Barry Joseph: Welcome back, listeners. Before we jump into today's episode, which will be looking at how my book, Matching Minds with Sondheim, is being used in game design classes in universities, first, we're gonna have a public service announcement, especially for all the authors out there.

For recently, yes, my friends, I was scammed for months. I want to now tell you the tale, and in exposing my story, hopefully save one of you from falling into the same fate. As an author, I receive multiple emails a week flattering me with details only a reader or an AI can glean from my book. This is followed then by an empathic offer to help me get my book to more readers.

The details change every time, but the formula is always the same: flatter, empathize, then offer help for a fee. At first, I found them curious epistemological artifacts of our time. In this context, I received the following email from someone named Ian.

It started actually on my birthday, on March 24th. "Hello, Barry. I recently finished Matching Minds with Sondheim and wanted to reach out personally. As someone who has spent decades writing thrillers and espionage novels, I do not write notes lightly, and this one felt earned. What stayed with me most was your...",

dot, dot, dot. A whole bunch of nice things about me and what I wrote about. And then back to Ian talking about himself. "Having begun my career in journalism before moving into fiction in the early 2000s, I've always been drawn to..." Dot, dot, dot. More about him. Again, kind of flattering. "I know from my own experience the invisible labor behind such projects."

Now empathizing with me. "If you are ever open to exchanging thoughts on the craft of translating intricate real-world phenomena into narrative or the challenge of engaging readers while honoring complexity, I would welcome that conversation. Simply respect from one author to another." No ask to sell me anything, no pitch.

It was just, "Hey, I like what you did, and I wanna talk." Now, this is a person who should be public, right? At the bottom was a link to the author's page on Amazon, and then a professional author's page as well.

So I clicked on him, and it looked real. And of course it looked real 'cause it was real. This was a real person. I could see their books, and I thought, "Well, that's really nice." So I wrote back. I thanked Ian for his kind words, and I said, let's get on the phone. Happy to chat." And Ian wrote back saying it generally made his day to hear that my note resonated, and they'd love to continue exchanging thoughts, but here by email, and then asked me some questions. I wrote back to Ian, "Forgive me, I trust you are real, but I get sent AI-crafted emails all the time targeting naive authors.

And the last paragraph of your last two emails say different things but have identical structures, a common technique found in AI-written missives. Express curiosity, ask a question that is slightly flattering, and then comment on the nature of the question." And I wrote, "I hope I'm not being insulting, but I only write this as I hope I'm completely wrong."

So I guess I'm asking, can you prove you're human?" And as you can hear, I wanted to connect with this author. I was really flattered they wanted to talk to me, and I thought that'd be fun.

So Ian wrote me back, "Fair question, and no offense taken at all. I understand why you asked. Yes, I'm real, and I write my own emails." And just says more about himself and his books and says they get it too. They've also gotten some odd email outreach. So I thought, "Okay, that's cool." So for the next few months, we exchanged emails about the craft.

March, April, May. In June, he asked, "Out of curiosity, what's been one of your biggest challenges as a writer? Is it more the creative side or things like publishing and getting the work in front of the right readers?" These are the kind of questions he would often ask, and we would write back and forth. And here I said, "For my challenge, creativity is never a problem.

It's about getting the support I need to get it out to readers." Two things then happened. One, he wrote, "What you said about your biggest challenge really resonated with me. For me, things started to change when I eventually connected with the team I work with." And without selling the team, without saying their name or any link, just said a few sentences about how helpful they were.

I never pushed into that, and I focused on chatting about craft. But the same day, I received an email from someone named Marnie. Let's put Ian aside for a while. My email from Marnie, June 10th. " My name is Marnie, and I'm part of You'll Love This Want a Book Club and More, a Goodreads community with several thousand engaged readers. And they talked about how they choose books, and every month people read them, and they love picking different books.

And then they say why they thought Matching Minds would be a good one for those folks. So I clicked on the link, and I looked at this thing on Goodreads. I saw that every month that's exactly what they do, and Marnie also had a link to their Goodreads profile, which I saw, and how long they were involved.

And then a disclaimer at the bottom: "This invitation is extended deliberately. You are receiving it because your book stood out to our reader community. If this opportunity does not align with your goals or if you have a different perspective on your book, you're welcome to disregard this message."

So a sell, but a light sell. And after many emails back and forth, I thought it would be great to have a dedicated book club read my book, and they would create a reader's guide as well, which I could use on my site afterwards. I thought it was pretty cool. So I negotiated a price, and I went to the link Marnie gave me to pay for it.

Flags went up right away. First, it was to pay for something through buying a ticket on Eventbrite, which is pretty odd, and second, I saw what the other events were, which was other random amounts of money clearly being billed to other authors. So I decided to look deeper into her account on Goodreads, and I saw if there was a way I could friend her with a message in my request.

So I wrote back to Marnie and said, "I have an idea. I can send you a friend request, and you can accept me and tell me what message I wrote in my request. Shall we do that?"

Marnie didn't like that idea. When Marnie wrote back saying they refused to do that, then I knew something wasn't right. And I wrote back, "If you are unable, then I think this is a scam.

The webpage says," as I noticed for the first time, "Marnie isn't active as an admin. You should be ashamed of yourself. And if you are be- and," and I meant this quite sincerely, "if you are being held captive in a Burmese work camp, know we are fighting for you." I then reached out to a current admin of the group, the real group that I saw was live on Goodreads, and she told me, "Wow, I've not been involved in that group on Goodreads for years.

Lovely to see they're still going. I'd assume that anyone asking you to pay to add your book is a scam. I think they have a longstanding policy of not allowing book promotions Marnie then wrote me back saying, "Don't look down on anyone you have never worked with simply because they never satisfy your conscience.

That's a bad attitude." First of all, suddenly the tone has changed, and second, this was no longer clearly being written by an AI. I wrote back, "You are clearly a scam artist. If you need to keep emailing me in order to not be punished, please feel free, but I know you're in no way connected to this real person, nor in any position to deliver what you promised."

Marnie wrote me back, "Have you ordered my service before that you know I can't deliver what I promise?" Period. To which I replied, "You are no longer making full sentences nor sense. I spoke with the Goodreads group. They said they never take money to promote a book, and Marnie is no longer an admin. Drop the ruse.

The gig is up." This is when I realized, actually, over all these weeks, Ian had stopped emailing me shortly after Marnie had first emailed me. On June 25th, I went to the real Ian's author's page and found his real email. I wrote to him, "Ian, have I been emailing with you," below, "or is it a scam artist using AI to prepare responses?

If a scam artist, I at least enjoyed pretending we were in conversation." The same week, Ian wrote back, "Dear Barry, definitely a scammer, unfortunately. They are prolific and quite clever. Cheers, Ian." On June 27th, the fake Ian wrote me back, "Hi, Barry, my apologies for the delayed reply. I've been catching up on a few things here, but I didn't want to rush my response because I really enjoyed your message."

To which I responded, "Marnie, I am not interested. Stop writing me." To which I received one final email, not from fake Ian, but from fake Marnie. It was simply two words, "Mad man." Now, I share this not to brag, but to normalize the shame involved in being subjected to scams. That is part of how they work. I spent months emailing with a scam artist, letting them learn about my writing process and getting close to sharing details about works in progress.

I spent weeks emailing with a second scam artist or their teammate and had decided in my mind to give that person money. I only stopped because they did a bad job with the financial transaction. I'm so embarrassed that I let it get as far as it did. My knowledge of how scams target their victims and my expertise with identifying AI-constructed text was still not enough to stop this months earlier. Blaming the victim, "Why did you ever do that?"

makes it hard for people to admit when they are being stung, which makes it harder for others to protect themselves. We understand that the algorithms in video games and mobile apps are sophisticated, designed to hack into the reptilian aspects of our brain and manipulate our actions. Scam artists are just as sophisticated, and they work by creating fear or flattery, both which shuts off our executive functioning.

We stop thinking critically, and then they isolate us. So watch for red flags, take a breather, and check with a trusted contact before providing access or giving money. And if anyone tries to stop you from doing any of that, set off the alarms. So other writers out there, please know you're not alone. Okay, sorry that was so heavy.

The special service announcement is now over. Let's get on with the show. And when it's done, please send me gift cards from Best Buy or 300 crypto coins, or this podcast will lock down your phone

Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. In today's episode, We'll be bringing back Eric Zimmerman to talk about the final section of my book,

Group A: How to Play the Sondheim Way. As I've said many times, I spoke with over 100 people across the development of my book, but most of them were for the first part of my book, Group One: Stephen Sondheim, A Ludological Biography. Group A, however, is a look back at that biography, an analysis of those games and puzzles. So while I wrote the first section through others, the last section I wrote mostly on my own.

But Eric has taken it and done something with it. He has brought it into his classroom months before my book was even released. So I wanted to chat with him about how my take on Sondheim's game and puzzle design values took on a new life when adapted for his classroom. And I want to invite to join us for today's conversation one of his students, A. Raph Corwin, who would later attend a number of my own book-related workshops

A is a game designer and theater artist who received her MFA in game design from the NYU Game Center. One of her main missions as a game designer is to help people get off their phones and get outside. She recently founded a business to do just that. Her company, Pigeon's Path Games, designs location-specific, puzzle-filled game books that turn city neighborhoods, college campuses, and other destinations into your personal playground. And as I mentioned, this is key, she was also both a student of Eric's and attended two of my workshops, bringing a valuable and unique perspective to this conversation. Welcome, A.

A.: Thank you for having me. Hi.

Barry Joseph: A, is there anything else you want to say or correct about your introduction?

A.: No, that was a great bio. Thank you for the introduction.

Barry Joseph: We're so glad you can be with us. All right, so Eric, let's start with you because I'm now gonna ask you about stuff that I don't know anything about. What was this class? What sources did you pull from my book? Why Matching Minds in the first place?

Eric: Well, the class that you're talking about has the incredibly uninteresting name of Game Design. Game Design 1 is an introductory course that all of the MFA students take, and A was an MFA student in our program. Game Design 2 is kind of an advanced version of the class, and the way that that class is structured is that it's co-created between the students and I. So it's a graduate design seminar. And I list a whole bunch of possible topics, and they contribute ideas for topics as well. Then once we've all voted on and decided what we want the class to be about, then I kind of hammer all of that into a syllabus and we get rolling. For the past few years, one of the topics that the students really wanted to study was puzzles and puzzle design. So that was true of the year that A took the class and the most recent year, this last year that just happened. We had a puzzle unit. So, during that unit, we're playing puzzles, we're reading about puzzles, and I had just heard about your book. I think that I was reading the manuscript so I could write that back cover blurb. And we incorporated, your book as a reading. Not the whole book, but the section of the book where you really talk about things from a game designer's point of view.

Barry Joseph: And A, can you tell us what it was like from your perspective?

A.: Of course. So when we started the unit on puzzles, I remember feeling a little bit like, not lost exactly, but that I'd always known I'd liked puzzles, but I never really realized how much I liked puzzles. That was really, like, a very revelatory section of the class for me of like, "Oh, one of the reasons why I'm a game designer is actually I wanna be a puzzle designer, specifically a narrative puzzle designer." So when we read your sections in the book of the sort of the, what is it, the seven rules... the seven rules Sondheim has for puzzle design, that really helped solidify for me, the best practices for puzzle design, right? Within game design, there is not a lot of focus on puzzle design, even though they're an integral part of many video games. And so that section of your book was just very helpful for me to start critically thinking about how to improve as a puzzle designer. Which I've, of course, taken into the business work that I'm now doing and my thesis that I did. So yes, it was incredibly informative for me as a puzzle designer.

Barry Joseph: So help me understand. If I was a student in the class, and you've assigned the reading, Eric, what came next? What was I doing with it? How did it get enacted within the class?

Eric: Well, had printed out a dartboard with your face on it, Barry, and we... kidding. We... one of the nice things about that class, and actually throughout the NYU Game Center, is that we integrate this idea of doing readings, looking at references, playing games into the act of making, right?

The center of any design class is actually making puzzles. So over the course of a few weeks, we're in the puzzle unit, and students are working in groups to do a puzzle project. And they're doing that. They get different constraints. I think they get constraints on the format of the puzzle and also on the domain of the puzzle.

Like, for example, format might be a webpage or a poster series. The domain might be language puzzles or logic puzzles, and then they also get a theme from a list that we brainstorm together. Then over the course of them working on that project, we're looking at readings by authors, and sourcebooks and things like that and playing puzzles in class. So your book was one of those things. And I, remember in our discussion, you know, we didn't necessarily, like, dissect every paragraph, but I asked students to think about what were some of the guidelines or best practices, as A mentioned, that were useful. And I think what's interesting about the book and the way you've structured it is that there's this kind of three nested sets of best practices, right? You have Sondheim's three principles of play. Then you have advice for game designers, and I think that one has four rules. And then you have a dozen rules for clue crafters, right? So it's kind of like the lists get bigger as they also get more specific in terms of what you're designing. And basically I just said, "Hey, which of these spoke to you? Which of these do you think are interesting or useful for your current projects?" And we started making a list on the board and just discussing them as principles of, good game design or good puzzle design.

Barry Joseph: Were the students aware that this was not just someone in games and puzzles, but someone who was considered one of the greatest creative minds in the 20th century in the area of musical theater, or was that irrelevant to the conversation?

A.: So, I come from a theater background and so for me it was like, "Oh, wow! Okay, Sondheim." I'm one of the few people that I think is the audience for your book, which has both backgrounds of game design and musical theater. So I was very intrigued by that fact, and that, I think of myself as sort of a budding multi-hyphenate, and I was very intrigued by his very multi-hyphenateness here of going through all these different art practices. Because I could see how some of the things that he said also really work with playwright, as a playwright myself. In a different kind of way, but I could see how they're very interconnected. And so for me it was a revelatory big deal to see that. I think that probably for most of my classmates it was not as much so.

There weren't that many musical theater fans in the classroom. But yes, for me personally that was very intriguing. That he was this, you know, great, larger than life character in musical theater, which is relatively, you know, quote unquote, "highbrow," considered highbrow art. And of course, games struggle with being taken seriously in society, so to see somebody that was so lauded. He says he wants to be a video game designer. Like, that was very fun for me to see in your book, yes.

Barry Joseph: Eric, I'm curious if you have any advice for other people who are in a situation as you were, teaching game design or puzzle design, and how they might make best use of my book in their curriculum. And yes, you will be getting a cut of all books sold after this.

Eric: Ah, no. , I think that I mentioned in my blurb on your book that I think that this is kind of a, must reading for puzzle designers. And I just think that what you've done so beautifully in that last section of your book is distilling, Sondheim's principles of good design. Now, these kinds of best practices, they're never like laws in stone , that you must obey, right? But they are really interesting and handy guides and tools that you can use as you're developing puzzles and play testing games to kind of figure out what's going wrong, how do I make this better, how could I fine-tune this into something, that could work well as an experience that I'm creating. And in, terms of integration, I think , what's so awesome about your book is that you've distilled these principles down into lists that can be discussed like I did with the students in class. You know, I think that, many of them were echoed in other readings and discussions that we had.

You know, for example, I would say the difference between a puzzle and a game is that, to use Scott Kim's definition, which we had read a couple weeks earlier, Scott Kim, a game designer, puzzle designer, is that a puzzle is a game with a single correct answer, right? That doesn't mean there's one way to solve it, but if you think about something like a crossword puzzle, like there is an answer, and I'm trying to figure out what the answer is. Whereas in a game of poker, okay, there's not one right way to play. It all depends on what's in my hand, what's on the table, the way my opponents are playing. There's not one solution, right, to playing poker. But there is one solution to, you know, a maze or a riddle or a crossword puzzle. So that's the classic idea of what a puzzle is. So when you're in that design space, you're often wrestling with this idea of difficulty. You know, you wanna be challenging to your players, but, you don't wanna make it so hard that it becomes frustrating. So a lot of the principles that you've extracted, like just to be generous to your players, to think about giving them clues kind of letting them win. You're not in opposition to your players. You're not trying to sort of like stump them. It's the opposite. You want them to eat the food that you're serving, right? You don't wanna keep them from eating it. So you wanna serve these delicious things And, you know, have them enjoy it. And then, lastly, in addition to those wonderful principles, that that's just one tiny example, is that you've listed the actual rules for the games, so that if people wanna actually play the games, you've very beautifully and clearly elucidated exactly how they can play.

Barry Joseph: And Eric, do I understand right that you brought the book back this past year, which would be the second year?

Eric: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: In the program? And if so, did you use any of those game rules and have them play them?

Eric: We discussed the games in detail. I don't know if we actually played one of the games. Sorry, Barry. Did we play any of the games, A, in the year that-

A.: I don't believe so. We read through... 'Cause we didn't have the full book at that point. It wasn't published yet when we had it our year. So we read through, the different lists of rules for designers, and then we read about the murder game. We didn't play them.

Eric: I think, Barry, what happens is that we actually read your book as a kind of advanced reading near the end of the unit, and at that point, the students have already played a lot of games, and they are eager to work on their own projects.

So all of those examples and ideas were folded into

Barry Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Eric: Their work as designers and definitely had a positive impact on them.

Barry Joseph: And I imagine at that point they've developed, not just through this course but through the program, the literacy to be able to look at a set of rules and know what kind of emergent properties will emerge from them that other people might need to actually see played out to fully understand what that system's about.

Eric: Do you agree with that, A? Can you look at a set of rules and extrapolate?

A.: I am the type of person that often needs to play something. But it actually, it really depends on the game. Like for me, for whatever reason, I have a really hard time imagining play with like a deck builder . I have to just, I have to play it to get it. , But, for actually a lot of strategic games, I can read the rules and understand the heuristics. Like more simple strategic games. But I think everybody's different. A lot of it has to do with your different styles of learning, whether you're a more tactile or visual learner. So yeah.

Eric: It's so interesting, Barry, that you called that a form of literacy. I do think that it is that. There's sort of a joke among game designers that there's that scene in Amadeus when Salieri is looking at Mozart's score, just the written notes, and then starts crying because he can hear the music in his head looking at the notes. So-

Barry Joseph: Nice

Eric: We always had a joke at the Game Center of seeing a student apply to the program and look at the rules of the game, and they would be so beautiful that we would start crying. I don't think that ever happened, but that's kind of what you're talking about, right?

Barry Joseph: That's right.

Eric: That ability to kind of look at a set of rules and appreciate them. Even without playing them. And again, I think what's what's so interesting about that example is that it is actually totally appropriate, right? Because we're talking about music and structures and, you know, that is one of the, these kind of common linkages.

Barry Joseph: And Eric, that's exactly what I asked you to do with me today. We did not play Sondheim's games. We looked as much as we could into his rules and imagined what they were like to then comment on them,

Eric: Yeah.

Barry Joseph: You did quite beautifully and movingly, and maybe brought some of our listeners to tears.

Eric: Yeah, probably because they're waiting for this episode to be over.

Barry Joseph: Stop. A, I'd like to ask you which of Sondheim's design principles spoke to you the most?

A.: I'm sorry I don't remember exactly how you phrased it in the book, but the one that always sticks out to me the most is one of the ones Eric mentioned already. My own paraphrase is, you want to make the player feel smart. You do not want them to struggle. Being a puzzle designer is not about being like, "Ooh, look at me, the puzzle designer. I'm so smart. Ha ha ha." Like, "I created a puzzle that no one can solve, so it's not fun." That is not the point of at least my ethos as a puzzle designer. I know some people love extremely complex puzzles that people bang their heads against. Some people, th-that's a very specific niche, niche of puzzles, but I like to be a puzzle designer for the masses. And to be a puzzle designer for the masses, you really have to think about this sort of sweet spot of you want it to be challenging, want it to make people go, "Huh." But you also wanna make sure that you have in the design that ability to have that a-ha moment of, "Oh, I get it," and you can solve it. So that's, I think, what I took the most. As a designer, you have to leave your ego at the door. It's really not about showing off your own intelligence.

Barry Joseph: Nice. I love that. And I love that that inspired you. And what I'd love to do now is hear about how both Eric's class and coming to my workshops helped inspire you now that you've graduated. So to do that, let's first go back and paint out the chronology. So A, you were in Eric's class a year and a half ago. That was months before my book came out. That was the winter-spring semester. And then that September, a month before my book came out, you came to not one, but two of my workshops. One was at the

A.: New York Library, specifically the performing arts, branch of the New York Public Library.

Barry Joseph: That's right, and that workshop was on-

A.: was on, treasure hunts, Sondheim's treasure hunts.

Barry Joseph: So tell us a bit about what that was like. What'd you do? What'd you take from it?

A.: So already at that point when I first went to your first workshop, I had been doing research for starting my own business. I knew that I wanted to create some sort of outdoor treasure hunt type games myself, sort of like outdoor escape rooms. So I'd gone and played a bunch of games over the summer in Europe mostly, 'cause these games are much more popular in Europe. So I'd been doing a lot of research, and I saw you know, the types of mechanics they used over there. And then I came to your workshop. I knew that you were coming to speak at NYU, so I signed up via Eventbrite, and then as I was signing up for that, it told me that you actually had another workshop that very night at the New York Public Library.

Barry Joseph: Great timing,

A.: it was great timing, and I saw that it was on treasure hunts. And so at this point, this was September, and so I was just starting to work on my thesis, and I was trying to start my own first game that I was just sort of really giving myself a sort of a hard deadline if I really wanted to try to design something in two months for Halloween. But I was feeling like I was struggling a little bit, and so I jumped in a bus and got to your workshop just on time. And, it was really, it was incredibly helpful because I saw through that workshop how both simplistic Sondheim's designs were, but also how evocative they were and how you could have narrative in them. . And then of course, you had us in that workshop do a little bit of design at the end of it with some people in the workshop, and so that just made me feel more confident in the moment. I saw that, oh, I could use this to make a puzzle. I could use this to make a puzzle, 'cause we were walking around the library looking at things on the walls. And so it was exactly what I wanted to do in my work, but here I am practicing it in this workshop, and so it was just so helpful. The next day I just started to design my own puzzles, for Greenwich Village. At first, I started to use some of the design types that you showed us that Sondheim used just to sort of onboard myself, and then I extrapolated there and went in a broader puzzle direction. But it was incredibly helpful to get myself started and just to see how something very simplistic in a way, and I mean simplistic in a very positive way. Simplistic puzzles are fun, but very hard to design. And so that's, I think that's one of the main things I took from that workshop.

Barry Joseph: And now you've graduated. Congratulations.

A.: Thank you

Barry Joseph: And all those things that you talked about learning from Eric and from my workshops that you started playing with and iterating and experimenting with designing treasure hunts in the real world based on what you were learning. Where has that taken you now?

A.: So now basically, from everything that I learned, at the NYU Game Center and from your book, I started my own company. It's called Pigeon's Path Games, and I specifically design outdoor adventure games that have a very strong narrative, but they are puzzle-filled. And so you have to solve puzzles to slowly unfold the narrative, and they're all designed for very specific locations. So right now I'm designing for New York City. My first game is in Greenwich Village. A Haunting in Greenwich Village is its title, and you have to play in Greenwich Village. You have to use architecture that's built into your surroundings. You have to go find it, and you have to use the architecture aspects of it, whether it's plaques or statues. But there's some sort of visual aspect that you then use to help solve the puzzles. So I'm planning to expand this business, go to more cities, to have games for university campuses and other locations. So I've fully embraced the title of puzzle designer.

Barry Joseph: Well, congratulations, and I just love that you are an example of someone who is paying forward Stephen Sondheim's work over his entire life, putting out puzzles and games, and through that, allowing me to be able to look at his work and put together my take on Sondheim's design principles, and that through the work that you're doing and the work that other people can do now that this work is available, the kind of ideas that he had, what stuff that Eric was talking about over the course of our time together in this episode, can have new echoes out in the world, but reinterpreted by new contemporary creative minds like yours.

A.: Yeah. As I said, I come from theater and now I'm in game design. Unfortunately Sondheim is no longer with us, but I feel this strong connection with him now that I never knew that I was going to have. So I feel very grateful for that as well.

Eric: I just want to add for your listeners, I want to just underscore a little bit how extraordinary A's body of work is and the work that you did here at the NYU Game Center. while most students are working in a group and they're trying to put together a video game that will be nice thing in their portfolio when they graduate. And nothing wrong with that, I think there's amazing games coming out. A really listened to the beat of your own drummer, right? You worked alone. You were creating a thing that doesn't really exist as a well-established genre, which is, like, wandering around a city, following clues, following a narrative, solving puzzles. And, you didn't just have this idea and made a little prototype or two. You actually in the fall ran a really commercially successful Halloween-themed event that included live actors. Then you kind of coalesced this into a more manageable book-based format, and you're ending the semester or you've just graduated, you know, a few weeks ago, from NYU with a whole business plan and, completed, you know, self-published books that you can potentially bring to a book publisher that could be interested in a whole series of

Barry Joseph: location-specific

Eric: interactive, historical narrative puzzle experiences. And again, just even to string those words together lets you know how unique they are, and I've played them. And they're fabulous. I really want your listeners, Barry, to kind of appreciate, how extraordinary A is as a designer, as a creative thinker. I think part of your strength is coming from this theatrical world and bringing all of that into your work as a game designer, but I just really want to applaud you. It's been fabulous to see, you bloom and grow and do these amazing things at the Game Center. And I can't wait to see what happens with your work and with Pigeon's path games.

A.: Thank you, Eric. That's so sweet of you. I will say definitely both of your works were incredibly, formative for me, so I couldn't have done it without both of you. And also to come back to something that you both said in your earlier conversation about Sondheim's board games and how they weren't really commercially viable. As Eric mentioned, yes, my first iteration, I had actors. I was playing the ghost that was haunting you on the trail, and I popped up at my players, and I haunted them, and I got lots of great screams. And everyone had a great time. But unfortunately, that version is not commercially viable, my theater plus game. And so that is why I have gone to a self-led game book style thing that I think is just as fun, but of course, it doesn't have as much theatrical interaction. So again, I learned another lesson that I think Sondheim also learned.. You can be very artistic in a commercially viable way, but you do have to sometimes leave some of your fun ideas at the door. So that's another thing that I definitely learned from from Sondheim and from all of you. But thank you again, Eric, for such kind words about my work.

Barry Joseph: And as we wrap up this episode, let me first thank you, A, for joining us today. It's always nice to see you. And please remind us again, how can we access your games?

A.: Of course. You can find me at pigeonspathgames.com. That's P-I-G-E-O-N-S, path, P-A-T-H, games.com. And also at Instagram, @pigeonspathgames.

Barry Joseph: Thank you listeners for joining us for Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. I also would like to thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis. Our line producer Dennis Caouki. And the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along. Until next time, remember, someone is on your side," especially when Matching Minds with Sondheim.

You did quite beautifully and movingly, and maybe brought some of our listeners to tears.

Eric: yeah, probably because they're waiting for this episode to be over. Stop