Conceived a 4-player board game inspired by politics

Anand Gandhi, filmmaker

There were two trains of thought that merged for the formation of Shasn [a board game on politics where players stand for elections, and use cash and social media to make common cause with voters]. One was that Vinay [Shukla] and Khushboo [Ranka] were planning on releasing a blu-ray version of An Insignificant Man, the movie they had directed. They wanted some kind of interactivity around it. At that point, we were deep into VR and AR, a vertical that was run by Zayn Memon. Vinay asked Zayn whether he could come up with an AR version of the film's cover, and that was the beginning of the conversation. Zayn has also been a designer who has spent some time thinking about what games are, what they mean, in a deep way. And this became a natural avenue for him to game-ify the idea of political discourse [the rough subject of An Insignificant Man].

I had no clue that something like this could be achieved. And I felt that this was the first example of the purpose of Memesys Culture Lab, the Goa-based film studio I had founded with my friends including Zayn - which was to not predict or pre-dictate the expression or form an idea can take. I played the same role in building this game that I do for most other projects at Memesys. I mentored, guided, facilitated and helped take the layer decisions and create narratives, though I wasn't required to be deeply engaged. The biggest problem we faced, though, was getting it produced in India. The quality of paper, printing material and expertise in cutting that we were looking for turned out to be really difficult to find here. From a larger studio perspective, I was also concerned about the fact that there is no market in India for a game like this. So, we thought of ways to engage with the local market and that was an exciting challenge.

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