became more invested as they got closer to getting enough points to win.
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And eventually, all four of us playing could have won.
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And I'll be honest, I had been leading and I thought I was going to win.
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We're all one chip away from winning.
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Yes!
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Oh my god!
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I won you guys!
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I'm gonna keep it.
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That's insane.
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I am here to tell you that the underdog won.
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Jamie won in the glow of her victory aftermath.
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We asked her.
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What she thought?
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Be real.
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You're making a very excited face.
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Okay.
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Here's what I am excited about.
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I am constantly on the lookout for a new game mechanic that no one else has ever done.
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And there is not a game out there that I can equate this to.
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So to me, gamers are going to be excited about playing a new concept.
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And it's also mass-friendly enough that Mastery Taylor and casual gamers will pick it up and have a glass playing it.
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I mean, we did it.
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We've got the Planet Money Game.
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Okay, well hold on.
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We've got one homemade copy of a game.
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And yes, we have been calling it the Planet Money Game.
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The most critical thing at this point is naming it.
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Really?
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Yeah, the name, the title, because a bad title will just absolutely sink a really great game.
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Okay fine.
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Title, TPD, workshop, amongst other things to figure out.
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And then I would also say the artwork, the aesthetic of what can appeal to the masses and picking the right theme is going to be critical to making it work.
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All right.
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Well, this is promising.
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So just as long as we don't mess up the name and the pictures, we can name the drawings, the naming.
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That's also if we're going to get to in some future episodes.
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But our game still has kinks to work out, which is why we have a big, big, big announcement.
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Sound, the taboo buzzer ring, the operation bell, the Planet Money Game prototype is available for download starting right this instant.
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Because listeners are beloved intelligent audience.
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We do need you to help us conduct the largest prototype playtest.
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I don't know, maybe ever perhaps.
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Now this is our troubleshooting phase, our debugging period.
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We have about a month to do this.
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So this is your assignment.
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Put a game night on the calendar and download the principal prototype of our game.
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The link to that is going to be in the podcast show notes, but it is also just planetmoneygame.com.
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PlanetMoneyGame.com.
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It's going to require little arts and crafts work printing, cutting out cards.
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But I know you industrious lot can handle that, I trust.
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At that link, you'll find instructions for how to play the game and how to send us feedback.
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Plus, you'll be able to sign up for our big group play along.
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Slash, ask us anything happening on Saturday, November 1st.
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Saturday, November 1st.
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I'll be there.
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Erica will be there.
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Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploding Kittens, will be there.
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We would love to see you.
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Also, we should say, Elan truly does not stop tinkering with these games.
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And so, the version that you will download and make at home is slightly different that the version we've been talking about.
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But all of this will be explained at planetmoneygame.com.
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This is just the beginning.
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Please stay tuned for updates and let the wild world of asymmetric information be your guide.
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This episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peasley.
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It was edited by Jess Zhang, fact-checked by Sierra Huatta's and engineered by Sina LaFredo.
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Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
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I'm Kenny Malone.
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I'm Erica Barris.
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This is NPR.
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Thanks for listening.