Lifestyle
This TV writer crafted her most powerful narrative yet — in the form of a board game
I knew “The Morrison Game Factory” had its hooks in me when I started talking back to it. There I was, alone and at home, and in conversation with a fictional machine.
Puzzles were sprawled around me. Colorful dice, a small board, little plastic rocket ships and a stack of cards with seemingly disconnected drawings on them — a golfer, a mushroom, a diver and more. I was about two hours into Lauren Bello’s puzzle game, but I was devouring it more as a story. That’s because “The Morrison Game Factory” unfolds as an interactive narrative, one in which each challenge unlocks another mini-chapter in a tale of friendship, loneliness and even grief.
There were some moments the puzzles stumped me. I used the hint system on one involving numbers. But more often I found myself pausing to reflect — affected by a touching phrase. An example: “I like that, that talking to me isn’t work for him,” an observation about what it feels like to be in true conversation and connection with someone. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when I opened a bewitching, vintage-tinged box detailing a fantastical assembly line and saw a smattering of board game figurines. Later, I felt an urgency to complete the game, especially once the relationship at its core is severed.
Lauren Bello’s game, “The Morrison Game Factory.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
That’s when I wanted to communicate with the main character of “The Morrison Game Factory.” I sat, caught in contemplation, mulling over moments in my life in which I’ve had to navigate separation and heartbreak. Such is the power of Bello’s tabletop puzzle tale. There was no time to dwell, however. In seconds I was back at it, arranging little wooden people — meeples, as they’re known — around a pinwheel with numbers at the end of each spoke. There were puzzles to solve, and a story of loneliness to cure.
Bello’s “The Morrison Game Factory” was one of the best narratives I encountered — or played — this summer. Bello, an L.A.-based television writer who has written for such series as “Foundation” and “The Sandman,” began crafting the game for friends during the worst days of the pandemic. It’s a love letter to play as a form of communication, a treatise on how games can connect us and enable vulnerability in our relationships. It’s also a hopeful statement, one of moving on with gratefulness rather than sadness, and how every day can be full of a new playful discovery.
“I think grief can feel so sharp that you can’t look at it directly or else you’ll be blinded,” Bello, 36, says. “Games, and fiction and other forms of media can be a way to process your grief and your overwhelming feelings in the background without forcing you to look at it directly. If they’re done well, you kind of realize you and your grief are standing side by side and hand in hand, and you realize, ‘Now I can turn to face you.’”
To explore “The Morrison Game Factory” is a delight. The conceit: We are handed a box of stray board game pieces, all of them, we’re told, rescued from an abandoned game factory and seemingly connected. The game is a constant act of discovery — maintenance logs will lead us to a website, where we’ll get to know the characters who once worked at the now-defunct game warehouse. We’ll be tasked to look at crossroad puzzles in unexpected ways, to piece together visual obstacles, construct actual puzzles and partake in one task that feels like a mini science experiment.
We’re given numbers to call, and at times we’ll read the deeply intimate thoughts of the main character, which we learn via the opening puzzle is a machine that has been able to gain the gifts of human thought and compassion. The slight sci-fi bent came naturally to Bello.
Lauren Bello, a L.A.-based television writer, with her game, “The Morrison Game Factory.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I’m definitely drawn to genre,” Bello says. “I feel like the world is changing very quickly — the way that people speak, the way that people act, the things people have access to. Genre is a fun way to say what you have to say while also inoculating against the effects of time.”
What would become “The Morrison Game Factory” started as a holiday exchange for a puzzle enthusiast Facebook group. Bello’s game attracted attention, and eventually it reached Rita Orlov, whose Bay Area company, PostCurious, would go on to publish the title. “When I played it, I was most enamored with the range of emotions I felt while experiencing the narrative — it made me laugh, it made me feel sadness and empathy, and it really made me care for the main character, all of which feels like a rarity in tabletop games,” Orlov says.
“The Morrison Game Factory” reorients us to look for a story more than a solution, meaning at times we may make the puzzle more difficult than it actually is. I played solo, although up to three is recommended, and at times I wished I had someone to bounce ideas off of. That’s because sometimes the answer is simply hiding in a catalog description. In that sense, working out what the puzzles are asking us to do is occasionally more of a challenge than the actual puzzle, but the underlying narrative drive helps create a sense of urgency.
“The Morrison Game Factory” is a constant act of discovery set at a now-defunct game warehouse.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Bello says writing television helped her create the framework for the game, especially when it came to building tension.
“I think that ‘Morrison Game Factory’ naturally fell into three acts,” Bello says. “My experience in writing other kinds of stories told me what those acts were. Also, good stories control a flow of energy. They have a very intentional sense of momentum. I tried in the game to start off with it easy and an expected momentum, and then ramp up the energy. By the third act, you feel, ‘I’m on a roll. I’m on fire.’ The puzzles get a little shorter, and you start feeling like everything that came before is now coming together. That’s a skill set I learned from other writing.”
Still, the fact that the game is reaching a wider audience now has Bello rethinking some of her approach. “The Morrison Game Factory” started with a Kickstarter and quickly exceeded its $30,000 goal in just a few hours (PostCurious has a dedicated following in the tabletop arena for its narrative-focused games, notably the tarot-inspired “The Light in the Mist”). Reviews beyond the board-game world, in the escape room and immersive communities, have been positive and have praised the title as an approachable and emotional story-first game, with some even asking if it’s possible for a board game to make you cry.
“The magic trick of ‘The Morrison Game Factory’ is that you aren’t thinking about the puzzles. You want to solve them not for the sake of the puzzles themselves but for the sake of the character and the story,” says Lisa Spira, co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a site dedicated to the escape room sector.
And Bello wonders today if the opening puzzle — a cipher challenge — can overwhelm some of those new to the space. “I try not to waste people’s time unnecessarily,” she says. “Sometimes it’s easy to turn things into a puzzle. I always try to be more experience-focused. Like, is this going to enhance your experience to have this puzzle? is there going to be an ‘aha moment’ or a moment of delight, or is it going to lead to, ‘Oh great, now I have to put a lot of work into this puzzle?’”
Lauren Bello’s “The Morrison Game Factory” unfolds as an interactive narrative, one in which each challenge unlocks another mini-chapter in a tale of friendship, loneliness and even grief.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
And yet the game is relatively forgiving. When we’re led to the accompanying website, a robust hint system delicately gives away the solutions. The goal here is joy — games as a dialogue, which comes through as we emotionally heal the story’s protagonist.
“I played a lot of games with my family and I loved the way that games could become a shorthand for things,” Bello says. “I loved when one person could lay down a piece and everyone would go, ‘Ohhh.’ You immediately knew what they were doing. It was a whole unspoken language behind the movement of the pieces. You could be expressing allegiance with someone, or standing up to someone, and it was this other world of language.”
To experience “The Morrison Game Factory” is essentially to have a conversation, one in which we learn a dialect centered on play. And it turns out it’s a vernacular that’s adept at far more than offering a challenge.
“At the end of the day,” Bello says, “it’s used to express love. That’s what it is for me.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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