Tag: fiasco reflection

The part of playing fiasco that I was looking forward to the most was picking a playset. I didn’t read through them fully before we sat down to play so I was excited to see what they looked like. We picked the suburban community. You would think most people would want to pick something that allows them to live out a fantasy life but I have lived my entire life in a suburban community. The suburban community our characters lived in was far from normal though. My relationship with Kiara’s character was crime and the detail was thieves. My relationship with Ian’s character was family and the detail was distant relatives. As we started act one and each of us created scenes sometimes what we originally said had potential to maybe cause issues later or not ensue enough action. As an experienced gamer, Ian felt the need to bring up issues with the scenes we can up with so we would step back and revise them a bit. I’m not exactly sure if this is technically allowed but it helped to make sure as we continued on with the game we would not reach road blocks. It was very frustrating to keep having to edit the scenes. Though if we had not done this the stories would not have been connected so, it was necessary to the success of our game play. Act one and the tilt seemed to take significantly longer than act two and the aftermath. It took a bit for us to get the hang of the game and figure out where we were trying to go but once that was established the game had much more flow. The most important things to keep in mind when building scenes is your relationships to the other characters. I think playing with three players maybe made it more difficult to keep the stories of each character more separate at first with the intention to eventually have them converge more. But with three characters each of them is connected to the others so when a scene mainly affects one character it at least must include one of the other two in order to remain logical. I made most of my decisions while role playing my character from an outside perspective. I think its harder to get into character, as an actor would, without knowing the full story line you are playing out. I wouldn’t describe the way I chose to play the game as role-playing the character, rather I was an author of the narrative. This role playing game gave me more freedom to choose the path that the game took, maybe too much freedom in my opinion. In some of the video games we played this semester we had choices to make as the main character but we were generally given options which I prefer. I was the first to create a scene in act one and I really had no idea where to begin. The amount of freedom we were given almost hinders the game play in my opinion because the scene that one player creates may not work with the scene another player created so that it was led to us having to revise people’s original ideas for a scene. Overall I was happy with the story we had in the end but the game did not go as smoothly as I had anticipated it would.

This was the first time I had ever played a role playing game before. At first the game was difficult for my group to set up. Despite having read through the instructions, actually executing those directions proved slightly more difficult. We also did not have enough die which meant that we had to go off script and improvise a bit. We decided to use the suburban playlet and created an intricate drug selling operation with each of our characters serving one purpose in the operation.

My character was the cashier at Apple Valley Grocery Store and also the lookout for the secret drug deals that were taking place outback between fellow drug operation members who also happened to be my step-father and my separated spouse. In terms of my strategy in playing. I first wanted to make sure that I would end up with an even number of black and white die at the end and elected to resolve instead of setting the scene. However, then I got engrossed in the story and ended up just letting play out the way it would, no longer caring about the safety or prosperity of my character. I ended up having the worst possible aftermath, which was fun to create although clearly detrimental to my character.

Fiasco was quite the experience. It is a tabletop role playing game involving creating your own story with a plot and an individualized ending. The experience of playing a tabletop RPG was very different from playing a video game RPG because it involved relationships with other people and require you to become the character. I haven’t played many RPGs before so I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but I have played Sims, which is very individualized and doesn’t involve how I react with others because I am playing alone. We had some guidance from choices set by the dice but the rest of it was left for us to decide. After spending half an hour trying to set up the game, read and reread the rules, we finally started the game. However, through the frustration, we all had fun with the weird settings and characters we were supposed to manipulate and play as. Our relationship and the story we were supposed to tell was as the drug dealer/manufacturer. Immediately, we all thought of ourselves as Walter White from Breaking Bad.

The game started slow because none of us had experience playing tabletop RPGs, which resulted in confusion. None of us knew how to react to each other and the story we were attempting to tell while including the other roles. However, after we got started and gained confidence, we were able to establish our characters’ roles, create detailed scenes, and bring the relationships all together. Our story began as a cliché crime drama with romance in Antarctica but soon turned into a gruesome story with stabbings, affairs, and the loss of certain body limbs. I enjoyed seeing how my character’s actions affected others and brought on consequences throughout the game. The way the game was set up tested our relationships as we were essentially trying to bring down others in order to better ourselves. Unfortunately, I was one of the first to die so I wasn’t able to experience the satisfaction of “winning”. Despite the fact that we all ended up dying, we had fun while playing the game and we were proud of that.

Fiasco requires collaboration. Through this RPG, we were able to collaborate and actively engage with others. Our group was able to assume key roles in collaborative work as our roles in the story we were creating together. Although we were trying to win and put ourselves above the others, we were still supportive and helpful of each other because we wanted to succeed in creating a successful story. As I was playing the game, one of my weaknesses came from my struggle to separate reality from the game. While it is probably a good thing that I didn’t forget about myself and my friendships, I wish I was able to separate it more while playing the game. I didn’t want to hurt my friends and I felt guilt, which is why I ended up being one of the first to die. But I also see this as a strength because, after reading Wolf in White Van, I am glad I can distinguish between reality and games.

While I was not looking forward to spending three hours of my night playing a tabletop role playing game that took forever to set up and understand the rules, it was one of the most interesting and fun things we have done. Instead of sitting in my bed on a rainy day wandering through an abandoned house or a deserted island, I was able to sit with friends and collaborate to create a story. Fiasco allowed me to play the role of the writer and the audience at the same time, which I did not expect. Learning to balance these two roles is important for writers because by understanding both aspects, it creates an understanding that will improve writing skills.

The most interesting part of this tabletop role-playing game was the sense of freedom (or perhaps the illusion of it) provided to each player. The first hour consisted of rummaging through the rulebook attempting to comprehend vague and ambiguous terminologies and guidelines that seemed loose enough to break easily. As a group, we had no prior experience in playing tabletop RPGs; this as expected resulted in confusion and apathy during the set-up process.

This aimlessness turned into hysterics soon enough as we began to establish relationships with one another. The scenarios we all conjured were simply ridiculous. What began as a cliche crime drama with a tacked on “romance” in Antarctica transformed into a gruesome, macabre, and paranormal tale by the game’s end. I favored the Resolve role during good majority of game time but later tried my hand at Establish to create on of the major twists in our game. The black dice were highly favored – bad endings are almost never a bore.

Fiasco is definitely analogous to a writing process. Each player contributes a piece to the overall narrative while building off the scenarios of others. What makes this game hugely entertaining is our intrinsic temptation to establish dominance and make our side of the story the best, consequently resulting in mayhem for others.

The most interesting part of this tabletop role-playing game was the sense of freedom (or perhaps the illusion of it) provided to each player. The first hour consisted of rummaging through the rulebook attempting to comprehend vague and ambiguous terminologies and guidelines that seemed loose enough to break easily. As a group, we had no prior experience in playing tabletop RPGs; this as expected resulted in confusion and apathy during the set-up process.

This aimlessness turned into hysterics soon enough as we began to establish relationships with one another. The scenarios we all conjured were simply ridiculous. What began as a cliche crime drama with a tacked on “romance” in Antarctica transformed into a gruesome, macabre, and paranormal tale by the game’s end. I favored the Resolve role during good majority of game time but later tried my hand at Establish to create on of the major twists in our game. The black dice were highly favored – bad endings are almost never a bore.

Fiasco is definitely analogous to a writing process. Each player contributes a piece to the overall narrative while building off the scenarios of others. What makes this game hugely entertaining is our intrinsic temptation to establish dominance and make our side of the story the best, consequently resulting in mayhem for others.

Fiasco is a role-playing game: not a video game, but a board game. This game is designed to collaborate. I have known some virtual role-playing games, but it was my first time to realize the existence of such board game. At first, I was overwhelmed by an unfamiliar assignment with 60 pages of the rulebook to read; furthermore, my worries did not disappear even after reading the manual, but these worries soon vanished as I learned from playing the game.

As we discussed in the class, breaking down the story and putting details are what the game designers wanted in order for this game to work out. Every player was well engaged in instructing the storyline of the game. As a player, it was interesting to observe and also actively participate in expanding the plot. The plot contained all the extreme elements that could not be easily seen in our real life. In this sense, I think Fiasco reminded me of other types of literatures, such as fiction. To elaborate, our plot contained dramatic details, such as drug problems, romance between the rich and the poor, and unexpected death by accident. For example, my character named John was raised in a very conservative and rich family. He was a son of the mayor of a suburban community; however, he happened to meet another character, named Frank first as a customer in drug business relationship, but later as a lover. Those details are distant from us as college students, but rather can be seen in the fiction. Because the setting and the plot were too distant to us, I noticed that other players in my group, including myself, tended to add more fictional elements into the story line. There was the part where John and his father, the mayor, had to chase Frank all the way to Canada with a chopper driven by his father. However, his father happened to be drunk, so the chopper crashed into the middle of nowhere in Nova Scotia. Also, from my perspective, I think all players had tendency to bring the most optimal ending for their own characters in the given circumstances.

The process of building story together requires collaboration, communication and comprehension. Because fours players had to come up with a single story, there had to be respect and support within the group. In this sense, I think our group united well and came up with the story that satisfies all of us. As I was playing the game, I noticed that my weakness came from the improvisation, making up scenarios and adding details into the story. It took me longer than other people to come up with details. Nonetheless, my group members waited in patience for me to add great fictional details to the story.

It was really awarding experience to deal this assignment in the literature class. Being an audience and writer at the same time is something I did not experience in any of my literature classes before. I had either become a writer or a reader, but not both. But Fiasco enabled me to put myself in both a person who establishes scene or resolves scenes for others and a person who listens to other people establishing the scene. Through negotiation and communication among group members, there seemed to be a balance between expectation as an audience and desire as a writer for each individual. Putting ourselves in both roles will enhance my ability as a writer who can write what I want and at the same time meet the expectation of audience.

We were initially thrown off by the lack of clearly defined paths or option with which to start the game. However, we naturally started creating our own narrative in the starting vacuum. Our characters were drug dealers/manufacturers, or at least directly related to the business and we all worked at the Apple Valley Supermarket in Tales from Suburbia playset. Being involved with drug dealing, we knew that we would have to make it big at some point in our then incomplete narrative. The need to get rich by robbing our boss ultimately guided the narrative of story. After making a substantial amount of money, we decided that we no longer needed to work for our crappy boss for near minimum wage at the supermarket. As a result, we hatched a plan to survey the store, find out when it was least busy, and then rob the store as we quit. As we crafted and executed our story, I observed how naturally our action narrative followed the exposition-rising action-climax-denouement pattern of Freytag’s pyramid. Our narrative started with three people with no future, followed by a break out where they ran into money and subsequently planned to rob their employer and flee, followed by the climax of the robbery, which concluded with everyone getting shot or going to jail or both. Freytag’s pyramid is clearly demonstrated with the Tilt and Aftermath playing perfectly into the Freytag’s structure. Speaking of, the Aftermath resulted in everything that could go with the robbery went wrong. The Aftermath was a fast-paced shootout and attempted escape that resulted in the robbery being a total flop, which served as an explosive to end to our story, which we found to be quite fitting.

My initial thoughts were that I would not be creative or experienced enough to simply craft a story from scratch. After getting started, however, the process of laying out the narrative came easy as one action implied a limited set of future possibilities, and the narrative quickly began to guide itself on its own, which quickly made the game look significantly less daunting than I had initially perceived it to be. As the narrative created itself, Fiasco began to feel more like an open world video game like GTA V as both had clear and limited options. In the same way that GTA V is open world yet implies that the player do certain things and behave in certain ways, the creation of a narrative in Fiasco ultimately leads to the same result as the previous action in the narrative implies a related action in the next scene.

Having not participated in too many creative writing opportunities in the past, I learned that being creative and creative writing don’t have to be daunting tasks in which every detail has to be meticulously thought out. Rather, simply providing a starting point will allow the piece to write itself. I think the casual game format allowed me organically create a narrative like I had not yet experienced in writing. I do look forward to experimenting in writing with a more organic creative process rather than forcing structure and detail where I deem appropriate.

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I hesitate to say that any of us authored the story that resulted from our Fiasco playthrough. I don’t think any of us would have written a story anything like had it been one of our stories. The progression of our story reminded me of the progression of Boatmurdered; an epic chronology of a Dwarf Fortress passed between players with each player playing one in-game year and then passing it on. Our story, like Boatmurdered, seemed like an agglomeration of several stories, with each story starting at the end of the last and promptly rejecting it. While our work is closer to a series of loosely related ideas smashed together than a “collaboration”, It nonetheless led to an entertaining, if disorganized, composition of failure.

I’m fairly certain that this style of writing was not what we were going for and it certainly isn’t a stellar example of collaborative writing (under most definitions of collaboration). Although I think we may have missed the intended educational mark on this assignment, I would argue that we discovered an entirely different lesson:
A collective work does not have to stem from a collective vision to be valuable. Literature with overtly conflicting ideas embedded can resolve smoothly without ever resolving the conflict itself.  WIP

 

On a side note, you should be careful of Dwarf fortress culture.

 

Like the game itself, it is off-puttingly deep.

It was surprising how invested we got into our separate characters. In a sense, we became the character ourselves and tried to make the best possible scenario. But because of our relationships to the other players and the different interest agendas, there was an incentive to create conflict with people for the sake of keeping your own character alive.

Essentially, then, the game turned highly political. Each character sided with one and betrayed another while later backstabbing friends and allying with enemies all for the sake of keeping their contrived character alive in the story.

My character had a “unpleasant past” relationship with the person on my left and a “parol officer” relationship with the person on my right. My story character was thus created as a police officer that used to be high school friends with a Cannabis dealer. As our careers drifted apart, so did our opinions of each other; this represented our “unpleasant history.” I was also the officer in charge of a minor charged with possession.  Our overall goal was to get even with each other. Our playset included a small suburban town and a van surrounded by old newspapers. What started out as a simple relationship between the character’s small time drug dealing crimes and the law turned into a full out multi-national war on one of the biggest organized crime sectors of all time.

During the setup, we got way ahead of ourselves by providing the backstory for all of our characters. In many cases, we were playing the game  backwards: we picked out events that were going to happen and then created the conditions in order for that event to occur. Sometimes, the storyline did not go where we expected it to go, mostly because it is difficult to negotiate

Also, there is a risk that as the game is being played, parts of the setup, such as key information that is determined by the roll of the die, are left out. For example, our weapon that caused a death was a toy chemistry set. Although we included the toy chemistry set in our discussion of creating narcotics, there was no direct relationship between a person’s death and the weapon determined by the die roll. By the time we got to the end of the story, there was a lot of information that we established at the start that got lost throughout the story. In some cases, the backstory for our characters and the actions that we claim our characters took may not have even matched up in a sensible way.

It seems that the game gives the players a large amount of freedom to explore the story. Yet, the problem with this freedom is that there is no wrong answer: the players aren’t punished for making decisions that may not work with the tilt. If we take a step back and look at the conditions that our story needed to fulfill, an infinite number of plot-lines could emerge. This may suggest that the game is doing most of the work and player contribution is really irrelevant. Even if we had a completely different set of conditions at the start of the game, I could see a way to make the story exactly the same.

 

Is Fiasco a game or an exercise in writing collaborative fiction? It is a game, in that it is run according to a formalized set of rules, composed of discrete parts, including a beginning, middle and end, and involves staples of game design such as dice rolls. On the other hand, there is no winner nor loser, not truly, and the most compelling part of the game takes place entirely in the collaborative creation of narrative. As players we used our imagination, and each other, to inject meaning into the experience through a type of conversational writing. In short, I consider Fiasco an exercise in collaborative fiction guided and structured by a formal set of game-like rules.

Before I was able to formulate high-level thoughts on Fiasco as outlined above I actually had to play the game which was an exercise in muddled confusion for the first thirty minutes as we attempted to make sense of the rules. In our game Brian, Nick, Jay and I elected to play in the “Suburbia” playset. I thought this would lead to small, meditative character stories but as with most (of mine at least) attempts at amateur storytelling, of which this certainly was, our plot got out of hand and became increasingly absurd. I had imagined stories à la “Mad Men” in the sense of getting insights into characters from their actions in a fairly mundane, though by nature of our given biographies somewhat scrupulous, lives. We ended up with something far nearer a thriller with wall-to-wall action reaching dizzying stakes and absurdities such as a escaping to Canada and then Britain, a deadly helicopter chase, being captured by and escaping from El Chapo when he and all other immigrants died from doctored drugs and so on and so forth. My character was a high-end drug dealer who wanted to “get revenge on the dirty immigrants” (hence their later deaths). With my pals Nick, on the right, with whom I had a drug manufacturing relationship and Jay, on the left, my closeted, gay lover. We fleshed out these roles, my connection to Nick went back to our childhood and the beginning of our drug trade in middle-school and we decided Jay was the Mayor’s son and college burnout. Finally, there was Brian who had connections to other players, but not myself, and was some sort of police officer monitoring Jay’s parole.

Playing through Fiasco, as with any time I attempt fiction, gave me greater appreciation for the skill and technique involved in creating compelling stories. While it was extremely enjoyable to play through our story it seems doubtful others would care about from the outside looking in as most of the enjoyment came from the actual creative process rather than the story that resulted from it. In addition to appreciating those who craft stories far better than I ever have, I also found myself reflecting on certain learning outcomes. In particular, writing as a process, where each turn was a chance to reflect on how I had controlled or affected the narrative previously and whether that was good or bad, something I now needed to correct, or an exciting direction I wanted to choose. Whichever of those I ended up landing on I implemented and improved my storytelling methods as I went along. And secondly, but not less importantly, collaboration. The reason I think so many people feared, or had concerns at a minimum, about this game was not only that they wouldn’t know how to play but that they would be opening up their minds to others and connecting ironically while working together. Many of us, myself included, keep an ironic distance as a coping mechanism which can often lead to worse collaboration. However, we were all able to relax and enjoy the game fairly quickly, getting caught up, as evidenced by the plot, in indulging each other’s ludicrous plotting.