Please Give Elizabeth Hargrave a MacArthur Genius Grant

Game Designers deserve more prestige

Would it surprise you to learn that there's never been a MacArthur Grant given to a game designer? The grant is a yearly, no strings attached award given to intellectuals across a variety of fields doing interesting work with outstanding talent. This might feel unimportant for a couple of different reasons:

1. The games industries are doing quite well, posting healthy profits year over year.

2. Games, culturally are quite popular! Lots of people play games

Why does it matter if they’ve never been culturally “recognized”?

1. Funding for games as art in the United States is woefully absent, so the fact that a source for funding interesting works chooses to ignore it.

2. Prestigious recognition is an important way that cultural conversations happen across a broader audience.

If games speak to more audiences about a wider range of topics it will deepen the games we can play and also improve our cultural experiences generally.

Why Focus on MacArthur Fellows?

One of my favorite authors growing up was David Macaulay. He might be best known for his work on The Way Things Work, but he also put together a series about big medieval construction projects. He was also connected to a very fun Pinball Game (which is apparently still purchasable in CD form at Amazon)

My first experience with the MacArthur Genius grant came in the form of David Macaulay. He wrote (writes) these illustrated books about the functioning of different pieces of history and technology. He turned complex workings of science and history into relatable, offbeat and funny stories.

The idea of making complex systems transparent and understandable was part of enchanted me about games in the first place.

As the MacArthur Grant describes itself:

The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.

Game Designers would seem to fit into any number of these fields, artists, teachers, humanists… Game designers also have historically tend to be incredibly self-directed. Often because there has been little to no guidance or structure for becoming a game designer.

But as Soren Johnson, lead designer on Old World and host of the podcast Designer Notes mentioned on X:

It is… in a word: stupid.

Why Game Designers Don't Win the Award

I think the biggest reasons are a stodgy relationship to commerce and prestige. Before jumping into this, I did some basic googling with a few of the bigger names in Board Games and the New York Times:

• Richard Garfield, Designer of Magic the Gathering

• Reiner Knizia, Designer of 100+ Board Games, who you may have never heard of but I almost guarantee the person who designed games you’ve played recently has almost certainly been influenced by

• Alan R Moon, Designer of Ticket to Ride, probably the second most popular non-Monopoly board game

• Klaus Teber, Catan

The only hit I got was on Klaus Weber, for his obituary.

The video game side isn't all that much better.

Baldur's Gate 3, arguably one of the most fascinating games of the last decade has come out and you would basically not know it existed from the perspective of the New York Times. It certainly didn’t help that The Washington Post laid off their entire vertical dedicated to video games coverage.

The absence of all of this would lead one to believe that game designers, as a creative class are basically uninterested and disconnected from the world. The connection isn’t the concept that popular coverage of games or game designers doesn’t happen. It clearly does. Matt Leacock has been featured in the New York Times a number of times (most recently for his upcoming game, Daybreak). It’s that broadly speaking, the coverage tends to focus on games as products, not game designers as creative people who are reasoning about current events and ideas using games as a method to reason about and communicate their ideas to the world.¹

There Are Other Reasons: Games and Commerce

The other discomfort that the Foundation might have is the tight relationship between commerce and game design. Especially with video games, it’s hard to draw a clear separation between a designer doing industry work and the team supporting them. I don’t want to spend a ton of time talking about it because it’s the worst version of that “and yet you participate in society” meme. It would be impossible to be a public game design creative and also not participate in the commercial side of it in some sense. And even beyond that, there are a host of game designers doing incredible work not in the industry. Butterfly Soup, comes to mind.

In that sense, it’s unsurprising why MacArthur might not prioritize giving money to game designers. Why give grants to people who aren’t getting talked about. And the prestige problem is a stupid chicken and egg issue. The ball needs to start rolling somewhere. It could start with The MacArthur Foundation giving a truckload of money to a worth designer. A designer like Elizabeth Hargrave.

Elizabeth Hargrave Deserves a Genius Grant

Elizabeth Hargrave is best known for her 2019 board game Wingspan, a Eurogame (one with economic mechanics) based on birds, their habits and behaviors.

While there are a lot of game designers who “deserve” a genius grant, but there are specific reasons why Elizabeth Hargrave would be an excellent candidate to be the first Game Designer awarded a MacArthur Grant. Now (well, next year) is a great time to start, and Elizabeth Hargrave would be a great designer to start with.

1. She's a brilliant designer who thinks about board games in a unique way that has enriched her industry.

2. She has the starts of the sort of broader coverage that a MacArthur might be interested in.

3. She's done a lot for board games, and women in board games as a whole, and her impact is worth more than just the sum of her (very impressive) designs.

Board games have taken off. Most of my friends have an idea about games that aren’t Monopoly, which is a pretty big step from where things landed in High School. But the gap between being a “board gamer” and a person who owns a board game or two, remains. Wingspan, along, inexplicably, with Terraforming Mars², is one of the games that I most often hear about from people who own a more complex game. It’s fun, the art is inviting, and it’s just complex enough to be interesting without being so complex that it’s incomprehensible.

And on top of that, she’s gotten coverage from larger national sources because of the popularity and the unique perspective.

New York Times Coverage: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off.

Axios DC: Best board games: Wingspan, designed by a D.C.-area local, is awesome for gamers and bird-lovers

While as a published designer, she's a relatively more recent entrant onto the board gaming scene, Elizabeth Hargrave has developed a very clear point of view on the types of games and designs she's interested in. She uses game design to create representations of the natural world, and pairs that with excellent artwork to create experiences that are approachable and deep. Her game, Tussy Mussy, is an whipsnap "I deal you choose" experience about giving each other floral arrangements and scoring points. She also create Mariposas about butterfly migrations and I’m eagerly awaiting the delivery of her new game The Fox Experiment, about Fox domestication.

On top of that she's made an effort to highlight the work of past women game designers who haven't gotten their due. I for one, didn't realize that Monopoly Deal was created Katharine Chapman until I learned about it on the Board Game Geek list she put together: Games by Women & People of Marginalized Genders

Monopoly Deal is an incredible game.

It's hard not to see how her success has made a positive impact on the gaming landscape more broadly, both in terms of who gets board games published and what types of themes are seen as “valid” uses of board gaming publishers resources. It's hard to imagine games like Forest Shuffle existing in a the world without the success of Wingspan.

There are three primary criteria for selection for a MacArthur Fellow:

1. Exceptional creativity

2. Promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments

3. Potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

She fits all of these categories, has a track record of being covered by prestigious outlets, and has shown herself to be a highly original thinker not fitting into typical industry molds, that one might most worry about with other game designers.

But the thing that I find the most inspiring about her work, is that same thing that made me excited about David Macauley as a kid. It’s playful, it’s unique, and it explores the world from a perspective that feels approachable and fantastical. The games make the word feel big and explorable. And that’s the type of person who deserves money to explore more ideas that can have an impact in her creative field and the world.

Game Designers Have Ideas

I would love to see Elizabeth Hargrave the first of many award winners. But I would also like to see more engagement between coverage of things happening in the world with the game designers who make popular games in the world. It’s such a flawed notion that games are escapes without any connection to the world they live in. Monopoly, the board game, was created as a treatise about capitalistic greed by Elizabeth Magie.

I would love to know what Richard Garfield has to say about Loot Boxes, a concept he basically popularized with Magic the Gathering (and played with in almost every design he’s created), or what Alan R Moon thought about while designing the newest Legacy Version of Ticket to Ride that explores an American West that isn’t drenched in colonial themes.

Game designers, even the very successful ones, are often thoughtful people who are using one of the most popular mediums of the moment to engage with many of the ideas that surround society. It would be lovely to push their ideas further into the world.

1. There are a whole other sets of conversations about the coverages of the arts generally, which games fall into and are impacted by. But generally the coverage of games

2. If someone could explain this one to me, I would love to understand it. It’s like one of the most complicated games I’ve played and yet people with minimal hobbyist interest in board games own it.