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Hey, You Sank My Plesiosaurus!
Five years ago, Joseph Steig’s eight-year-old son and Diane Kelly’s seven-year-old daughter frittered away a play date with Pokemon. “Joseph said to me offhand, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there were games that got kids as excited about the real world?’” Kelly recounts. “And I thought, hmm, there’s an interesting idea.” That’s how Zygote Games was conceived.
Since then the Massachusetts game company, with Steig as its business director, has launched Bone Wars, a card game centered around the cutthroat hunt for dinosaur fossils at the turn of the twentieth century. Parasites Unleashed, their second game, will be in stores this June. More ideas are in the pipeline, including one about chemistry and another about DNA coding.
Kelly, who became company scientific director, was quick to recruit her husband, science fiction writer James L. Cambias, as game architect. This brought their staff to three – a dedicated but part-time trio since they all have day jobs (Kelly is a research associate in the geology department at Amherst College). Like any good business they meet to weigh marketing strategies and successes, such as getting Bone Wars sold at FAO Schwartz. Then again, many of their get-togethers revolve around “breaking” game prototypes, industry-speak for playing games to see where the rules fall apart.
The games must not only play smoothly, they’ve got to teach science too. In that department, Zygote Games steers clear of those didactic science games that bored us all as kids. “The way we approach the education end of things is more along the lines of stealth education,” Kelly explains. For example, in Bone Wars the underlying rules are based on the scientific method: the iterative process of building your dinosaur skeleton is akin to testing a hypothesis over and over again.
Biology topics make for easy inspiration. “We want our games to be fun and competitive, and biology is naturally competitive,” says Kelly, who has a biology Ph.D. from Duke University. “There are winners and losers in biological systems.” Her dissertation was on the functional morphology of the reproductive system in male armadillos. “And no,” she adds, “that is not going to be the subject of one of our games anytime soon.”
You can purchase your own game of Bone Wars at Zygote Games’ website or visit FAO Schwartz. Zygote Games also runs Science Made Cool, a blog mostly about parasites and blimps.
