Revenge of the Interns.
Who pays for the CEO’s annual bonus? The junior intern, of course. Corporate Shuffle, the new card game designed by Dr. Richard Garfield, C’85, Gr’93, features rules as illogical as those in any corporate workplace. And no wonder — it’s based on Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoon, which mocks every facet of office life from cubicle politics to acronym addictions.
The hobby that led Garfield to become lead game
designer at the Washington state-based Wizards of the Coast, Inc., began
in junior high, he explains: “It was triggered by Dungeons &
Dragons, which really puts the player in the role of game designer.”
Garfield planned a career in mathematics teaching and research, but
never gave up game-designing for fun. While he was earning his Ph.D. in
combinational mathematics at Penn, Wizards of the Coast purchased a game
he had created years earlier, RoboRally. His next creation for the
company, the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering, sold 10 million
cards in six weeks.
In Corporate Shuffle, players race to empty their hands and
ascend the corporate ladder, achieving leverage with tools such as the
ominously-named “Twirling Wedgie” card. By tapping into Dilbert‘s
popularity, Garfield says, his company hopes to attract more game
players. “We have a hope that games will become an accepted form of
entertainment on the level of movies or sports.”
