The entire staff of Psychology Today pitched in to design the B&W game, suggesting appropriate names for the various properties and actions on the opportunity cards. Mary Harrington Hall, the managing editor, came up with the name for the game, and helped in the final selection of names and actions. A black group from San Diego played early versions of the game and made valuable suggestions. My task was to integrate all of the comments and suggestions and come up balanced, playable game. However, the balanced reward mechanism almost always led to a boring stalemate, so I altered the rewards mechanism to give the Blacks an edge if they played in a certain way.

I am not keen on games that rely on the roll of the dice to move the game along. My previous game for the magazine, the Cities Game, relied on voting scores to determine outcome. No dice, but chance did play a role in the form of opportunity cards that were drawn at certain points of the game. In several ways, the Cities Game exemplified the results of racism even more than the B&W game did. The original version of the Cities Game had a wide variety of power options for players, but because the game was to be printed in a magazine, I had to condense the options to only a few per player.The free-ranging interactions of the game players are key to the game results.

I think the original version of the Cities Game would work very well if players made their voting choices on a computer, which then would calculate the outcomes according to a hidden algorithm. I also have considered turning the Cities Game into an interactive computer simulation game, but it seems to me that the interactions between individuals and groups would be greatly diminished.

Psychology Today also created the first in-depth questionnaire survey that any reader of the magazine could participate in. I was the editor selected to develop these reader questionnaires. One questionnaire examined urban issues, and analysis of the answers of Psych Today readers revealed for the first time a fear of integrated schooling. Educated middle-class whites who said it was okay for their son or daughter to date or marry a black person did not always extend that acceptance to having blacks attend their white schools.

I do remember it being very entertaining and replacing Monopoly for awhile in our house.

Blacks can win most of the time if they play consistently in a certain way.

When designing the win/lose mechanism, I first tried out giving both sides roughly equal opportunities to win, but that led to stalemates in the game. So I decided to push the game in the direction of the underdog, and weighted the opportunities according.

The game can be modified by anyone simply by making changes to the opportunities decks, taking out those that are no longer relevant and adding new cards that reflect current issues.

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