Ludology 240 - Are You Receiving Me?

Emma and Gil welcome Adrienne Smith, designer of the card game Blitz Champz and wide receiver for the Boston Renegades women's gridiron football team. We discuss the intersection of mass market, kids, and sports game design, the state of women's football in modern America, and serial entrepreneurship. This episode was recorded on November 16, 2020. A couple of weeks later, Vanderbilt brought their varsity women's soccer goalie, Sarah Fuller, onto their men's football team as a kicker. Note: This will be the last Ludology episode of 2020! We are taking our annual winter break, during which time there will be no episodes of Ludology, Biography of a Board Game, or GameTek. We will return on January 10, 2021 with our annual "State of the Industry" episode with the Podfather, Stephen Buonocore. SHOW NOTES 2m05s: Wondering how you can throw a spiral? 3m18s: Adrienne played for the New York Sharks. Here's the web page for the IFAF. 3m56s: More information about Jen Welter, the first female coach in the NFL. 5m14s: Gil wrote a Twitter thread about the history of women in football after the news about Sarah Fuller broke. 5m46s: Women's old-school football pants, versus MC Hammer's pants. 8m03s: The Women's Football Alliance, and the Women's National Football Conference 10m17s: More info about Ultimate, originally called Ultimate Frisbee. 10m42s: More info about Ultimate Hall of Famer Molly Goodwin. 14m00s: Adrienne is correct! The periodic table of the elements was first envisioned by Dmitri Mendeleev. Said he, "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary." 21m56s: You can hear more from our interview with graphic/game designer Daniel Solis on Ludology 204 - The Eyes Have It. 25m23s: Here's a closer look at Adrienne's "Passing TD" card. 27m26s: You can hear more from our interview with mass market toy/game designer Kim Vandenbrouke on Ludology 212 - Inventing Play. 29m47s: Here's a clip of the amazing Kyler Murray "Hail Mary" pass that somehow landed in D'Andre Hopkins' arms. This happened the day before we recorded. (I do not recommend Bills fans clicking on that link.) 34m28s: Adrienne is talking about New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, winner of 6 Super Bowls.  42m46s: More info about Gotham Girls' Roller Derby, the NYC-based roller derby organization. (There are other fantastic roller derby organizations around the world, like the world #1-ranked Rose City Rollers in Portland, OR, and the world #2-ranked Victorian Roller Derby League in Melbourne, Australia, all run by the Women's Flat Track Derby Association.) 44m17s: You can hear more about Omari Akhil's views on the intersection of sports and games in Ludology 233 - A Sporting Chance.  55m26s: The legendary arcade game Galaga. 58m37s: It may not have been a tornado that hit NYC on November 15, but it seems to have come very close to one. 1h07m49s: More info about Title IX, passed in the US in 1972, which prohibits discrimination in education based on sex. The upshot of this is that for most sports, if a school wanted to field a men's team in a given sport, they had to field a women's team as well.  1h09m03s: Pop Warner Football is a US organization for youth football, roughly equivalent to Little League baseball. It's named for legendary coach Pop Warner. Also, more information about Utah Girls Tackle Football. 1h10m51s: If you want to know more about minorities in the middle ages, a great place to start is People of Color in European Art History. 1h13m48s: Here's Adrienne's Instagram page.