Wild Ducks
The General Manager of Design made an offhand comment about needing a board game to play during our flagship training program’s lunch break. I volunteered to create it.
“Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species, alongside language, culture and technology”
- Dr. David Whitebread, The Importance of Play, 2012
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Sometime during the 8th iteration of IBMs new training program designed to teach product teams how to integrate human-centered practices into their next releases, the GM of Design said “We need a game.” The Studio Director immediately replied, “I know just the guy to design it for us.”
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The game would need to be simple enough to be taught and played in under 30 minutes, while reinforcing IBM’s Product Management Curriculum and commitment to design..
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Ten minutes of fast-paced, real-time gameplay that reinforces the importance of design and design research in the Product Release cycle, while giving players the opportunity to practice storyboarding, all in an expertly designed box.
First I established the following design principles;
The game would have to be taught and played in less than 45 minutes so it could be worked into one of our many training programs
It should reinforce our curriculum
It had to be fun. Not just work-game fun, but real fun.
With this in mind I started exploring a card-based game that would give IBM the most flexibility to teach Product Management and design concepts, and would be easy to quickly mass produce.
I came up with a concept that allowed people to play as a team that is trying to release and then improve an MVP product. The central mechanic would be similar to Pictionary, which would keep the teams in a creative mindset. In order to test this concept, I created very low fidelity prototypes, and met with a board game design “guild” weekly at the local IHOP to test and get feedback.
While I tested and refined the gameplay, I solicited help from IBM’s growing ranks of talented young visual designers to establish art direction options. In honor of the powerful impact these young designers were having at IBM, we named the game Wild Ducks, the moniker graduates of our new hire training program had given themselves.
I had decided on a novel game mechanic where a teams would compete against a 10 minute clock to release a new product, and improve it over multiple releases. The primary strategic decision would be how much to invest in design activities that would only pay off later. Teams that invested only in in development would expose themselves to risky “Snags”, or the possibility that the product wouldn’t meet their users’ needs and then fail in the market.
The final piece of the puzzle was, as my Distinguished Designer colleague Joni Saylor assured me, a beautiful box.
Here I am speaking about the game on a podcast devoted to educational games.
Impact
We had fun, working across visual design, industrial design, and game design disciplines to rapidly build something unique for IBM.
Thanks to the beautiful art and packaging, the game became the perfect gift for visiting client executives and further signalled that IBM was no longer just as a technological giant, but was also a dynamic design leader.
Eventually the demand for the game increased such that we had to repackage it in simple, cost-effective, burlap sacks. Rumor has it that there are a few copies of the game left, complete with the original packaging, somewhere in the Austin Studio.
