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Passover Is Better With Game Design

Gamify your Seder.
That's better. Photo: Emanuel Maiberg

Those of us who observe Passover are in for a gauntlet tonight, but if you had Gabe Smedresman's and Rachel Neurath's Interactive Haggadah, which aims to improve the whole experience using game design concepts, you'd probably have a better time.

If you're having a traditional Seder, whoever's considered the man of the house will sit at the head of the table, open a Haggadah—a kind of instruction manual for the night—and preside over a long and often convoluted process of Hebrew blessings, breaking of matzah, intermittent eating, and hiding of food around the house. Somehow, all of this is meant to reflect the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, a journey from slavery to freedom.

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It's not until you've had gentiles over for Seder and watched them exchange wide-eyed glances as you dipped your finger into a glass of wine and dripped it onto the plate while chanting the ten Plagues of Egypt (Blood, Frogs, Lice, Boils, et cetera) that you notice that this is one of the weirdest things even secular Jews do every year.

You play with your food more than you eat it for most of the night, and many families abandon the ceremony halfway through and start digging into matzah balls because it gets tedious.

Consider the fact that the Haggadah asks people to go back for some more ritual after everyone is stuffed with food. It's an absurdly tall order.

Smedresman, an experienced game designer, told me the Interactive Haggadah's goal is to keep people engaged by giving everyone around the table a way to participate and allow them move through the night at their own pace, but without losing the essence of the holiday.

He and Neurath created it in collaboration with The Kitchen, a "startup Jewish community" in San Francisco. Its founding rabbi, Noa Kushner, provided the rabbinical oversight to make sure the important stuff wasn't lost in the process.

This is a perfect match for Passover because the essential instruction is to imagine it as if you yourself were there, liberated from slavery

Unlike the book format of the traditional Haggadah, the Interactive Haggadah is presented as a pack of cards. There are numbered ritual cards, which contain all the essential religious ceremony, concept cards that invite people to discuss one of Passover's themes (slavery, for example), and action cards. The Tikkun Olam action card asks you to do something nice for someone else at the table, and I'm guessing that the self-explanatory Drink card is the most coveted in the deck.

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Rather than have one person preside over the Seder, you shuffle the cards and hand an equal amount to everyone around the table. If you follow the ritual cards by the numbers you'll get something that looks very much like a traditional Seder, only that more people get to participate, with each person handling the section he was dealt, and you're invited to play the extra cards as you please.

"The unique power of games is that you're not just looking at a story from the outside, you're actually in the moment," Smedresman told me. "The whole point of games is you are the player, you are making choices, you are put in the situation the game is trying to represent."

He said that this is a perfect match for Passover because the essential instruction of the holiday is to imagine it as if you yourself were there, liberated from slavery.

"[Passover] has always been interactive," Smedresman said. "You're doing these actions, you're telling a story. It's a uniquely well-suited occasion for a game."

The Plagues card. Photo: Emanuel Maiberg

Passover doesn't only resemble a game in that it comes with an instruction booklet, tasks that need to be performed, and an epic story; it even contains a little scavenger hunt within it in the form of the Afikoman. The Interactive Haggadah is only redesigning what is already there to keep people engaged, which Smedresman told me is a guiding principle at The Kitchen.

"It's about keeping a solid core of tradition and language, the essential elements of the faith, but at a communication level, completely opening up everything, and rethinking how Judaism applies to modern day life," he said.

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Smedresman, Neurath, and The Kitchen have been prototyping the Interactive Haggadah since last year, and they learned that not all game design ideas were good fit since then. The original version was designed as a board game, but between all the guests, food, and essential Seder Plate, table space is very constrained, hence the cards. Another version had a pointing system that used candy to keep score, but this turned out to be a logistical nightmare. More importantly, people just didn't care.

"The test I did with my family was really cool," Smedresman said. "I didn't feel like I really knew a lot of the people because the only time I saw them was Passover. The cards got them to open up."

Some challenges persist, namely going back to ritual after you're full of food and wine. Even the Interactive Haggadah hasn't cracked this problem.

"We're working on that," Smedresman said. "We need to figure out a way to tie it all together, and I think that's one of the places where game design techniques can be a powerful force. You can use rules to set up tension that only gets resolved at the end, after dinner, to give it closure."

A Seder, Smedresman said, is also like a game in that it's a special, safe play space, in which you agree to engage with an alternate set of rules. The Interactive Haggadah wants to help you in there, and good closure is important to step out back into the normal world, hopefully a little bit changed by the experience.

"We'd like to use game rules to make that experience happen more reliably and more meaningfully for more people," Smedresman said.

You can buy the Interactive Haggadah (version 2.0) on The Kitchen's website for $28.