S2E02 - Gut Check (Microbiome) - Gaming with Science

Episode Transcript
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David (00:00):
Music.

Brian (00:06):
Hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast
where we talk about the sciencebehind some of your favorite
games.

Jason (00:12):
Today, we'll be talking about gut check published by
Qiagen. All right. Welcome back,everyone. This is Jason.

Brian (00:20):
This is Brian,

Jason (00:21):
and we have another special guest on today, Dr David
Coil. David, would you pleaseintroduce yourself?

David (00:26):
Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show.
My name is David Coil. Rightnow. I'm the program manager for
a National Science Foundationfunded center on pandemic
Insights, where we study what wecall the pre emergence phase of
pandemics, which is virusescirculating in animals that
might jump to people and causeproblems.

Brian (00:45):
Very cool. Maybe we should have had you on the other
game. We didn't know.

Jason (00:48):
Hey, we can't have everyone on the pandemic
episode. We have to spread themaround. I'm sure there will be
other disease related games wecan go over.

Brian (00:55):
Yeah, probably

Jason (00:56):
anyway. So David, we wanted to get on here. Because
not only is he an avid gamer andscientist, he's actually the
chief creator of gut check,which we're going to be going
over today.

Brian (01:07):
Yay.

Jason (01:08):
This is less going to be an interview. We mostly want to
talk the science, but we do wantto get some insights from you
about the making of the game,the things involved in that. But
mostly we want to talk aboutmicrobiome science before we get
to that, though, we would liketo start off with some cool
science fact. As our guests, wegive you the first choice. If
you have some cool science factyou've learned lately, you can
share it. Otherwise, I'm sureBrian has something to share.

David (01:28):
It's funny, I actually tried to think of something. But
in the spaces I work in, all ofmy science facts are depressing
for a fun I mean,

Brian (01:37):
we just did a paleontology game. And you know,
they always point out that thebest Paleontology is founded by
tragedy, so

David (01:45):
fair enough.

Brian (01:46):
Uh, well, I did find something. And maybe this is not
depressing, but possiblyentertaining. I usually try to
theme them. So this is themicrobiome of underarm odor.

Jason (01:57):
This sounds like it's heading for an ignobel

Brian (02:00):
No, not at all that you would be amazed at how many
studies there are. I don't know.I maybe you wouldn't. I'm not
sure. Okay, so underarm odor isnot produced by your underarm.
It is produced by the breakdownof things that come out of your
apocrine glands, by the microbesthat live in your underarm.
There is a dipeptide, so twoamino acids stuck onto a thiol

(02:22):
alcohol. It has some name that'squite complicated, so I'll stick
with thiol alcohol. Thiol meanssulfur, so a lot of stinky
compounds tend to have sulfur inthem. The alcohol, I assume,
just means it's very volatile,which means it's going to spread
through the air very easily.

Jason (02:36):
And now I see why you got this, because your whole thing
is stinky plant compounds allmade os sulfur

Brian (02:39):
Exactly! There's actually a deeper connection here. So I
study onions, garlic and thattype of defensive chemistry.
There is a very meaningfulconnection here. The compound
itself doesn't smell likeanything. It's odorless.
Supposedly, I found a couple ofthings that said it actually is
an antimicrobial in and ofitself that it can bind to
ureases and actually can killbacteria. So bacteria,

(03:01):
particularly Streptococcushominis, which as you can
imagine, it takes this namebecause it lives on people, will
take this compound up. It splitsoff those little amino acids,
presumably uses them as food,turns them into pyruvate, uses
in its primary metabolism. Andthen it's got a specific enzyme,
a carbon sulfur lyase, that willsplit off that sulfur thiol
alcohol, so that it's no longertoxic, which then gets exported

(03:23):
out of the cell and smells realbad. So this is the same type of
enzyme that gets, truly getsused by onions and garlic to
produce their defensivecompounds. So that's that's how
I learned about it. But yeah,same kind of deal. I did see
another paper where they figuredout things that could inhibit
that process, so that you don'tstink as badly.

Jason (03:42):
So this reminds me, I read a book all about sweat a
few years ago, and yes, that's aweird book to read, but it's one
of those like, let's take a aneveryday thing and look into the
science of it. It's actuallyquite fascinating. But the
author talked about, believe theauthor was a woman, she talked
with someone who wasinvestigating, essentially,
microbiome treatments, like skinmicrobiome treatments to change

(04:04):
your body odor so that you don'thave as bad body odor. There's
this whole story about this guywho picked up bad body odor from
his girlfriend and then tryingto treat that so that anyway,
there's this whole story. I'lllink it in the show notes if you
want to look up an entire bookabout sweat.

Brian (04:20):
You know, I do remember hearing a couple studies that
people tend to share theirmicrobiome that like people in a
single household. Yeah. Is thattrue?

David (04:26):
Yeah, no, no, for sure. And if we get into the topic of
fecal transplants, which is myfavorite topic of conversation,
doing it from someone in yourhousehold is useful for that
reason.

Brian (04:36):
We talked a lot about poop in our paleontology episode
too. It sounds like this isgoing to be a common running
theme, maybe this year,

David (04:42):
Microbiologists just love to talk about poop.

Jason (04:47):
All right, so let's get on into this game, then gut
check. So gut check is a littlebit of an unusual game. Most of
the games we go over, everyonewe have gone over so far is a
commercially published game.This one is not quite in that
space. This was a game that wasdesigned as almost an
educational outreach. You saidyou had a grant from the was it
Sloan Foundation to docommunication and outreach?

Brian (05:09):
Oh, that's very cool.

Jason (05:11):
I like first that you actually have a scientific paper
talking about the game. We did abonus episode on Publish or
perish. I like the way ofactually being able to turn a
game into a publication that youcan not perish by anyway. I like
how you talked in there the theproblem of making a an
educational game that isactually fun, because most of
them aren't. In fact, we'vetalked on this podcast before

(05:32):
about how the term educationalgame is almost a dirty word in
the gaming industry, because theidea is that if it's
educational, it can't be fun.And so this game was essentially
your goal to try to hit both ofthose the same time. So for
those of you haven't played it,which is actually going to be
quite a lot of you, because itis not commercially available.
It is, however, free to printand play. So it is Creative

(05:55):
Commons licensed. Go tomicrobe.net, you can download
it, print it off, play whateveryou want, which I imagine, is
how a lot of like teachers anduniversity classes are getting
traction on this. Now, it wasbriefly published by MoBio and
then Qiagen, but they decidednot to continue that.
Unfortunately, turns out, ifyou're in the business of
extracting DNA from cells, itdoesn't make much sense to
continue publishing a boardgame, much to our sadness.

Brian (06:16):
I was at the ASM micro meeting last year and they had
copies of gut check. It's like,Oh, that's really cool.

David (06:21):
They still have it. They still have it, and they give it
out as prizes at conference andthings like that. So it's
available through QIAGEN, butyou can't order it. You have to
earn it or win it, or convincesomeone to give it to you,

Brian (06:33):
which I wish I had taken the time to go to the Qiagen
booth and convince them to giveit to me, because I didn't
realize I couldn't go and justbuy it. I definitely would have
made a point otherwise.

Jason (06:42):
I'll have to see. I'm going to a conference this next
week. I'll have to see if I cansort of extort it out of them,
even though I already have acopy. It's just like I need to
get more of these out incirculation to people.

Brian (06:52):
Well, I need a copy, so you should get it for me,

Jason (06:55):
fair enough. All right, so what does this game actually
consist of? So typical boardgame components, there's a large
central board where you trackpoints. Points in this game are
health, and you each have yourown player board where you track
the microbes and diseases thatyou have picked up. There's a
deck full of microbes,beneficials, pathogens, so
diseases and harmful ones, andalso a bunch of opportunistic

(07:17):
ones, which can be eitherbeneficial or pathogenic
depending on circumstances. Andthat plays into some of the
strategy of Do you want to playa beneficial on yourself or a
pathogen on someone else? Playerage is 13 plus, although,
apparently, David, you mentionedin one article that you had your
six year old daughter play, andshe quite enjoyed it.

David (07:33):
The reason it's 13 plus is because of the edibility of
the pieces. If you want to makeit for younger ages, you have to
do toxicity testing on yourpieces. This is something I
learned. I learned all sorts ofweird things through the process
of designing a game that, as agamer, I was unaware of, I would
have happily put eight plus onthe box, but then you have to

(07:54):
test the components.

Jason (07:55):
How many eight year olds are still eating game pieces?

David (07:58):
I don't know who came up with these rules anyway.

Jason (08:04):
So two to four players, ages 13 plus,

Brian (08:06):
legally,

Jason (08:07):
legally, yes, you can. You can give it to younger
children, just at

Brian (08:12):
at your own risk

Jason (08:13):
Well, it's more at their own risk. Don't feed the game to
your children. You should befine. And the goal of the game
is just to accumulate healthpoints over the course of it,
which happens through a fewcards that you can play. Like,
if you have microbes that candigest certain foods, you play
those foods, you get health. Youcan lose health by aside from
pathogens and diseases, thereare certain things that can
happen. Like, for example,getting a round of antibiotics

(08:35):
can decrease some of yourmicrobes and also slightly
decrease your health. There'sthese gut check cards that
basically are a semi random wayof checking how your microbiome
health is at the moment, andthat will determine your score,
will make it go up and down. Andthe goal is basically that
whenever the draw deck finallyruns out, you have the highest
health, or ideally, you get tothe maximum, which is like 50.

(08:56):
No one's ever done that in anyof the games we played. And
especially, you don't fall tozero, which is where you die.
And no one ever did that in anyof our games, either. So

Brian (09:05):
I got down the health track quite a bit. A few times.
I'm actually not very good atthese games.

Jason (09:10):
didn't you win the last one we played?

Brian (09:12):
absolutely not

Jason (09:13):
okay,

Brian (09:14):
not even close.

Jason (09:15):
Okay. So those are all the components of the game.
Playing the game. You draw yourcards, you're playing your
microbes on yourself, on someoneelse, you're playing diseases.
You're playing treatments likeprebiotics, that's microbe food,
which basically lets you playmore microbes, probiotics, which
lets you get a random beneficialmicrobe, various other things.
My favorite card in the entiredeck, and maybe we'll talk about

(09:36):
this a little bit, is thehomeopathy card. So the
homeopathic treatment, whichliterally does nothing.

Brian (09:41):
Yeah, it's a pointless card,

Jason (09:43):
which I love that, because I think that's an
important thing to put in there.If there's any of our listeners
who are great devotees ofhomeopathy, I'm sorry you may
enjoy your placebo effect asmuch as you want, but it's still
just a placebo effect.

Brian (09:55):
So I only played the we only played the commercial
version of the game that wasprovided to Jason. Thank you. By
the way, my favorite thing aboutthe mat in the middle is it's
just a depiction of theintestines, and that's it. It's
sort of like it's the there'ssort of a dead skull on one end,
and then there's the other end,where, I guess the maximum
health you would go out thewhatever. We don't need to talk
about it in detail. But I waslike, this is this person has no

(10:17):
stomach. They have no mouth.This is only a human from the
perspective of the microbes,

David (10:23):
it's a schematic. It's a gut schematic.

Jason (10:27):
Well, from the microbes point of view, we are basically
just a walking thing of habitat,and most of them are in our gut.
So like, what else matters?

Brian (10:33):
Yeah, it's just that the bits that are around the gut are
of no concern,

Jason (10:37):
kind of like how we only care about, like, the 100 yards
or so, plus or minus the surfaceof the earth and maybe a little
bit of that atmosphere. Stuff.Anyway, let's get into the
science of this. Now this iswhere I really want to get into
things. So I am actually a plantmicrobiome researcher. That's
what my research is on. Eventhough I don't study the human
microbiome, I do kind of keepabreast more or less of major

(10:57):
things. And when I was startinggraduate school like this was
just barely a new thing. Wecould barely even touch the
microbiome. Microbiomes becausethe technology to to look at
these and had just barely beenmade, but now they're
everywhere. I say you can'tthrow a rock without hitting
some new paper saying, No, themicrobiome is important in this
thing and that thing and allthese stuff, things like
depression, heart disease,behaviors, obesity. I think

(11:17):
we're still trying to sort outhow how much of it is. It's a
cause versus a symptom. But thefact is that people are finding
links all over the place, and itpops up all over the place on
YouTube, Tiktok, whatever, whichnow brings us to our core thing,
David, what's a microbiome?

David (11:33):
You know? And I'm glad you asked that. And as you just
mentioned, you know, microbiomesare everywhere. But, you know, I
designed this game 10 years ago,and at the time, it was still
very much an emerging Wild Westsort of, sort of science. I feel
like things have settled down alittle more. We have a better
handle on the tools and what itall means. But a microbiome is
just a collection of microbes ina context, and it may or may not

(11:57):
be biologically meaningful. Wecould talk about the microbiome
of the planet, which might notbe meaningful, but in this case,
we're talking about like thehuman gut microbiome. We're just
saying all of the microbes thatare typically found in the human
gut. But it still gets verydifficult on the edges. You
know, there's lots of microbesthat are transitory because they
came off your food. Are thosepart of your microbiome or not?

(12:19):
The microbiome is actually afuzzy concept. It's clearly
really important in a lot ofplaces, but it's, it's fuzzy on
the edges.

Brian (12:26):
It's kind of like an ecosystem, right? What are the
edges of an ecosystem? Yeah,it's fuzzy.

David (12:30):
It is an ecosystem, actually. And that, that's
probably what makes it soimportant.

Jason (12:34):
Next question, then, is like, Okay, we all have
microbiome we have manymicrobiomes. We've got the gut,
skin, inside the mouth, likepretty much anything that
touches the outside world has amicrobiome, I think, is it still
thought that all our interiortissue is still pretty sterile.
If things are going right?

David (12:49):
If things are going right. But like we used to say
that urine is sterile, and wenow know that that's not
necessarily the case, evenwithout pathology.

Brian (12:58):
Oh, interesting. Okay, so humans are a tube, right? So
anything on the outside andanything on the inside,

David (13:03):
yeah.

Jason (13:04):
then why is the microbiome important? You have
all this gut health and gutmicrobiome, what's been found
about how this actually impactsour health? I rattle off a few
things, but I'm sure you have amuch better idea of this.

David (13:16):
Well, just you know, the microbes in your gut, for
example, can help you digest anynumber of things. They make a
lot of compounds, you know, moredigestible, more absorbable.
They also perform what we callniche exclusion, like you have
happy, warm places inside you,and if they're full of
beneficial microbes and thereisn't space or opportunity for

(13:39):
pathogens to grow. So I thinkthat's a really important part
of the human microbiome. It'sjust already having something
living in all these nice, warm,moist places, which makes it
harder for bad actors to come inand play. And so as you say,
we're discovering more and moreevery year about how important
the microbiome is and potentialeffects on the brain and mood

(14:02):
and neurological conditions. Andit's just fascinating how
quickly you know, 20 years ago,to most people, microbes are
bad, are bad, and they'resomething you want to avoid at
all costs. And I think now ourunderstanding is much more
nuanced. Of course, it's alsoswung the other way. You know,
there's a lot of snake oil andthings out there about, you

(14:24):
know, pop this pill and magichappens.

Brian (14:26):
Do you think that societally, we've kind of
shifted to some microbes arebad, some microbes are good, or
do you still think it's kind ofa mixed bag in terms of how well
that, sort of, like, made itsway out into society?

David (14:38):
It's mixed. But, I mean, if you look at, you know, the
yogurt section of the store,and, you know, the active
cultures and probiotics andprebiotics and like, you know,
there's, there is definitely, Ithink, an understanding that
microbes can be beneficial, thenuances of that, though, I think
we still don't really understandall the details,

Jason (14:59):
yeah, and so. Was one of my follow up questions is, I
know there's a bunch of, as yousaid, snake oil out there. I
mean, anything that has even thepotential of being something to
improve health, people willlatch on and they'll slap a
label on it, and they'll startselling you at a 10 times
markup. How do you find reliableinformation about microbiome,
what actually causes a benefit?What is possibly snake oil. Are

(15:21):
there trusted sources or trustedpeople to check with?

Unknown (15:23):
I mean, that's a really good question. You know, a study
will come out saying that thismicrobe was found in higher
abundance in healthy people, asopposed to unhealthy people, for
some condition, obesity, forexample, and then immediately
there's people packaging andselling it. But I think a lot is
confusing, you know, correlationand causation, right? We don't

(15:45):
know in many cases whichdirection things go. You know,
maybe your microbes aredifferent because you're healthy
or because of some underlyingconfounding factor, right? It's
not that having this microbewill make you lose weight or
will make you happy or whatever,right? So I think there's,
there's a lot of confusion ofthis idea of correlation and

(16:06):
causation. You know, thepublished scientific literature
is not perfect, but it's, it's alot better place to start than
than TikTok, I would say, ifyou're information on on
microbiome health. But to someextent, for me, personally, I
put it in the same category asnutrition, in the sense of,
there's paper saying coffee isbad, there's papers saying

(16:27):
coffee is good. And you know,our feelings about fat and sugar
and all these things change overtime. But broadly, if you eat a
relatively balanced diet thatconsists of a lot of different
things that don't come out of acan, you're probably all right.
And I would say that samegeneral approach probably
applies to microbes. If youdon't hit yourself with

(16:48):
antibiotics too often, and youeat a balanced diet, your
microbiome will probably behappy. That's probably good
enough for most people, in mostcases, unless you want a fecal
transplant. And that's adifferent story.

Brian (16:59):
I hope we get to get into that just a little bit at some
point.

Jason (17:02):
Well, let's head into that, because you mentioned
antibiotics. a few times now,and so tying that together, what
I know is that one reason whyyou want to be cautious with
antibiotics, and I guess, quickaside, antibiotics are a
wonderful invention that haverevolutionized health,

Brian (17:17):
saved lives.

Jason (17:18):
Oh, they've saved millions upon millions of lives.
But that doesn't mean you shoulduse them anytime you want. It's
like they should be usedcarefully. And maybe David, you
can get into the variousreasons, like, why do we want to
be careful about usingantibiotics as opposed to just
using them anytime I startfeeling sick?

David (17:33):
Yeah, no. I mean that. That's an excellent question. I
think this is, again, alsosomething that as sort of a
society, we're shifting in ourunderstanding of when it's
appropriate. So, as you pointout, I mean, they're, they're a
fantastic invention. I sayinvention. They're not really
invented by us. The vastmajority of antibiotics are
produced by other microbes,right? And they use them for
their own purposes. You know,there's a whole arms race out in

(17:54):
soil of antibiotics beingproduced by some bacteria and
then defenses by other bacteria.And there's a whole ecosystem
out there, and we just sort ofsteal from that.

Jason (18:02):
I keep saying that nature looks like it's in harmony, just
because everything is out to geteach other all the time. And so
it just looks balanced becausewe've reached equilibrium, but
they're really just all outtrying to kill each other.

David (18:12):
They are. They are, and that's where most of our
antibiotics come from. And so ifyou have strep, you have strep
throat to be common you want totake antibiotics. I mean, strep
can actually lead to prettysevere complications in some
cases, and so you takeantibiotics, it knocks those
bacteria down, your microbiome,re-equilibrates , and you're
doing well. But the problem is,antibiotics are not specific. We

(18:35):
had antibiotics that knocked outjust a particular bacteria. That
would be amazing, because thenwe could just take that and
knock out. But they're not.They're generally, you hear this
term broad spectrum antibiotics.And broad spectrum means they
kill a lot of different things,and so they kill not only
necessarily the pathogen thatyou're after you hope, but also
many of the beneficial microbesin your body. And that's where

(18:57):
you start to have a problem,because you disequilibrate the
system, and in severe cases,you're in a hospital, you need
to be on antibiotics. Maybeyou're having surgery, or you
had a severe infection, and youyou knock out your microbiome so
badly that a single bad actorcan take over. So this happens
in hospitals with Clostridiumdifficile, C diff, it's a really

(19:19):
nasty usually, hospital acquiredinfection, and it typically
appears in people who've hadantibiotics and you have a
single bacterium that takes overthe whole gut, and it can be
lethal if it's not treated.

Brian (19:31):
Oh, geez, I didn't realize that.

Jason (19:32):
And this goes back to what you were saying about
beneficial sometimes they arebeneficial just because they're
occupying space and they'rekeeping a bad actor from getting
in and taking over. It soundslike this is what happens you
what happens you do antibioticsor basically a scorched earth on
your intestines. And if you'reunlucky, then that means that
there's a new opportunity for Cdiff to move in and take over.
Is that about right?

David (19:52):
Yeah, no, that's about right. And this gets to, you
know, we have to talk aboutfecal transplants, and the best
use case for fecal transplantsis, in fact, in this scenario
where you have a single badactor, and that bad actor, that
C diff, is often resistant tonumerous antibiotics, so you
can't take more antibiotics tosolve the problem, but you can
give an infusion of beneficialmicrobes. So you take someone

(20:15):
that has a healthy gutmicrobiome, you take feces from
that person, you inject it intothe gut, and you sort of give
that ecosystem a chance to reestablish itself and push out
the bad actor. And it actuallyworks really well for that
purpose.

Brian (20:30):
So, just to go back to the ecosystem analogy, I think
we've already said it. This isthe antibiotics are clear
cutting the forest, right? Andyou've got individuals that are
able to, I mean, there's a wholefield of disturbance ecology.
That's basically what a postantibiotic intestines is, right?
Is a disturbed ecosystem wheresomething can come in and take
over all of that niche space,but it can still be pushed out

(20:52):
by a healthy ecosystem that'sreintroduced.

Jason (20:54):
Yeah, I was actually just looking this up, and I like how
you represented this in thegame. C diff is one of the
pathogens in the game, and whenit's in play, whoever has it,
they can't add any beneficials,except through probiotics. So
basically, the intentionaladdition, they can't just be
colonized by something. You haveto actually intentionally take
it or do the fecal transplantcard, which I think what gets
rid of all the negative ones?

David (21:16):
Yeah, fecal transplant knocks down all the pathogens.

Brian (21:20):
I noticed there was one card in the game that seemed to
have no downside, and that wasthe phage therapy. Can we talk
about that for a bit?

David (21:27):
Sure, phage therapy is still pretty new. So
bacteriophages are viruses thatspecifically attack and kill
bacteria. So phages don'tpresent any risk to human
health. They don't impact humancells. They go after bacteria.
The idea of using phages to killbacteria specifically is
relatively new, at least in theUnited States. It's actually

(21:50):
something that the Soviet Unionhas been working on for many,
many years. But there was adisconnect for a long time
between science that happenedbehind the Iron Curtain and
science that was being publishedin the West. But I think it's,
it's equilibrating a little morenow, but the the attraction of
that is the specificity of thephages. So this idea that you
could have something that's morespecifically targeting a

(22:13):
particular pathogen, you had aparticular phage that went after
that, and that might not impactthe rest of the microbiome, I'd
say we're still in the veryearly days. But that's, that's
the attraction and the thepromise of phage therapy.

Jason (22:25):
And so those of you who don't know what a phage is,
you've probably actually seenone. If you've ever seen a
little cartoon of some littlevirus that looks like, like
little 20 sided die on a stickwith spider legs. That's a phage

Brian (22:35):
a lunar lander?

Jason (22:36):
Yeah, they look really cool.

Brian (22:38):
So they often get used to depict viruses where, like,
unfortunately, human viruses areusually really boring looking.
Bacteriophage look real cool, sothey tend to get used
inappropriately to representviruses. Because why wouldn't
you want something that lookslike it's got little legs, like
a little weird spider with a gemhead,

Jason (22:55):
although now I think we're probably getting
variations of COVID representinghuman viruses since that well,
Pardon, pardon? The phrase wentviral.

David (23:01):
Yeah, that's what we see now. Is enveloped viruses.

Jason (23:05):
So we've talked a few times now about like, prebiotics
and probiotics, which are bothcards in the game that you can
play. But can you tell us alittle bit what? What are those
two things? What's thedifference between them? Are
either of them worth using?

David (23:17):
Sure. So prebiotics, as you mentioned earlier, are
basically food for beneficialmicrobes. The idea is that there
are certain compounds, fiberfalls in this category, that we
don't necessarily digestdirectly, but that beneficial
microbes can use. And so we'resort of nudging our microbiome
in a beneficial direction bygiving them certain foods that

(23:40):
beneficials can use probioticsis just the act of taking live,
active bacteria. So if you haveactive culture yogurt, that's
basically a form of probiotics,both of them, scientifically,
are very clearly establishedconcepts. The use of them for
improving human health, I wouldsay, is murkier. You know, when
you take bacteria orally, soactive culture yogurt, how much

(24:04):
of that is going to survivepassage through your digestive
system, through the, you know,very inhospitable environment of
your stomach and and actuallyget into your gut and do
something useful there. Andalso, you know, maybe what my
gut needs at this moment isdifferent from what your gut
needs. So it's hard to say, youknow, there's a universal, you
know, little, little probioticthat you can drink, that's,

(24:24):
that's necessarily useful. Ithink there is some evidence
showing that after antibiotictreatment, so after you've
knocked down your yourmicrobiome with antibiotics,
there's some benefit in intrying to re establish a healthy
gut microbiome with probiotics.So I'd say they're both
scientifically useful concepts,but I wouldn't say it's clear

(24:45):
exactly how to apply themcommercially for health.

Brian (24:48):
In the game, some of your beneficials help you digest
certain things, like you said,fiber, plants, dairy, there's
one more I'm forgetting. What amI forgetting? Jason,

Jason (24:56):
vitamins. They don't digest vitamins. They make the

Brian (24:58):
That's right. It's grains Dairy, plant material, and then
vitamins.
vitamins, making the ultimatefood, pizza, right? That was
that's actually in the game aswell. The best card to play is
pizza. Which I like that? Ithink it was lasagna in the
print to play.

David (25:11):
Well, it's funny, because there's things like that that,
you know, it was lasagna in mymind, because I was finding
something that had all thesedifferent components to it. But
when Qiagen printed the game,they insisted it had to be
pizza. I don't know why, andthere's other weird things like
that, where I had these youcould go on a bus trip or a

(25:31):
plane trip, you know, which isthe idea of you're sharing
microbes with other people, andthat's what happens in the game.
But they insisted to add like, atrain trip and a boat like I
don't know why.

Brian (25:43):
There's four different types of trips. They all do the
same thing. It's just passmicrobes to the left or to the
right.

David (25:47):
I had one was to the left and one was to the right. So I
had train trips to the left,plane trips to the right. I
don't know why they decided toadd boats.

Brian (25:55):
Were there any other changes that they wanted to
make, or that they made that youknow of?

Jason (25:59):
there was a significant art upgrade. That's the most
visible change, probably,

David (26:03):
in the print and play version. The artist who designed
the print and play version wasvery thoughtful about ink usage,
so the print and play cards aredesigned to not destroy your you
know, ink cartridge.

Brian (26:15):
Oh that's great. That's actually really considerate.

David (26:18):
And that's a different consideration when you're
printing. Also, every companyout there has, you know, a
certainaesthetic. They have, youknow, fonts that they used or
whatever. And so there'sactually two printed,
commercially printed versions ofthe game. There's the MoBio
version, which has the MoBiocolor palette and fonts. And
then when they got completelyabsorbed by Qiagen, Qiagen then

(26:39):
reprinted the game, and theyredid all the art. It's the same
pictures, but it's with a Qiagenset of fonts and color palettes.

Brian (26:47):
Oh, man, I gotta go try to find on eBay the MoBio
version somewhere so I can havethe whole set.

Jason (26:52):
Good luck. I looked up. I couldn't find even to used copy.

Brian (26:55):
You couldn't find it either?

Jason (26:56):
I couldn't find a used copy for sale anywhere. So okay,
At one point I want to talkabout the weird, the weird
history of the game and how itcame to be offered as a
promotional item by Qiagen

David (27:07):
Well, that story of the game, we were doing a project
where we sent a bunch ofbacteria to the International
Space Station to see how theygrew in microgravity compared to
Earth, actually collected withthe help of professional
cheerleaders around the country.So you can see why I did a lot
of media interviews.

Brian (27:21):
This is, this is this is okay, sure,

Jason (27:24):
professional cheerleaders, as in, like the
people cheering on of like

David (27:27):
NFL, NFL and NBA cheerleaders

Brian (27:29):
collected your microbes to send to the space station.

David (27:31):
It's a long story. Anyway,

Brian (27:31):
it sounds like someone did an like a mad lib of just
combining words

David (27:33):
It the awesome project, but I created baseball cards for
all the bacteria that were goingto the space station, little
trading cards that had, like, afun fact. And then so the and we
would give these out atpromotional events. We were
trying to get people engaged in,like, getting excited about
these bacteria that were goingto space and my boss asked me if

(27:54):
we could gamify those cards,like, like pokemon or something
like that, turn them into atrading card game. And I thought
about it, and I decided, no, Ijust I couldn't see any hook or
any interest. But I said, youknow, it would be cool to design
a game about the microbiome. Andhe said, We should absolutely do
that. Said, Okay. And then Isaid, I want you to repeat in
front of all these witnesses. Itwas like at a lab meeting, there

(28:16):
were like 20 people there, and Isaid that you want me to spend
my time at work design boardgame? Yeah, and so I started to
think about it, and then off wewent. So yes, I got paid to
design a board game that wasvery exciting,

Jason (28:30):
awesome. That's great. And along those lines, so you
decided not to gamify the littlecollectible cards. But I know a
few other people have maybe nota game out of it, but they made
them collectible. Thisconference I'm going to next
week. Every year, there's one ortwo companies that they have the
little collectible cards of,like the genomes they've
sequenced and stuff. And everyyear I seek them out, just so I
can add to my collection. But mylittle binder here, of all my

(28:52):
little genome cards that have noreal value whatsoever, other
than I think they're cool

Brian (28:57):
my chronically disorganized office, I thought I
had a little stack of thesecards. I have the mulberry
genome. I think it's up on mycard thing on the wall next to
all of my Oddish cards.

David (29:06):
Yeah. Well, people were excited to take these cards at a
convention or whatever, but as aMagic the Gathering nerd myself,
for five years, I couldn't see away to gamify it.

Jason (29:16):
All right, so there's one other thing I want to talk
about, the mechanics of the gamethat you represented, because
you did take care to try torepresent real scientific
concepts mechanically, andthat's horizontal gene transfer,
which I think we may havementioned in past episodes, but
it's not something that youusually hear about, but unless
you're actually a microbiologistor in biology. In the game, when

(29:37):
you have a bacteria that'sgotten Antibiotic resistance
because it survived yourtreatment of antibiotics, then
you can play a card that willactually move that resistance to
another bacteria, which I assumethat the idea is that if you
have any harmful resistant ones,you can move that to a
beneficial one so that itdoesn't get nuked the next time
you use that antibiotic. Butthis represents real biology

(29:57):
going on. So David, can youexplain a little bit of. Like,
what that's representing, how itworks in in the wild, so to

David (30:03):
Sure sure, but, but in game terms, you can also make
This is listeners. Why, anytimeyou're prescribed antibiotics,
speak?
your opponents pathogensresistant to more microbes with
lateral gene transfers so thatthey have more trouble getting
rid of Yeah. So in real terms,so I guess we'll talk really
briefly about antibioticresistance. So microbes, as I
said, they're living this battlein the soil, on plants or

(30:23):
wherever they're fighting withother microbes. And so they've
evolved a lot of defenses toprotect them against
antibiotics. And so a reallycommon form of antibiotic
resistance is a pump, sobacteria have pumps that pump
out the antibiotics so theydon't damage the cell. And so if
you have the right kind of pump,and when you're exposed to that

(30:46):
kind of antibiotic, you can justpump it out of your cell and
survive. That's a common defenseagainst antibiotics. It's a way
that bacteria are resistant tothose antibiotics. And there's
many different forms ofantibiotic resistance. Some of
those happen just naturallythrough mutation. You know, if
you expose bacteria in a dish toan antibiotic over and over

(31:07):
again, some of them are going toacquire resistance to it,
through some mechanism oranother, and eventually, all of
the microbes in that dish willbe resistant to that antibiotic
because you've kept them underwhat we call selective pressure,
you've kept attacking them withthis antibiotic, and only the
you finish the course ofantibiotics, even if you feel
ones who are resistant to itsurvive.

(31:30):
fine, because otherwise you'redoing that exact same thing
inside your body.
and you're still potentiallydoing it even if you finish the
course of antibiotics. Right?You know it makes sense that
when you continually apply somethreat, the things that are
resistant to that threatsurvive. And this is a problem,
because over time, as a society,when we use antibiotics, we

(31:51):
create these multi drugresistant bacteria. And so if
you think about MRSA, is amethicillin resistant staph
aureus, it's a problem inhospitals. But in the past, you
know, it had become resistant tomethicillin, which is a kind of
antibiotic that is used a lot,and if you had it, then we used

(32:11):
something else. We used adifferent antibiotic,
vancomycin, say, to treat it.But now we have these strains,
these, they're called XDR these,these multi drug resistant
strains, where they're resistantto most, or maybe all of the
antibiotics we have. So you havein a single bacterium, they have
all these different resistances,and we can't kill them. And some

(32:31):
of those bacteria are lethal.And so people die because
they've acquired these multidrug resistant strains of
bacteria. Where it gets reallyinteresting is that some forms
of these resistances canactually be transferred from one
bacteria to another, and that'sthe horizontal gene transfer. So
if the resistance is, say,encoded on what we call plasmid,

(32:53):
it's a separate piece of DNA.It's not part of the genome of
the bacteria. It's a separatefree floating piece of DNA that
can actually get transferred toanother bacteria, and that
bacteria can become resistanteven though they've never seen
the antibiotic. And so one ofthe concerns with the overuse of
antibiotics is that you createresistances, and those
resistances can then be passedout to other bacteria. So that's

(33:15):
a concept I really wanted toconvey in the game, and this is
one of the places where thelateral gene transfer card in
the game is not very useful froma gameplay perspective. It's the
card that gets discarded most ofthe time. But I really wanted to
convey this idea, the resistancethat could be transferred
between microbes.

Brian (33:32):
I felt that in the game it's like, this is a really cool
mechanic. I appreciate whythat's here. It's hard to use,
so I didn't end up using it verymuch, but it's like the
homeopathy does nothing, andthat still needs to be there for
the purposes of beingentertaining.

David (33:45):
There's a balance between education and entertaining. And,
you know, I've listened to a lotof your guys' podcasts are
really, really interesting. And,you know, the vast majority of
those games didn't exist 10years ago. We now live in the
sort of post wingspan era. Of,you know, teaching people cool
science with an interesting,beautiful game is is more

(34:09):
commonly accepted. And, youknow, as we talked about at the
beginning of the episode, I wasfrustrated with the fact that
most educational games, thegameplay was very weird. And in
particular, I've always beenfrustrated with this concept
where you're faced with a choicein the game, but it's an obvious
choice. I should either do thisthing which is clearly good or
this thing which would bestupid, then I don't feel like

(34:29):
you're making real choices. AndI really wanted a game where I
felt like when you looked atyour hand, it wasn't obvious
what you should do, like, oh, doI want to play a beneficial on
myself? Do I want to hurtsomeone else? Like I wanted that
process where you have tostrategize about your choices.

Brian (34:43):
Let's get into game design just a little bit. So I
had a question, how did youchoose which pathogens my wife
got the plague a bunch of timeswhen we played there were only
10 different pathogen cards, andI think only four different
pathogens in the version that'spublished by Qiagen. How were
those selected? Because theyweren't all gut microbes.

David (34:59):
So when. I designed the game. Everything just had
placeholder names. You know,good bug one, bad bug three. You
know, as I was doing the massiveamount of play testing that game
design requires, because there'sa balance, right? If you have
too many pathogens in the game,then, you know, everyone dies
all the time. And so, you know,I did hundreds of hours of play

(35:20):
testing, and most of that wasjust with placeholders and then
once I felt like I had anappropriate balance in terms of
number of cards and types ofcards and things like that, then
I went out and tried to findthings that made sense. And I
think I actually talked aboutthis in the paper. In the
beginning, I had something thatdigested meat, because that kind
of made sense to me. And I wentout into the scientific

(35:41):
literature, and I couldn't findany evidence anywhere the
bacteria that helped you digestmeat.

Brian (35:47):
I think meat's pretty easy to break down, right?

David (35:49):
Yeah, but I couldn't find it. So maybe, you know, the body
does all the work, and you don'tneed the microbes for that. So I
had to shift to something else,and I switched to grains, which
numerous people have pointed outto me over the years that grains
are plants, so it doesn't havegrains two separate categories.
But yeah, for for choosing thethe pathogens, you know, I had

(36:12):
to have things like C diff,because it made sense of this
concept of resistance. Andbotulism is another food borne
thing. I tried to find thingsalso that people had heard of.
So the plague is in there, not agut microbe, but it's something
that people have heard of. So Ithought it would be interesting.
So it's maybe, maybe not themost scientifically interesting,
but, but something that would befamiliar to people.

Jason (36:32):
And you have to admit, the game appeal of just giving
other people botulism and theplague and stuff, there's a
certain amount of fun in that.

Brian (36:39):
Oh, for sure. No, I was teasing my wife. She needed to
stop hanging out with so manyprairie dogs, because prairie
dogs carry plague. I think oneof the hardest things to to deal
with, with antibioticresistance, and I know I even
have graduate students whoreally struggle with this, is
that it's the it's an act ofselection, the resistance
existed. It's just, you'veeliminated everything that was
sensitive, that's always hard tocommunicate. It's not that

(37:02):
taking antibiotics createsresistance that selects for the
resistant individuals.

David (37:07):
Yeah no, that's true, and that's a difficult concept to
convey. And in the game, itappears that resistance is
created, right? Because youtreat with antibiotics and then
you get rid of half of yourbeneficials, and then the other
half become resistant. Butyou're right. That's not what's
happening. You're selecting forthe things that are resistant.

Brian (37:25):
Could you let us see behind the curtain? What was a
mechanic that sort of gotdropped during play testing?

David (37:30):
Oh see, this is like a memory test. Now, that was a
long time ago and and I've kindof blocked it out, I mean,

Brian (37:39):
so that that might go into my next question is like,
would you design another game?Or do you have an idea for
another game that you'd like todesign? Or is that, are you have
you left that part of your lifebehind?

David (37:47):
Well, I think I mentioned this actually in the paper the
if you've done enough playtesting, you should never want
to play your game again. Andeveryone you know should never
want to play you know, I hosteda weekly Friday night board game
group, and by the time the gamewas published, all of my
colleagues and all of my friendsnever wanted to see it again.

(38:09):
You know, when we got shrinkwrap copies of it, I gave
everyone a copy as a thank you,and they're probably mostly
still in shrink wrap oneveryone's shelves because
everyone was traumatized by theiterative play play testing is
is really quite painful. And Imean, I spent many, many hours
putting my PhD to good use usinga paper cutter cutting out

(38:29):
cards, because I would printthem on card stock, I would cut
them, and we'd play, like, twogames and be like, this doesn't
work at all, or like, thisdoesn't make any sense. And so
I'd go back and I makeadjustments, and I'd print them
out again. That's why, whenpeople asked about like, could
you make an expansion? Like,people have asked, Could you
make like, an STD expansion?

Brian (38:47):
Oh, gosh,

Jason (38:48):
Gut check after dark. Oh,

David (38:50):
exactly. I don't. I don't think I want to do that. I don't
want to revisit that process.

Brian (38:56):
That was people's top requests. Was STDs?

David (38:59):
I had multiple people request an STD expansion

Brian (39:02):
or STI sexually transmitted infection, I guess
we call it now, but

David (39:06):
I don't think I want to revisit that space. I would
consider designing another game,but there's so many things I
would do differently. Thebiggest which I would I would
want to understand thepublication and distribution
process in advance. I mean, Ididn't know what I was doing
when I made this game. I did allthe play testing, I got
everything ready, and we weregoing to spend grant money from

(39:28):
the Albert P Sloan Foundation toprint it, and then we were just
going to sell it to recoup ourcosts. And that's where I
discovered, do you have aproblem? Because if I hand you
the game and collect $20 I'mobligated by the State of
California to collect sales taxon that transaction and then
file that sales tax as abusiness. And I didn't want to
do that. I didn't form, I didn'twant to form an LLC file

(39:52):
business taxes. Or I just wasn'tinterested in that. And, yeah, I
hadn't thought about that inadvance. I was like, oh, we'll
just spend grant money to makeit and then, you know, we'll
recoup our costs, but it doesn'twork that way. So we could have
spent a bunch of grant money andjust given it away and not
recoup our costs, but thatdidn't make sense either. So the
game sat for like, a year as Itried to figure out what to do.

(40:12):
And everybody's like, well,Kickstarter, you know, exploding
around that time, andeverybody's look good Exploding
Kittens, they made, you know, amillion dollars in five days. I
was like, Well, yeah, this isnot going to do that, you know,
I'm not the oatmeal, and it's aton of work, as you pointed out
Brian. So I sat on it for a longtime, and then I just, I cold
called MoBio, and I said, I havea proposal for you guys. I'll

(40:37):
give you this game, justeverything you need. You put
your name all over it. You payto print it, you give it out as
a promotional item, and you giveme enough copies to like, you
know, give to friends andfamily, and that's what they
did. I didn't realize at thetime that I had not thought of
this as an educational game inthe context of like high school
and college classrooms. I wasthinking about gamers and

(40:58):
biologists. Those were ourtargets. It became very popular
with high school and collegeteachers, and I started to get a
lot of requests for copies ofthe game to use in the
classroom. And I wish I hadthought about that use case in
advance, because I would havedone two things differently.
First of all, I would have madesure I had copies of the game to
give to people for educationpurposes, but I would have

(41:18):
designed a shorter, simplergame, you know, had a lot of
people using a game in a highschool classroom. You can't
explain this game and play it ina 45 minute class period.

Brian (41:28):
Oh, yeah, that is hard.

David (41:31):
The game is too complicated for like, non-gamer
high school students to pick upquickly, and it takes too long
to play. So in that sense, if Ihad wanted to design a game that
would be used in education. Iwould have designed something
like a deck of cards that wasmore portable, simpler, and just
got at those concepts withoutall the complexity.

Jason (41:52):
Before we started recording, you were mentioning
something about the universityactually getting upset with you
for giving the game away toMoBio. Can you go into that in a
little bit more details andmaybe share what you're allowed
to share

David (42:02):
well as a staff member of the University. And this is
different for you guys, becauseyou guys are faculty, they have
different IP protections. Youknow, if you invent something,
you have some personal stake asa faculty member in you know,
when you go through your techtransfer, office, etc, as staff,
the university owns you,basically. And so if you create

(42:25):
things, the university issupposed to, you know, own the
rights to those things,basically. And so by creating
the game and releasing it undera Creative Commons license, that
was a violation of the spirit ofthat policy, at least. And so
when the discussions about thiscame up, the university was
asking, but who owns thecopyright? And it's like, no
one, because I released it underan open Creative Commons

(42:47):
license. And they're like, but,but who owns it? Like, does
MoBio own it? I'm like, No, andQiagen doesn't understand this
either. Qiagen has all thefiles, and they have everything,
and they can make more copies ofthis game. But this idea that,
like, no one owns the rights, Ithink, is not intuitive to
either industry or academia.

Brian (43:07):
Yeah, I could see this being a problem, because at that
point it's like, well, then howdo we make money on it? That's,
well, you don't, you don't makemoney on it.

David (43:14):
Someone can take the cards off of gut check, put it
on T shirts, sell it, and makemoney. And, like, that's all
allowable because it's an openlicense.

Brian (43:22):
Jason I were talking about adding some sort of, like,
game upgrade items to ourwebsite, which we could totally
do, because it's creativecommons, right?

David (43:29):
You can do whatever you want with it.

Jason (43:30):
Yeah, our top choices were a tip card for, like, what
you can do in your turn, becausewe kept having to reference the
Rule book for that, and thenmaking little 3d printed
antibiotic resistance instead ofthe cards. I understand why you
did the cards, because those areprobably much cheaper to print
than custom little tokens, butgiving people their own 3d print
files to just make a fewantibiotics seems like it'd be
easy enough.

David (43:51):
That would be really cool, and I really regret the
fact that I didn't have a tipcard, like a rule summary card.
There's any number of regrets.So in preparation for this
episode, I sat down with my twoteenage daughters, and I played
my game again. It's been manyyears. I relived the trauma, and
I found all sorts of things tobe critical about. I was like,

(44:11):
Oh, I wouldn't do that again, orthat was a mistake.

Brian (44:14):
Let us know what you what you would change. We have every
opportunity here to make thechanges. We could say they are.
"David Coil approved".

David (44:21):
Well, one of the biggest issues is you guys reviewed
pandemic. You've playedpandemic.

Brian (44:26):
We did

David (44:27):
The way the epidemics are spread throughout the deck. You
know, you make pile.

Brian (44:31):
Oh, the gut check system reminds me of the pandemic
outbreak system.

David (44:36):
It is very similar, except that they're totally
random throughout the deck,which is a problem I was trying
to avoid the hassle with gameslike pandemic, we have to create
a bunch of piles, and then youhave to shuffle a card into each
pile, and then you have to stackthe piles, right? But the the
utility of that is, you get somedistribution of these
checkpoints. In gut check. Youjust chuck them into the deck.

(44:57):
They're totally random, but thatmeans that the game can be very
swingy from like a pointperspective, so you're doing
really well at this particularmoment, and there's three turns
in a row where a gut check comesup that's going to massively
balloon your score, or whatever,or be really frustrating if you
just happen to have a nosocomialinfection, and a couple of
pathogens when that happens. SoI think it's it adds to the

(45:20):
randomness in a problematic way,to have the checkpoints be
totally random. So I think if Iwere to do it again, or if I
were to make an addendum, Iwould do something more like
pandemic, where they'redistributed.

Brian (45:32):
but then that also is kind of counter to that well,
but I want something easy toplay in a high school classroom.
So it's like, this is the thing.It's always a choice. It's
always a balance. It's like, isit the game balance? Is it the
educational component? It is atime constraint.

David (45:45):
Every game suffers from those choices, which is why
there's house rules, right? Somany people, you know, I like
this game, but there's this onething, and so, like, we're gonna
change this,

Brian (45:53):
but that's the joy of a board game, as opposed to a

David (45:53):
It's true as long as everybody's on the same page.
video game. Well, I guess nowyou can mod a video game, but
you want to play a board a boardgame differently, you just play
it differently. If you don'tlike a rule, you just don't like
a rule, you just don't use it.If you want to add a new rule,
you just do it.

Brian (46:06):
The number of times I've played a board game, many, many,
many times the wrong way, onlylater to realize, Oh, that's not
the rules. This game seemsreally out of balance. It's
because you're playing it wrong,but you were still having fun.
Everybody was still playing bythe same rules.

Jason (46:19):
I'm not convinced that anyone actually plays monopoly
by the real rules.
No, nobody does. I mean,monopoly is the classic example
of an educational game that isno longer educational, right?
Yeah, it's actually, I think itwas a plot point in the movie
heretic that just came out abouthow it was originally meant to
teach the evils of capitalism.And then someone decided that,
hey, this could be a fun game.I'm going to take it, remove the

(46:39):
moral lesson, and just sell abunch of it.

Brian (46:41):
There was another game where it was like, I can't
remember what it was. It wasmonopoly. And what was the name
of the opposite game on theother side of the board,
cooperation, or something. Well,the cooperation part was boring,
so nobody wanted to play it

David (46:52):
You know, monopoly is interesting. If you play with
the actual rules, the game isactually much faster than with
all the house rules that peopletypically play with.

Jason (47:01):
So we're getting near time. So it's probably time to
wrap up. Normally, what we do iswe give a letter grade to the
game in terms of how it did interms of science and gameplay. I
feel really weird doing thatwith the game creator.

Brian (47:12):
Do you want us to grade you? Because it feels weird.

Jason (47:15):
I wanted to ask David, you said you recently played it.
It was obviously wasn't justsparkles and rainbows. Of
reliving your game. What wouldyou give the game in terms of,
how good was the gameplay? Howgood was the science? Like, how
did it represent the science youwanted to represent?

Brian (47:30):
I love this compromise. It basically puts it completely
on the Creator.

David (47:34):
Yeah, no, this is interesting. After listening to
a bunch of your episodes, I waslike, I'm gonna be the first
game creator. So I'm curious howthey're going to do the the
grading part,

Jason (47:44):
simple, we we delegate.

David (47:46):
I'm totally comfortable if you grade and criticize the
game well, so let me do thescience first. So I think the
science is is not perfect,

Brian (47:54):
but it can't be. It never can be, right?

David (47:58):
I feel like the game did a good job at conveying the
scientific concepts that Iwanted to convey, especially
about this idea aboutopportunistic microbes that,
like everything's not black andwhite. It's not, you know, the
Rebellion and the Empire, thegood guys and the bad guys. You
know, context matters, and somicrobes can be good in some
contexts and bad in othercontexts. That and the concept

(48:20):
of antibiotic resistance and thetrade offs of the use of
antibiotics and the fact that,you know, beneficial microbes
can help you digest things. Ifeel like those concepts came
through in the game. There areimportant mechanics in the game,
and I've gotten a lot of lettersover the years, and people
reaching out on Twitter andthings like that, where people
like, hey, my teenager learnedsomething from this game. So I

(48:41):
feel like the game wassuccessful from a scientific
perspective, even though, ofcourse, there's corners cut
about the science the gameplayis where I'm more critical,
because I feel like the game istoo swingy from a points
perspective, like a good game,to me, is someone who's played
it a bunch is going toconsistently beat someone who

(49:03):
hasn't played it until theylearn the strategies and nuance.
If it's random, who wins, then Ifeel like you haven't succeeded
as a game designer in doingsomething that requires
strategic thought. It's a littleharder to sort of pick up and
play than I would like. I don'tlove the instructions. You read
through the instructions thefirst time, you're like, Okay,
don't quite get it. And this issomething I learned as a game

(49:25):
designer. That's because theinstruction is the very last
thing you do hours of playtesting. You got it all figured
out. You know the rules byheart. Everyone you play with
knows the rules by heart. Andthen you're like, crap. I gotta
write all this down, and then itsort of gets done at the end.
That doesn't go through thatiterative process to the extent
that it should. So I'm gonnagive it a b minus for gameplay.

(49:46):
Oh,

Brian (49:46):
Oh that seems unduly harsh. I think you're being too
harsh. I really do.

David (49:50):
Well, it's like when you talk to an artist though, right?
Like everybody criticizes theirown work.

Brian (49:54):
yeah, so we're gonna, we're gonna inflate that a
little bit. I think thegameplay, I think it is fun. I'm
always worried that the bias of,hey, I'm a card carrying
microbiologist, maybe how muchthis is influencing me. I don't
really care. It's a B, let's behonest, not a b minus. That's a
fun game. You definitely get theA out of the science. From my
perspective. Jason, do you? Do?You agree with me? You agree
with me, right?

Jason (50:15):
I'm thinking because, again, I was trying to, I was
trying to recuse myself frombeing put in this position, but
no, I think like B for gameplayis good A, maybe A- minus
territory for the science, justbecause part of me thinks that
if it's a gut check game, theyshould all be gut bacteria. But
that's a that's a littlequibble, to be honest.

Brian (50:33):
That's true. We didn't do our nitpick, did we? I guess my
nit pick was that you don't getplague in the gut.

Jason (50:38):
That's probably just it. And I think also, we have gotten
spoiled by deep science games.There are several that we've
gone over that have an amazing,like, very huge amount of
science in them where, like,each card has its own little
fact and everything. And so it'slike, it's hard to compare to
get some of those. I think Davidyour your evaluation, is spot
on, it does what it set out todo.

Brian (50:58):
And it was also, it's a pioneering game. Like you said.
This was 10 years ago. This waspre wingspan. This was pre the
sort of boom in science andeducational games. This was,
have you had a chance to play,like cytosis, for instance, or
any of the games from geniusgames, where the sort of hard
science concept is at the at thecenter?

David (51:14):
I played some of them, yeah. And, I mean, I had one
called pathogenesis. Oh, there'sa lot of really cool science
games out there, and they comemuch prettier boxes, much more
effective, the boxes we don'tneed to talk about that I tried
to explain to them, that gamershave a certain expectation for
what a game box looks like, andthis they produce is not it at

(51:35):
all. on a shelf In a thriftstore, you'd be like, that's not
a real game because there's anaesthetic to what a game looks
like on a shelf, and they didnot care. But anyway, yeah, I
love many of those games, and Ilove the fact that science games
are popular.

Jason (51:51):
all right. Well, I think that's we're going to close down
here. I will say, if any of youlistening to this, are aspiring
game designers and want to cutyour teeth on gut check v2 you
would now have not only a bunchof ideas to do so, but you have
permission, because it's allCreative Commons. So you can go
out and do it and publish it,and publish a paper on it, and
there you go. That's how you canget started with that. Just
gonna say, Thank you, David forcoming on. This was great having

(52:13):
you here. I liked doing this assomething that's very dear to my
heart with the microbiomescience, but also something that
was made by a scientist to teachscience and see that other side.
As we said on here before,educational games sometimes get
a bad rap. And I'll be honest,your paper did not dissuade me
from that. As you mentioned, allthese educational games I had
never heard of,

Brian (52:32):
we haven't found a good game to talk about bacteria. So
honestly, for that reason alone,I loved being able to play gut
check, and I was excited to getthe printed copy to do so.
David, where if you wantedanybody to reach you, you said
you've gotten letters andthings. First of all, do you
want people to be able to get intouch with you? And second,
where would you like them to beable to do that?

David (52:50):
The best way to get in touch with me is on social
media, either x or blue sky. Andit's David A Coil,

Jason (52:57):
All right. So any of you who want to play gut check to go
ahead and look it up atmicrobe.net we'll put the link
in the show notes, and untilnext time, have a great month
and happy gaming.

Brian (53:05):
Have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

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S2E02 - Gut Check (Microbiome)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}S2E02 - Gut Check (Microbiome)