By Shinri Furuzawa
I was saddened to learn that due to complications of Covid (link here) Richard Tait, co-inventor of the board game Cranium, died recently at the age of 58.
Tait created Cranium with his business partner, Whit Alexander, a friend and former colleague at Microsoft. Cranium and its sister games were hugely popular in the 1990s and 2000s, selling over 44 million copies in 22 countries before the company was sold to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5 million.
The original spark behind the game is part of Cranium legend. As told by Whit Alexander, Tait was on a vacation with his wife and friends when someone suggested playing a board game. Tait found that while he and his wife were “extraordinarily good” at Pictionary, the other couple “destroyed them” at Scrabble. Tait wondered why there wasn’t a game where everyone could be good at some part of the game. He wanted to develop a new game that gave everyone a chance to shine. This concept would be the key to Cranium’s success.
MI Theory as “the great inspiration”
Alexander told MI Oasis that Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was “core” in the initial development of Cranium and that, “The original game depended on the comprehensive articulation of [MI theory].” Tait began with 4 activities: Hangman, Trivial Pursuit, Charades and Pictionary. He wanted something for what he understood as left-brained people and right-brained people—hence the brain logo and the name Cranium. Alexander, however, knew the challenge was to find a more robust framework to deliver on the promise that “everyone shines.” In researching intelligence with the conviction that people can be good at different things, MI theory “immediately popped up… and that was like an ‘aha’ moment.” Alexander and Tait came to understand it was not about left brain or right brain, it was about multiple intelligences.
Applying MI Theory to the game
According to Alexander, the development of Cranium was an exercise in marrying multiple intelligences with a systematic subject framework and an inventory of games that had been successful over the decades. Cranium was designed to include activities which relied on as many different intelligences as possible. Players might be required to hum a song, impersonate a celebrity, draw something while blindfolded, make a clay representation of a concept, or spell a word backwards, among other challenges. (In contrast, most games at the time challenged just one or two intelligences, such as linguistic and spatial intelligences required for Scrabble).
The intelligences were embodied across four Cranium characters: Word Worm, Data Head, Star Performer, and Creative Cat. Michael Adams, a lead game maker for a design shop that was contracted to invent additional games for Cranium, explained that MI theory was filtered into these four characters which could be described as “an artistic type, a player with words, a scientist, and an actor.” Adams said, “Every time I invented something… I had to be sure that the four characters were included and, by inference, their ability and/or intelligence.”
Bringing to bear their experience working with Encarta encyclopedia at Microsoft, Tait and Alexander also considered how best to appeal to different intelligences in Cranium’s different subject categories. Alexander described their method, “We went intelligence by intelligence and looked at Encarta subject categories”—for example, predicting that someone with naturalist intelligence might be interested in geology. Considering the game was targeted at “yupsters,” geology questions might be unexpected, “Yet,” as Alexander said, “there they were, and that’s why.”
Alexander also gave the example of musical intelligence, “We knew it wasn’t enough to ask questions about music, we needed activities that were intrinsically musical and that led directly to the ‘humdinger’ activity where you had to hum or whistle a song.”
A Smash Hit
Cranium was a runaway success. After the original Cranium, using the same principles, the company went on to win “Game Of The Year” with four different games in five consecutive years. Alexander described one moment on the Oprah Winfrey Show when instead of plugging the game she was meant to promote, Julia Roberts, said “Yeah, yeah that’s great, but there’s this new game— Cranium, I love it, we can’t stop playing!” Their phones did not stop ringing after that, as Alexander added “Thank you, Julia Roberts!”
When asked if he was astonished at the success of the game, Alexander responded, “You have to be humble, and many things could have gone wrong and did go wrong, but we had to truthfully say we weren’t totally surprised, because we did very explicitly architect, design and passionately develop the game to deliver on this experience [where everyone shines] so we were pretty optimistic that people were going to like this game.”
Everyone Shines
Alexander noted that after the news of Tait’s death, former Cranium employees re-connected and reminisced about what it meant to be part of the Cranium brand, “Everyone, almost to a person, said there was no daylight between Cranium brand values and the corporate culture. The single word that that best embodied it was shine.” He described the company as “a super engaged, super fun workplace… it felt like the game, people loved coming to work.” One of the company’s fun quirks was that people chose their own titles, Alexander being “Chief Noodler.” Catherine Carr led the content team for many years at Cranium as “Keeper of the Flame.” She said that beyond MI theory’s influence on game activities and content, “The underlying theory has had a tremendous impact on my professional and personal life since those days. So many companies are talking about how to be more inclusive these days, and I would observe that understanding multiple intelligences is a particularly powerful mechanism for encouraging diversity and inclusion!”
In my view, any game that encouraged people to value each player for being intelligent in their own way and to respect one another’s differences as strengths was a welcome addition to the toy and game industry. Whether in a game, work, or educational setting, a team is more likely to be successful when each person is allowed to shine and their individual intelligences and intellectual profile are respected. Howard Gardner has said that, “When our individual intelligences are yoked to positive ends, we can all pursue good work and good citizenship.” Perhaps a cooperative board game like Cranium which teaches us to celebrate “shining moments” for every player over a final result of winners and losers helps us move towards this worthy goal.
Thanks to Whit Alexander, Catherine Carr, and Michael Adams for their much appreciated reflections on MI theory and Cranium.
Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash