--:-- Kenny Malone: This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder.
--:-- Mary Childs: Hey, it's Mary Childs. This first week of October is historic. It is the first time in over half a century that NPR and its member stations are operating without any federal support. It may feel uncertain, but here's what is certain. Public media endures. Independent, resilient, people-powered. Whatever the moment, you will still find us here telling stories that matter. This is Planet Money from NPR.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Previously on Planet Money. We are making a board game. Tabletop games is actually the largest category on Kickstarter. Get out of here. Yeah, it is. If you make games, there has never been more competition.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This is Orbeo. This is Masterpiece. This is Cargard. We need help. A partner. Welcome to the Exploding Kittens office. Our basic question here is, can we make a board game and where do we start?
--:-- Elan Lee: I think what the next step here is we do some homework and you do some homework. Your homework is give us three themes that are interesting to you. I'm curious to see what you come back with.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So we talked roughly what, two weeks ago, three weeks ago? Yeah, somewhere in there.
--:-- Elan Lee: That is the voice of Elan Lee, game designer and co-founder of the Exploding Kittens Game Company.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Because we are making a board game. We are partnering with Exploding Kittens and we've got big dreams. To make the kind of game that anyone would want to play. To make a game that has big economic ideas baked into it. And Exploding Kittens had given us an assignment. We bring them some economic concepts and themes. They see if any of that might have promise for a real game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, we took the assignment very seriously. We had a full staff meeting where we went deep. We went nerdy. And I believe you had told us to come back with about three ideas. We've got 17.
--:-- Elan Lee: Oh, this is going to be a fun project.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay. Now, were all of these 17 ideas, like, obviously going to be Monopoly killers? You know, displace America's most popular games?
--:-- Elan Lee: Well, who can say?
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so we began to pitch. Think about this. There are elves. They live forever, but they have to plan for retirement. What do they do? What does that even mean?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay. All right. Next idea. Apprentice wizards running a bank. So they have the power to create money, but they're apprentices, so it always backfires. They mess it up.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay. You don't have to respond to everyone. You can let them settle in. I'm letting that one settle.
--:-- Elan Lee: Okay, they weren't all home runs, but some of her ideas did seem to be getting a decent response. Like when we pitched a game inspired by compound interest, the idea that a small investment can snowball into something massive with enough time.
--:-- Kenny Malone: You ever play Risk? Yes. You just described the mechanic by which armies are built in Risk, which is great. I mean, really, really nice shoulders to stand on there.
--:-- Elan Lee: So I would call that half of an idea.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We also pitched a game called Moral Hazard, where you have to decide which failing banks to bail out. But you may be hurting your future self by teaching those banks that you're going to clean up their mistakes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: What you just said, your future self. Like, there is an interesting game concept I've never seen before where you have two players, you and your future self.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We pitched a game called Keeping Up With The Joneses, where you buy things like a boat to make everyone around you jealous. Just to learn, oh no, having this boat card is costing me so much and making me miserable.
--:-- Elan Lee: Here's why I hate this idea. Let me start there. I think what you have just described is a game with no replay value. Once you understand the properties associated with each card, with each item, I don't think you're going to be able to find that same delight when you go through that game again.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We pitched game idea after game idea. It's the same game, and you don't know if you're playing within the capitalist system or the socialist system.
--:-- Elan Lee: Oh, that's a fun twist.
--:-- Kenny Malone: After Game Idea. I have a question, though, about the inflation game. Like, what's the goal here? Probably that, uh, I don't know.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We haven't thought that one through. Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: After Game Idea. Pro-cyclicality. We don't have to call the game that. Yeah, we're not going to call the game that.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And what became very clear was that we knew very little about what might work for a new game.
--:-- Elan Lee: Do you think we brought something to the table here today that is useful?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Absolutely, yes. I mean, look, there's two ways that games are born. 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And the other way is you start off with a really strong theme, something that you know there's already an audience for, and then you try to find the right gameplay mechanic to match with it.
--:-- Elan Lee: Feels like we've done neither here. We've just brought... You've planted the seeds for a path for the latter.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yes. And in fact, one of the 17 economic idea seeds that we planted that day would eventually become the Planet Money game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Erica Barris. Planet Money is making a game. We have a partner. We've got some econ ideas. Now we need to figure out how to turn those ideas into a game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Ideally one that is fun and also chock full of economics, but doesn't feel like econ homework, which is perhaps a little harder than we appreciated.
--:-- Kenny Malone: By the end of this episode, you listeners will be able to play an early prototype of the Planet Money game. In fact, we need you to play it and help us perfect it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But first, the story of that game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Support for this podcast and the following message come from Ameriprise Financial. Chief Market Strategist Anthony Saglin-Bennie shares the importance of a goal-based investment strategy.
--:-- Anthony Saglin-Bennie: You have to know where you're going, right? What's the goal? What's the destination?
--:-- Kenny Malone: By identifying those goals, you can construct a well-diversified portfolio that hopefully helps meet those goals.
--:-- Kenny Malone: For more information and important disclosures, visit Ameriprise.com slash advice.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Ameriprise Financial cannot guarantee future financial results. Securities offered by Ameriprise Financial Services, LLC, member FINRA, and SIPC.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We noticed that some of the most popular board games out there are about economics. Think Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. So we thought we should make a game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And along the way, learn about the economics of making a game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We want our Planet Money game to be nerdy, to teach people economics. And we want the game to be popular, beloved the world over, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Millions even. Millions.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah. Yeah. And to sell all those games, the key is getting into stores like Walmart or Target.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This is partly why we've partnered with Exploding Kittens. They know how to make games, the kinds of games that sometimes get picked up by big box stores.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But, you know, let us not get ahead of ourselves. Step one here is what even is the game going to be? Time for another meeting with Exploding Kittens.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So last time we talked to you, you were the very lucky recipient of 17 incredible economic concepts that we gave to you.
--:-- Kenny Malone: That, again, is Exploding Kittens co-founder, Alon Lee. But there are a bunch of Exploding Kittens folks on this call.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So we are curious just what happened immediately afterwards? What was the conversation that happened right after that?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Oh, sure. So even when you pitch them to us, we were taking notes and we wrote down like, oh, maybe explore this, maybe explore that.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so that pretty quickly got us to like, all right, a lot of these are just not going to work. Like they're just, this feels like school. It's not going to be fun.
--:-- Kenny Malone: What do we do? Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: However, Ilan and one of Exploding Kittens's game designers, Ian Clayman, tell us that one of our ideas in particular had sparked something special.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So what was the idea that kind of fit? Yeah. So the one that we really got excited about was the Market for Lemons idea.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Market for Lemons. Classic. Woohoo.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The Market for Lemons is an economics paper from the 1970s by Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He's also famous because he's the husband of the former Fed head and secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: In this case, there is unequal information between sellers and buyers of used cars.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Right A used car seller knows everything that is wrong with their used car but the buyers do not
--:-- Kenny Malone: And that is a problem
--:-- Kenny Malone: But the reason it a famous paper is because it shows how this ultimately becomes a problem for both the buyers and the sellers in the end
--:-- Kenny Malone: What happens is you'll have some dishonest sellers who hide what's wrong with their used cars.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Eventually, buyers will assume all sellers are dishonest and all used cars are crappy cars.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so the buyers will only offer crappy car prices.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so we end up with this like spiral where nothing's left in the market but lemons.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Just bad, crappy used cars.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The market for lemons is an example of how asymmetric information can destroy a market.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It can literally lead to market failure.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And it's not just a problem for used cars.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Asymmetric information can be an issue in the health insurance market or when a company is trying to hire new employees.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And Exploding Kittens liked the idea.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They liked the market for lemons.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Is it just because the branding is so good? Like it is one of the best names of an actual economics paper ever.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Which could be good or could be, you know, rote at this point.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Well, understood, but I would say like not overused.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Exploding Kittens had been playing around with some ideas inspired by Market for Lemons, and co-founder Elon Lee was very excited because they had discovered what they thought could be the core part of what could become the Planet Money game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: In fact, Elon says, they were recording the exact moment that this discovery happened.
--:-- Kenny Malone: No, it was really like just That is a very rare moment to catch on tape.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And I kept, like, staring over at the camera thinking, oh, God, please, they'll be recording. Please, please, please, please, please.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah. We really accidentally captured lightning in a bottle. 100%, yes. Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Go look at the tapes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right. Go for it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So we started off by talking. We see exploding kittens in the dining room of a house they'd fronted for a retreat.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The dining table is covered in game designer accoutrement. Yeah, blank playing cards and Sharpie markers.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Existing games that can be used for parts.
--:-- Kenny Malone: There are four people around this table, including Elan, 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?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Except there's no car per se. There's just four homemade cards that tell the seller whether they have a good car or a lemon.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I mean, I did like the asymmetric information there of just like you and I were like, oh, it's a good car. And you guys were like, oh, it's a bad car. But it's just not working, they seem to agree.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Interesting. Not fun yet, but interesting.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They take a break to maybe let some new ideas percolate.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Now, what's important to know about these recordings is that Exploding Kittens is not testing a game at all.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Their cards don't have fancy art. They're not playing full rounds.
--:-- Kenny Malone: What they are testing are different game mechanics, the most basic atomic level building block of a game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It's the loop that players will do over and over.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And if the game mechanic is not sparking, there is no game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right, what were you saying? Yes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So the thing that... The herd of exploding kittens reconvene.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And this, we are told, is where the magical Planet Money game moment is caught on tape.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We see co-founder Elon Lee is now pacing around the room, sort of conducting the team.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Let's see if we had a deck with good cards and bad cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Someone runs and grabs a deck of playing cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Red card's bad, black card's good? Sure.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah, red card's bad, black card's good, like whatever.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They're making this up as they go.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And what they come up with is the following.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, okay, there's still a seller. And that person is going to start by drawing two cards and secretly looking at them.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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. Those are the only three options.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Then the seller proposes a deal to another player, the buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Like, I want to keep this card and I want you to take this other card.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Now, the buyer does not get to see those cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They simply have to decide, do they accept this deal or do they reverse it? Like, no, no, no, you take this card and I want your card.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And to be clear, the seller doesn't have to offer one card.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They could offer both cards or no cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It's a little convoluted to explain.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But it really is a surprisingly basic mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Like deal or no deal, is the seller bluffing or not? Yeah, this isn't a fleshed out thing yet.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This is trying to see if there's enough social manipulation here to be interesting. Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And here is the moment Exploding Kittens was so excited to show us.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It happens literally the first time they try this new game mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, so the first seller is in.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He reaches for the playing cards, tries to remember the rules.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Black is good. Red is bad. Okay. Two. He draws two cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He looks at them. Looks across the table at his buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Looks back at his cards. looks at the buyer back to the cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He sort of tilts his head and looks puzzled, almost as if to say, oh, wait, what is the strategy here?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Alon is watching him, and he is delighted. Already interesting. Okay, what are you doing?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Ian chooses to split up the two cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He puts one card in front of himself, one in front of his buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Now it's the buyer's decision. Should he reverse the deal? No, he keeps it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They both flip over their cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right. Wow. Yes, some not radio-friendly words about how this all played out.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Because it turns out both cards were bad cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And Ilan is watching all of this fascinated because it has revealed that this mechanic is maybe more strategically complex than he thought.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Ian had essentially chosen to eat one bad card in order to avoid the risk of ending up with two bad cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: You split those because you didn't want to take all the rest. Okay, I want to take all the rest.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They run another round to test the mechanic again.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We're switching cards. Oh, all right. And again. And again. Keep it. Ah, f***. Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: There's no way three times in a row. I mean, it is so basic. So basic, but also so clear that it has brought the room to life. Yeah, let's stop and have a little conversation. Yeah. All right.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So something is happening here, which I like. Yep. But it's like a six out of ten. Right.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so that, Lon was explaining to us in our Zoom meeting, is what a game design breakthrough looks like for exploding kittens.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It started to suddenly work and work really well.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I noticed that you could sort of graph the intellectual curiosity, like, I guess there's something interesting here.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And then suddenly you're yelling more and saying the F word more to each other.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I've never tried to plot that out on a graph, but I will bet there is a really nice correlation there you've just discovered.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They were so excited. And we were excited that they were excited.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But how how uh to put this uh we did not appreciate the simple elegance of the game mechanic that's a nice way to put it no we were like that's all like a bluffing game and uh in our defense here's what we were thinking at the time we did know this was the earliest stage of development but but whatever this was needed to be the seed for the planet money game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah. Shouldn't it literally teach people the big economic ideas behind the market for lemons? Like show players how asymmetric information can destroy a market.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And what Exploding Kittens had showed us was like fun looking, but it did just look like deal or no deal, lying or not lying. Like that was the mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And so we gently tried to offer this feedback.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And then Ilan gently managed our existential crisis and reassured us that he has made a gazillion games.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We want a game that an economist will pick up and say, oh, this is the greatest game. A high school class can play it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And it's like almost like a substitute for reading the paper market for lemons. But also like a 10 year old can play it. That is the version we want.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I love the challenge. I think we are certainly not there yet.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I mean, is it going to be smart? Can we make it smart enough so that we can say, here's the economics concept. It's hidden there, but it's demonstrating this thing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I do. Yeah.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Well, here's the beauty of this. We got a really good game. It has a rough outline of this economic principle.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And now we need to figure out how you can walk away from the game with that delightful whole sense of nerdiness where you think like, oh, you fooled me into learning something, but I didn't even realize it at the time.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And now that I do, that was really cool. Like, if we can get there with this, we'll be in a good place.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And it better to start with a really fun game and try to get there rather than vice versa which is a much harder task
--:-- Kenny Malone: Basically Elan and the Exploding Kittens crew are like trust us We have an economic idea from you and we have the beginning of a good game mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And in this industry, a good game mechanic, it's rare. It's like discovering a new way to power a game. It is incredibly hard to come up with.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And we have that. The rest will fall into place.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And thus began a months long process of so much prototyping.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right, friends, who wants to learn how to play the Planet Money board game draft one?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Exploding Kittens would send a prototype.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And in each draft, they're sending over more than just a game mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: They're sending handmade cards, usually just repurposed Exploding kittens cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And they're sending instructions.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Your goal is to make deals with other players to collect the good cards and avoid the bad cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The first player with five good cards wins.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And for each of these drafts, Elon seems to also be making like a million tweaks, running tests, and apparently keeping audio journals this whole time.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, we just ran another test of the planet money game, and it was good, but not great.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, so the test last night was interesting. The mechanic is still pretty solid.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, just had a great test. Need to make some changes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Listening to Elan talk to, I guess, Elan in these recordings, did perhaps begin to give us more of an appreciation for the art of what he's doing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah. Clearly turning a game mechanic into something that is a game comes with all these questions.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Like, what is the optimal number of good cards versus bad cards?
--:-- Kenny Malone: The deck was completely unbalanced.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Would it be more fun if there were superpower cards that let you do special things? Didn't really work.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Some were overpowered, some were underpowered.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, maybe tweak the superpowers. Make a whole new card.
--:-- Kenny Malone: There's going to be six of those now that I think about it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Wait, uh-oh. Are there still enough bad cards in the deck to cause chaos, though?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Oh, shoot. I think only one player can get knocked out of the game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Oh, wait. Yeah, it is never ending.
--:-- Kenny Malone: There was the version where everyone was getting bored in between turns, so Elan tried giving everyone 16 cards in their hands, so they did have something to look at.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So they're not bored. That's great.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But there's just massive decision paralysis.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Then there was the version where the game took no time at all to finish. Like, average gameplay was like four minutes, and ideally it would be closer to 20.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, meanwhile, whenever we would see one of these prototypes of the games, we were still a little worried, to be honest.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Superpower cards, 16-card hands, fine. But, like, when is this going to be a game where players live out the experience of being inside the market for lemons?
--:-- Kenny Malone: We would go back to Exploding Kittens with this, like throwing spaghetti at the wall approach.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Like, what if we introduced monopoly money? What if people are constantly bidding or trading? What if the rulebook is 15 pages long?
--:-- Kenny Malone: And Exploding Kittens was very patient with our flying spaghetti feedback.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Sometimes they would make tweaks and sometimes they would have very valuable lessons for us on why our suggestions may not fit into the hyper-competitive, low-margin world of game manufacturing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, for example, we asked them, would the game have more heft if it took a little longer to play, like more than 20 minutes?
--:-- Kenny Malone: I would say the sweet spot for us in general is really to try to hit a 20-minute game, maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But if we can get maximum entertainment, satisfaction, that beautiful sense of mastery start to finish in 20 minutes, we know we have a hit on our hands. Okay.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Why not go longer? That's our executive producer, Alex Goldmark. Why not go longer? Why is that the special amount?
--:-- Kenny Malone: So you want players to be able to go longer. You don't want the game to force them to go longer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The story of Exploding Kittens is exactly this. We optimize that game to be exactly 20 minutes almost every time you play.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Huh. Okay.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Another interesting business lesson came for us when we suggested that it was sort of hard during one of the prototypes to keep track of who was close to winning, who was close to losing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So how fun would it be if there were colorful plastic coins to keep track of all the points, eh?
--:-- Kenny Malone: The Exploding Kittens team liked the idea.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But Kelly Volpelak, VP of Creative Operations, told us, we are aiming for a planet money game made entirely of paper.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So it's not a no on coins, but it's way better if they're not plastic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So paper is the cheapest.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We love an all paper game because that means if we charge $20, we can make more money.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Cardboard is paper? Yes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay. Cardstock, the box, we would even consider that paper. Okay.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, okay, Exploding Kittens tells us they could add paper or cardstock or cardboard coins if that's what everyone wanted to do.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But yes, mixing materials like having plastic coins would drive up manufacturing costs.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It might require multiple factories.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And to sell the game in a store like Target or Walmart, we want to keep the price to $20 to $25.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So we have to keep costs down and keep it to paper if we want to make a profit.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Anything you get from a tree, you can consider that paper. Okay.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So off go the exploding kittens to make even more changes.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Because, you know, the beautiful lesson in that paper isn't just about the challenges when a seller has more information than a buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It's about how that asymmetry can cause a market to grind to a halt.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, did we really want a game that ground to a halt in order to teach an economics lesson?
--:-- Kenny Malone: I mean, honestly, kind of, but we were also beginning to see why that might not have a broadly popular appeal.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, okay. But even if the game wasn't going to recreate a Market for Lemons-style collapse, could the game mechanic at least get closer to nailing the feeling of real-world asymmetric information correctly?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Yeah, because remember the game mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: That's just a game about bluffing, where one person has zero information and the other has all the information.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But when someone is buying a used car, they can see the car. They get some information.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And that's fun. It's a more complex, messy version of asymmetric information.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We need something that gets closer to that.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And then Exploding Kittens sent us a new version with this one key change.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right, here we go. Planet Money game. Take 117.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This is a video of Elan explaining the new game version to his team.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right, so let's go over what we just changed.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Okay, so hopefully the game in general will go much faster.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And what was this revolutionary change?
--:-- Kenny Malone: Well, Elan 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But this time. I'm going to show you this one. Oh. Wait, wait, what are you doing?
--:-- Kenny Malone: So you keep your cards, but I'm not taking mine. Yes, the seller now shows one of the cards in the deal.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Everyone gets to see it. That's it. That's the big change.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I know, it doesn't sound like much. But suddenly, instead of the game just being about bluffing, the buyer now has some information. just like the economic dynamic that exists in the used car market.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And really, honestly, out of nowhere, it did feel more like an economics game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We went back to Exploding Kittens one last time.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I think the top line note here is we had a lot of fun playing the Planet Money board game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Should we just say it? It was great. I mean, it was a lot of fun. I love to hear this. This is a milestone. I think this is it. I think we have a game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I think we've got a game. I love this. I mean, it was a prototype of a game with handwritten cards and rules that still needed tweaking.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But it was clearly a rough draft of a Planet Money game.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And we liked it.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But the real test is to bring it to the tastemakers, who can get these games into the targets and Walmarts of the world.
--:-- Kenny Malone: That is After the Break.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This message comes from NPR sponsor FX, presenting The Lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Introducing you to Lee Raybon, a quirky journalist slash rare bookstore owner slash unofficial truth seeker who is always on the tail of his latest conspiracy.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This time, his most recent expose puts him head to head with a powerful family that rules Tulsa, meaning only one thing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: He must be on to something big.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This message comes from Apple Card.
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--:-- Kenny Malone: Once we had a version of the game that we were happy with, we wanted to bring it to one person in particular.
--:-- Kenny Malone: How many games have you played in your life at this point? Oh my goodness. Over, under a thousand. Oh, over. Really? Yes, definitely over.
--:-- Kenny Malone: This is Jamie Wolanski. She's a game consultant. Her job is to get games into big box stores.
--:-- Kenny Malone: She is, in fact, the one who first got Settlers of Catan into Target.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Exploding Kittens often hires her to pitch their games to the big box stores.
--:-- Kenny Malone: 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.
--:-- Kenny Malone: I mean, this was a huge moment for us. Like, she was going to play a prototype of the game and render judgment.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All right, so let's actually do the four of us playing.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, here's the scene. We're in a hotel lobby with the Exploding Kittens crew and Jamie.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The head of game development, Thor Ritz, he runs through the instructions.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So, I'm going to deal everyone five cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: We're all crowded around a couple of high-top tables.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Jamie is, in fact, sitting just to my left.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Oh, I have one too many. I have six.
--:-- Kenny Malone: That voice is Carly McGinnis, president of Exploding Kittens.
--:-- Kenny Malone: She's being sarcastic here because they are literally just homemade cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: There are red cards. They're bad. And green ones. They're good.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Avoid the red ones. Collect enough green ones and you win.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And of course, the way you collect cards is through our deal making game mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: The game begins.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Carly, you are going to make an offer to Jamie. You're going to pick three cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: You've got five in your hand. So Carly, the seller, takes three cards from her hand.
--:-- Kenny Malone: She places one of them in front of Jamie, the buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Carly, the seller, is essentially saying, I want you, Jamie, to take this one card, and I want to keep these other two cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: But don't forget, we now have that key information asymmetry tweak to our mechanic.
--:-- Kenny Malone: All that Carly has to do is reveal one of her cards.
--:-- Kenny Malone: Carly, the seller, chooses to reveal the one card she is offering Jamie, the buyer.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It is a green number two, a good card.
--:-- Kenny Malone: So now, Jamie, you know something about the deal that she just offered you.
--:-- Kenny Malone: It looks pretty good, right? Sure does.
--:-- Kenny Malone: And now it is all up to Jamie to decide. Take the deal or reverse it? Does she take the sure thing, the green two, or does she reverse the deal in hopes that Carly was hiding something even better in the two cards that are still face down in front of Carly the seller?
--:-- Kenny Malone: You don't know anything about this pile? Yeah. But this pile, you know, at least has two pretty green. I'll take the green pile. Okay. Now you have to show us. What is it? I knew it.
