- April 25, 2024
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Since they're pretty much always operating on the same wave length, Alex Lipinski and Roxy Marrese have long used each other as sounding boards for their different ideas.
"He would message me and say things like 'Alex, what do you want to have done at the push of a button?'" Lipinski said. "We've had a lot of different ideas and one finally came to life."
"It was my senior year at Florida State University, and Alex and I were shooting texts back and forth," Marrese said. "He had been batting this idea around about a card game and we thought it would be a cool way to keep ourselves busy during the summer."
Little did they know, the game — as it tends to do — took on another life of its own.
"If you do play and play it correctly, you won’t have a problem voicing your opinion. There will be no stigma to quiet yourself." — Roxy Marrese, co-creater of The Art of Debate.
The Art of Debate, a group card game where players take turns debating light-hearted questions like "Can you consider a fish a pet" to harder topics such as "Should the government fund space exploration," is now at the forefront of the minds of these two long-time best friends. Though the game encourages debate among players, the real goal for Lipinski and Marrese is to start a conversation.
"We want to get people talking and to not be afraid of having an opinion," Marrese said. "There's an epidemic, for lack of a better word, of people not forming their own opinions and instead latching on to something they read on the internet or saw on the news. If you do play and play it correctly, you won’t have a problem voicing your opinion. There will be no stigma to quiet yourself."
Though the game could unravel some pretty heavy stuff, in the guys' own experience, people usually walk away not only having had a fun time, but also better understanding the people they played the game with.
"We went to the University of Central Florida the other day and asked people questions from the game," Lipinski said. "It was a lot of fun and we got to know a lot of people from it. We really want people to be able to talk to each other about things they normally don’t talk about when first meeting."
Lipinski and Marrese are looking to get the game out to more people, but because of a lack of funding, they are not able to do it themselves. They recently created a KickStarter campaign to raise $9,800 to be able to produce and ship out 1,000 units. Currently, the game has raised $2,851, and the deadline is Nov. 28. Anyone interested in backing this project should visit kickstarter.com or theartofdebatecardgame.com.
