The whole Amble Troupe comes together to reflect on our design process

In this episode, we take a deep dive into our design process, through the lens of our game Green Hollow. All five members of the Troupe come together for the first time, with the first appearance by Bec Dahl. We designed Green Hollow as an experience for teams to come together, and learn more about themselves as individuals and as a group. We cover a wide range of techniques, tools, and processes we used to get our desired player outcomes through the game.

Links to resources

Green Hollow
https://amble.studio/green-hollow-game/

For the Queen
https://www.evilhat.com/home/for-the-queen/

This Vineyard will be Our Salvation
https://tinkertaylorpublications.itch.io/vineyard

Marx Shepherd talks ‘This Vineyard’ with designer Taylor Daigneault
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/17-taylor-daigneault-discusses-this-vineyard-will-be/id1496698286?i=1000487930320

Joshua Vial
https://joshuavial.com/

Enspiral
https://www.enspiral.com/

Lina Patel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/linaxpatel/

Green Hollow video ft. Lina Patel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONP1jjgopkA

Reinventing Organisations (the book)
https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

TEAL movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_organisation

Kiri talks to Alex Roberts on Building the Game
http://www.buildingthegamepodcast.com/episode-463-bangers-only/

StorySynth
https://storysynth.org/

Randy Lubin
https://randylubin.com/

Armello
https://armello.com/

Amble twitter
https://twitter.com/theamblestudio

Amble Ko-Fi
https://ko-fi.com/amblestudio

Transcript

Hailey: [00:00:00] This is Amble the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderland between ways of working and games. I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

Jason: I’m Jason Tampake. Hi Hails, how’re you going?

Hailey: Yeah, Jase, very excited because we’ve got the whole troupe here today.

Jason: It’s true. Yeah, I’m stoked as well.

This is um, the whole troupe. It’s an opportunity for us all to have a conversation together. And this is our pilot, this working out aloud episode. Where we’re going to open the box a little bit on how we’re thinking about our design process and how we’re working through some of the challenges that we’re facing in that sort of space.

Hailey: Fantastic. So just to remind everyone you have previously met troupe members Logan Timmins. Hi Logan.

Logan: Hi.

Hailey: Hey, welcome. And Kiri Bear.

Kiri: Hello.

Hailey: Hello. They both joined us on our episode about lyric and ritual games and Logan also on an [00:01:00] episode following that. But for the first time today, we have joining us, Rebecca ‘Bec’ Dahl. Welcome Bec. Welcome aboard and-

Bec: Hello.

Hailey: Look, I’ve known Bec for over a decade. And it’s, it’s hard to know what to say about all of the things Bec can do. She’s one of the world’s premier Swiss army knives, able to hack databases, design websites, and make steam punk pizza carts. She has a master’s of science and sustainability leadership and also a lot of experience with social marketing. This is just someone who can learn and do incredible amounts of things. And so we’re really grateful to have Bec here today.

Kiri: She also makes beautiful art and pictures and things.

Hailey: That’s true. A lot of the art you see on our stuff is from Bec.

Jason: And is great at Armello.

Bec: Ah, thank you guys. A lovely introduction.

Hailey: Awesome. Great to have you here.

All [00:02:00] right. Let’s get started. So what are we doing today Jase?

Jason: Yeah. So today the hope was we’d have a conversation with the whole crew around our process and how we, as Amble team, think about designing games in this sort of space that we’re into. A working title of this being our ‘working out aloud’ piece. And we plan on doing this a whole bunch more.

Conscious that it’s really a opportunity for us to reflect on our process, but also share it with the growing community of folks who might be doing this sort of stuff. And an opportunity to see feedback and course correction and learning and mutual sharing and all of that other sorts of good stuff.

Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this one. This is actually really exciting for me when you get to talk through what it is that we’re doing and how we’re thinking about it. It’s really exciting.

Hailey: Yeah, fantastic. And as always, we’re going to start things off by talking about a game that isn’t ours, that is relevant to today’s content.

And in particular, we’ve got a couple of games that really inspired [00:03:00] our game ‘Green Hollow’, which is the game we’re talking about today. And those are ‘For the Queen’ by Alex Roberts. And ‘This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation’, by Taylor Daigneult. And I think Logan’s going to kick us off to talk a little bit about those games, how they work, what they are, what they do.

Logan: Sure. Yeah. So ‘For the Queen’, by Alex Roberts and Evil Hat Productions is a very simple story game the mechanics of which inspired Green Hollow a lot around having a deck of cards. The instructions are all cards, and you just take turns, drawing a card and reading it and responding to a prompt. And the thing I love about ‘For the Queen’ is that all the prompts are really juicy and make for really interesting story beats. And then you have a final card which wraps up the story and brings it to a conclusion at the end of that arc. Often very dramatically. It’s a very dramatic game, which is lovely.

Similarly, ‘This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation’ by Taylor [00:04:00] Daigneult of Tinker Taylor Publications is a ‘Descended from the Queen’ game, which means it’s based on ‘For the Queen’, uses the same mechanics. Except in ‘This Vineyard’ everyone plays as runner ducks or geese who are working on a vineyard, based on a real life vineyard. And so there’s the drama there around basically between work and life. And how much you give into your work and for what reward at the end. So these ducks and geese are promised to go to the Isle of Ipharadesi, where they will not be eaten. They will not on anyone’s dinner plate and they’ll get to live out the rest of their lives. It’s about, yeah, is the reward worth it in the end? And also similarly, very juicy prompts. And you get that final card, which brings you to a resolution.

Hailey: Yeah, it’s super cute to have that setting, which in contrast to ‘For the Queen’ is, you’re in the retinue of this queen and you’re on a journey and you’re protecting [00:05:00] her. And it has this air of sort of seriousness and even the sense of violence in it.

Whereas ‘This Vineyard’ seems on its face, maybe a little more cutesy where we’re playing animals, but the themes that you get into around work and, and trust and exploitation and all these sorts of things. Are-

Jason: Yeah, a hundred percent. I still, I still think about the existential crisis of whether or not the island is real, the promise of the island is real.

Um, you know, it really evoked very, very, deep, juicy conversation.

Hailey: I wonder if anyone wants to say more about how these games influenced us for ‘Green Hollow’ or just what was really meaningful in playing those games? What inspired us?

Kiri: Yeah, I’m just remembering the time that we played these games was, you know, like we started as, as a board game company, we were going to make board games and we had a couple of board games that we were working on and then COVID happened. And we were struggling to work out how to do stuff online with our [00:06:00] existing board games, using tabletop simulator and things like that. Which aren’t very accessible for the general community.

And we also have this rhythm of our weekly game night and we played For the Queen just as part of our Thursday game night to try it out and I was like, “Hey, we can make a game like this”. And it would be much easier for us to deliver that online. And like, let’s, let’s just try it. Let’s just like, and we decided we’d play This Vineyard because I’d heard Taylor talking about that with Marx Shepherd.

So we decided we’ll play This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation, and then we’ll sit down and brainstorm, what it would look like if we did a Descended from the Queen game around project management and team work.

Hailey: That’s right. Because we were working on Awesome New Project. The board game was kind of the centerpiece and the thing that we were putting all our energy into and putting out there into the world and getting some positive [00:07:00] responses on it.

But like you said, because people had to get into these 3d physics simulators and manage a camera as well as picking up these tokens and loading heavily in their browser. And it was just all too much. And also, you know, board games, they have a lot of rules and there’s a big on-ramp for some folks, whereas others are very excited.

And so, yeah I remember we originally called ‘Green Hollow’, ‘For the Awesome’ as a sort of For the Queen reference, but also as an Awesome New Project reference. And it was sort of a deliberate mashup of the two. ‘Cause Awesome New Project also tried to simulate a project, but in a more pushing cubes around managing resources sort of way with almost zero role-play.

Kiri: Yeah. So it was initially conceived of as a lighter, role-play heavy version of Awesome New Project.

Hailey: But where did it go from there? Cause it pretty quickly to kind of life of its own.

Kiri: I just [00:08:00] remember this feeling of being really drawn into it and feeling passionate about it and energized by it. This process of making up these questions and trying to craft an experience for people that would draw out all of the experiences that they’d already had of teamwork and all of those tensions that come up when you’re trying to work with other people.

And you’ve got this goal in mind, this shared vision, but then the realities and the practicalities of actually getting folks to work together towards that shared goal.

Jason: Yeah, I love that. Part of contextualizing these sort of processes, one of the cues that we have here to think about in terms of what it is that we’re actually doing, one of the aphorisms or maximums or guiding principles that we use is, is the ‘start with the end’ in mind piece.

And that’s sort of what you’re getting to Kiri. It’s interesting when you’re talking about the intentionality of games. So games that are, or processes that are, [00:09:00] heading towards ‘something’ it’s important to have a reasonably clear picture of what that sort of ‘something’ is, or at least a, an initial starting point of what that ‘something’ is.

And you were talking there about the, the thing that was compelling was ‘how do we enable people to engage with the complexity of experiences and yeah all the messy human stuff that goes along with working together to work towards a shared outcome’.

How did we hit upon that or clarify some of that sort of space? I mean-

Hailey: I’m gonna add some framing to that Jase, because I’m reminded of some early advice we got from a business perspective from a friend Joshua Vile, who founded Inspiral, who said “focus on the snowy peaks of where you’re trying to go and focus on the next steps of where you need to step next. But don’t worry about the mid game or what’s going to happen in all the steps between there, because things are going to change so much, that you can get lost in that”. And lots of people kind of get trapped in imagining that [00:10:00] mid game and trying to plan for all of those eventualities.

And it sort of feels similar with For the Awesome, which became Green Hollow, that well, we know we want to make games that help teams develop their collaboration capability or help people grow as individuals in the context of teamwork. And we have this intuition that For the Queen and This Vineyard could be adapted for that purpose.

And we didn’t have a whole lot more defined than that when we started running. I remember it was a very like intuitive drive to just let’s just get together. And the first session was like, “how do we start? Just write a list of questions. Let’s just write a hundred questions and then we’ll pare them down.”

Is that how you folks remember it?

Kiri: Yeah.

Logan: Yeah. I remember looking at Awesome New Project and the various challenge prompts and making those into questions and then from there, figuring out more questions. And then eventually turning to the instruction cards for ‘For the Queen’ and adapting [00:11:00] those to Green Hollow.

Hailey: Yeah. So we really just took the opportunity to do almost kind of a one-to-one translation.

So not overly worrying about ‘who’s the audience for this’. But I think that’s something we’ve been learning is that as much as we have an audience in mind at the same time, because they’re games and they’re these products that if we just make something that resonates with itself and kind of has its own holistic beauty to it, that that’s the best way to test ‘is this something that people want?’

Rather than, with other products, it might make more sense to really deeply understand the market and the audience and all of that. Yeah, that’s really just kind of coming through for me now.

Bec: And I think we’d done a bit of that audience stuff upfront for Awesome New Project for the board game.

And this was really starting to draw out the role-playing aspect of it. Like Awesome New Project had less of the role-playing, even though a lot of our theory was based on role playing. You know, role-players being able to [00:12:00] bring those skills into the, into the workplace. And what does that mean for teams?

And then Awesome New Project had some of that, but it was like really light. And this was kind of really drawing it out in a really simple way. And as you said, it didn’t have that same on-ramp of having to learn a board game, which is nice and just really focusing on, on building that shared experience within the players.

Hailey: Maybe that’s an opportunity to connect this up to our emerging Theory of Change. We’re talking about starting with the end in mind, and we have done a lot of work as Amble on what it is we’re trying to do in the world. And I know on this podcast, you’ve sort of said it a number of different ways.

We believe that the world needs more people working together effectively and developing as individuals. We believe there’s something special in the world of games, and in particular story games and co-creation games, that allow that to happen. And we think that there’s an underexplored territory here and we’re [00:13:00] exploring that through the podcast, but also through the things we make.

And maybe that’s part of the reason why this opportunity to make Green Hollow and to adapt these games really resonated because it was like, “Okay, finally. Yeah, we’re really hitting the sweet spot of having it be gameful and turn-based and easy for people to participate in without being improv all stars”.

Yeah, having an on-ramp for them to get into that creative role playing space, that immersive space, that sort of inspired this whole exploration in the first place.

Kiri: Yeah. And like Bec said, these games This Vineyard and, and For the Queen, are almost like my go to, for introducing people into role-play. Like everyone knows the dragon game. It’s very famous, but there’s quite a steep ramp to get your head around the rules and how it all works. And there’s lots of incomprehensible, illogical things about it that it’s just [00:14:00] like, that’s the way it’s always been done. So that’s how we do it.

Whereas these examples really are a much lower bar for people to step into that playful storytelling aspect of it, without some of the, the rules and the dice and the specifics that make other games more difficult to approach.

Jason: I love that, Kiri. And then there’s something about these games, when we played them, it feels like a very, very unique distillation of something. You know, when, when we think about what makes conversation or what makes an intimate relationship, or how do you explore the nature of work or, you know, these sorts of things. They’re very distilled.

Logan, you mentioned earlier that there’s a juiciness to the prompts. There’s a, a real richness in the things that we’re given to begin playing with. And there’s something deeply human in that. I mean, it’s something really, really compelling in those sorts of games.

Bec: Really reminds me of a lot closer to how I hear my daughter [00:15:00] play. Like ‘just pretend that I have wings now’. And then, you know, everyone in the room is just accepting that that’s the new reality, you know, like that really gentle way of pretending and playing that kids have that we all did.

That’s really innate and doesn’t need a lot of rules or a lot of dice or a lot of additional layers to it. So you can have that really basic level of playfulness and then have conversations that are related to where you’re at, rather than it being a fiction that maybe not everyone can get them lined into right away.

Hailey: That reminds me of something you said in a previous episode Kiri, about why games as a way to bring people into these experiences. And you said “Games are connected to play. Play is this really important thing”.

And yeah, what I’m curious about in this conversation is what it is about the way that these particular games are structured that allow adults to be invited [00:16:00] back into a space of play in a way that’s then also beneficial to their more practical goals. And I’m reminded of we’ve recently interviewed our friend Lina Patel about this. And she commented on how, the way the instructions work in the game. And she felt really held as someone who had never played any form of role-playing or story game before to step into this space. And that really allowed her to enjoy it.

Kiri: One of the things we learned along the way was this notion of play equipment. That’s like really heavily in my head now. And initially we tried to make it so that the players had maximum choice about everything. But it, it becomes a tyranny that like, if people could go anywhere, they’re just like, well, I don’t know, uh, uh, uh. And so that’s really how we transitioned from For the Awesome to Green Hollow is that we started making this play equipment.

So now you’re in a bronze age village. And now there’s these people in the village and there’s this village [00:17:00] down the road that’s named. And you’ve got this choice of these characters. And that’s something that For the Queen and This Vineyard also do is, this kind of world-building layer so it gives people hooks that they can then swing off. You know, like monkey bars and slides and swings that they can build their story into, they can add onto, and it also increases the indirection.

Jason: The thing that I’m fascinated, I’m curious about is; as a designer in that space, when we encountered This Vineyard and For the Queen there was such beautiful play equipment there, something that immediately drew us in. As designers of, of these sorts of processes how does that feel to be making the decision around what is ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’, what the play equipment is, what’s appropriate? What’s the appropriate shape of this ladder and what’s the…?

Logan: Yeah, I find it very exciting and a great design [00:18:00] exercise to think. Because that’s the power of design, right? You get to shape the playground and you know, there’s always going to be someone who runs up the slide instead of sliding down it. But you still, you get that chance to put the slide there in the first place.

It all comes back to the experience that you want the players to have, right. Starting with the end in mind, how much fun, what kind of fun do you want them to be able to have on the playground?

Okay. In order to do that, in order to ‘feel the wind in their hair’, they’re going to need a swing. So I’m going to put a swing in there. In order to ‘face their fear of heights’, I’m going to put some really tall monkey bars, and that sort of thing. So I find it really exciting and challenging and growing to think about, okay, what kind of play equipment do we need?

And also taking out, maybe what’s assumed. Like, “oh, we’re making a playground, we have to have a slide”. Okay. Maybe this playground actually doesn’t need a slide and taking out, really challenging the norms of other games that you’ve seen or played and, and really [00:19:00] knuckling into what this game actually needs that you’re doing for this specific instance.

Kiri: So in Green Hollow specifically, there are no leaders, there’s no real hierarchy. We took that out.

And the other thing- one of the reasons why we choose a bronze age village- in one of the very early playtests of For the Awesome, I had a player who was like, “I don’t like them. I’m just going to sack them”.

And part of my thinking in making it this bronze age village that’s quite self-contained is this notion that ‘there’s no away’. You can’t just send your team issues away, you can’t just sack people and send them off. Cause we’re all here in the village, we all depend on each other for our survival. So it’s creating the circumstances that’s then going to elicit the sort of collaborative team building mindset that we’re trying to generate.

Hailey: Yeah. I’d like to pull that thread further. And that’s a brilliant concrete example, but as we moved into this process, and as we played with more people, we started to discover more and more the kinds [00:20:00] of benefits that it could provide that people wanted. And I wonder if we could just share some of the realizations about, about that. What it is we were intuitively trying to do what we were trying to elicit, what we, as designers were trying to design for it to provide equipment for.

And like you said, in the core version of Green Hollow, we’re really thinking about non-hierarchical teams. Teams that are, to use some of the modern buzzword, ‘self-managing’. Often that’s a startup or there’s a whole movement to try to move organizations towards a more self-managing approach where there’s less hierarchy and more autonomy and more people defining their own pathway.

If you’re familiar with things like ‘Reinventing Organizations’ the book, and the TEAL movement. All these sorts of things speak to this idea of self-management. But also community groups. People who are doing things from the grassroots who want to make change in their local community are effectively maybe self-managing in their [00:21:00] approach.

And that’s just one of the things I think we were trying to bring out in Green Hollow, and I wonder what else is coming to mind for people?

Bec: For me, it partly comes back to thinking about if we’re wanting to create a game that creates change, then the real opportunity for a game is in building some sense of social proof and some sense of self-efficacy as well. So it’s that question of, ‘can I do this? Can I have this conversation? Do I know how to have this conversation?’ You know, that self-advocacy around ‘can I deal with this scenario?’ Or really putting those scenarios in front of people.

So what are the scenarios that we want people to have an opportunity to try on as a character and understand for themselves if they know how to deal with that. You know, like get some learnings. And also the aspect of social proof as well. Like seeing people in those different scenarios and being able to see, ‘will I be accepted if I have this conversation? Will someone else have this conversation? How do they deal with this?’ And that teaches [00:22:00] me, if I know that you deal with that in a particular way in the game, you’re probably going to deal with that in a similar way in a real scenario as well. It gives me some evidence that you can’t get in a day-to-day work environment in the same way that you can through this.

So just looking for those conversations that we want to hook people into.

Hailey: Yeah. Fantastic Bec, and that reminds me Kiri, you started to say something earlier about play equipment creating indirection, which I think relates to Bec’s point. Can you say more about that?

Kiri: So there’s one of the instruction cards says “you are going to play a character that is not you”. And that notion of ‘I’m here and I’m being someone else that’s not me’. It means I can be awkward or ridiculous, or I can make mistakes and I can fail. And it doesn’t matter because we’re just playing and it’s not me.

But what happens is, inevitably, if we’re put on the spot, we [00:23:00] have to answer this question, I have to make something up for this character, the easiest way to do that is to draw on my own life experience. And this is one of my favorite moments when I’m watching other people play is seeing them kind of collide with themselves from a new direction.

So I had a player at one point who kind of set themselves up as like, ” yeah, I’m gonna make our gatherings happen at the pub and I’m going to give Root Beer for everybody, and I’m going to like be this big guzzling figure”. And then as the game progressed, they were like, “ah, actually hosting people is really important to me. And making people feel welcome in a space and ensuring that they’ve got food and drink and the physical needs met so that they feel comfortable in a space is something that I do a lot. So I was like making up this character that was not me, but actually I’ve found that there’s something of me in that character.”

Hailey: Yeah. And I, [00:24:00] I think this happens regardless of whether it’s a game that’s explicitly meant to do it or not. Even in more mainstream role playing games when people make their fighter barbarian hero and they have this backstory, they’re always playing an aspect of themselves. Whether it’s a desire or wish fulfillment or some old story, it’s almost a cliche and a joke

Kiri: I had this exact experience in our game when my character, through various events, turned from what they were, to kind of the opposite. So they went from being this chaotic good person to being this lawful evil person. And I found that experience so satisfying because I got to live out a part of myself that is usually quite repressed, but it’s still there.

And it was really fascinating to discover the ways in which I am a bit of a stickler for the rules sometimes. And I can be a bit [00:25:00] aggressive about that with other people.

Hailey: Well and also someone who wants what they want and goes for it.

Kiri: Mm.

So, going back to questions and how crucial the questions are. I got to talk to Alex Roberts on the Building the Game Podcast. And pretty much, we spent the whole time talking about the questions and that the key to For the Queen was in the questions.

In fact, Alex tells this beautiful story about how the original version of For the Queen had a Jenga tower and six kinds of dice. And then she realized actually, this is all about the questions and just asking people questions and getting the questions to be really juicy and interesting. And she really encouraged me to think about like, ‘what’s the reaction that you want to get from people when they read the question?’. And I noticed in play tests we do this a lot. Like go review the questions again and look at the questions again, and which are the ones that are really getting rich, interesting answers and which are the [00:26:00] ones that are just a bit not that interesting or not going to interesting places. Bangers only.

So, yeah, in Green Hollow, I feel like what I want the questions to do is to provoke people. To make them go, “oh, uh, what would I do in that situation?”

And also kind of inspire them like, “oh yeah, I’ve had that happen actually. And what I did was this, so, this character is going to do this”. Something like that.

Jason: You Logan? How do you refine questions? What’s your vibe on that?

Logan: Yeah that about nails it around the idea of ‘bangers only’. Something that’s really exciting, that makes you sit there and you then go, “oh, wow. That’s a good question.” Something that, yes sparks maybe multiple ideas or, it’s just really exciting that the answer is always going to make an impact.

Right. There is no answer that is like, “okay, that doesn’t change anything. We’ll just read the next one now.” Questions that [00:27:00] provoke a change in the story or building of the story, that’s part of what it is to be at ‘banger’.

Kiri: The relationships between the people at the table.

Hailey: I want to bring you in Bec because you’ve made some interventions in our question development process.

And by way of context, I think one of the powerful things about story games is that they’re, in one sense, a collective hallucination. We’re operating in the world of shared imagination. And so the richness with which we simulate reality means that there’s so many different dimensions that can be touched on and experienced and explored all at once.

And so one of the things we’ve discovered is that a game like Green Hollow is good for so many different aspects of teamwork and personal development and growing as an individual in a world and thinking about business. And we didn’t have to write specific mechanics for all of those, as long as the questions were provocative.

And one of the things [00:28:00] that you really brought in for us was, I think you looked at some examples of common business challenges and you brought in frameworks and categories of different things that people were experiencing that we wanted to hit or bring in. And then we could map our questions to that.

Is there more that you can say about that approach because you brought it in multiple times, it’s been really fruitful.

Bec: Yeah I think there’s been two parts to it. One has certainly been when we’ve been just trying to make sure that there’s a bit of an art to the story. Like the players feel like they get somewhere at the end and it doesn’t just kind of end. We’ve had that conversation multiple- “where is the arc here?”

And the other part was really just trying to draw around themes. One thing that we learned early on with Awesome New Project that’s particularly important in a board game situation was, “What is the balance, the maths behind what the players are doing?” So it was a bit like that with the questions, you know, there’s a level at which it’s just about looking for those questions that are getting that, that kind of, “wow, that’s a really good [00:29:00] question” response.

And you can kind of do that through testing. And we’ve done quite a lot of that, but then also just looking at like, we had had one or more, we were looking at things going, “is this making people feel good or is this kind of a bummer the question?” And that’s one way we were sorting things. Like, “where do we want people to be at this point? Do they want to feel challenged? Do they want to feel like uplifted and they’re building the world around them.”

And then going deeper again. So where we’re adapting Green Hollow at the moment for a specific client’s situation was really investigating with them, ‘What are the themes that they’re trying to explore with their audience, with the people that they’re working?’ And really investigating what those were and what might be underlying them and starting to look at our questions and go, “How do these fit in and where do we need new questions that draw out these themes so that we’re hitting the right balance”. And the adaptation that we’re doing to get the results that they’re looking for to find those [00:30:00] right conversations. And sometimes a little bit like in the gameplay itself, having some of those boundaries can actually help you be creative with the questions as well.

You know, like “we need a question here that’s teaching someone resilience.” And then you’re kind of more structured in how you being creative instead of being completely open, which can help improve the questions that we’re asking and really refine them down as well. I’ve found in the process we’ve been going through at the moment.

Hailey: Yeah. Awesome. That makes me want to go back to our process of iteration and how we’ve been developing so far and then come back to that client that we’re working with now.

It strikes me that it’s really common; games playtest. They find play testers, play testers play them. And as we started to get more intentional and serious about that, we went well, “who is our audience?” And the more we realized that it was professionals working in Ways of Working, who might then want to bring this game in, or managers who are responsible for their [00:31:00] teams’ teamwork who are looking for a team building exercise, something alternative to do. And that gave us really specific lessons in terms of how we structured the game, both in terms of the questions, which are so crucial, but also those sort of instruction and set up cards that bring people into the setting. And I guess I’m inviting some reflections on some of the themes that really stood out.

I know one of them was, I think we alluded to this earlier around giving people maximum choice and allowing people to define their own path. Well that’s something that story gamers want, veterans story gamers, who want room to really explore and creative and remix the game and take it in new directions.

But people who don’t do a lot of story gaming, or, you know you’re going to have a group that maybe has one story gamer in it out of six, you dial that kind of choice down. You add more basic instructions, things you would assume a story gamer would know. You need to put those into the instructions to welcome people in.[00:32:00]

Were there any other realizations in that boundary, as we traverse the boundary from being inspired by a story game and learning through play testing with non-story gamers?

Kiri: I think something that we learned through play testing, it was maybe not so much about that boundary, but that bump between the instructions and the first card.

Yeah, we just found that people would get to the end of the instructions, and then the first question card was there and inevitably the first person who got that question was kind of stumped. And there’s a transition from a kind of passive way of being, in reading the instructions and just reading out what’s on each card, and then there’s this point where the play starts, and now you’re reading a question you need to respond to the question.

And so it’s taken us quite a bit of time and I think we’re still working on it really. One of the things we did was make the shift really apparent. So [00:33:00] the instructions say ‘the next card is where you start telling the story. We’re now entering Green Hollow’.

And we also have prescribed the first six or so questions so that we’ve got control over the first question that you’re being asked isn’t about a conflict with a teammate it’s something just about like, how did you get to work today? Or how did you arrive at the gathering place? What did you see on the way? So that folks can spend a bit of time building the world and building the environment that they’re in before they have to answer tough questions.

Jason: Sorry, Kiri, so if I can play that back, what you’re talking about here is a very intentional opportunity that we took in refinement or in design to consider how people on ramp into the game or ease into the world of play.

Is that-?

Kiri: Yeah. And well, specifically the different phases of the game and how they transition from one phase to the next [00:34:00] phase.

Hailey: For me that, to connect it back to this point about, you know, people with story gaming experience and people who don’t have that. People who haven’t played any make-believe in a while, that transition to that point where ‘now I need to make something up? What are the rules here? Am I allowed to say just anything? I know there was a card earlier that said, I can say anything on my turn, but do I have to consult people? Do I have to check in?’

For story gamers, they know the boundaries and the rules, or maybe someone who’s taken some improv courses, would know, and they know what to do in that moment. But it’s so new for so many people, but what’s really struck me at the same time as how liberating they found it.

I think as we bring these kinds of very distilled story games without the spreadsheet, character sheet, math, and huge amount of rules in it, the more that there are people who discover that this is something they like to do, and they never had any idea that they like to do it. And I think that’s why that moment is so [00:35:00] important that we support them in that moment.

Jason: Totally, and that’s sort of where I was coming from like- Because what it evokes for me, if we think about the other side of our equation, if this is about increasing ways of working, helping people, engage in collaborative activity, there’s something about games as being able to help those contexts, help create the contexts in which people can enter into that space again.

You know, like Bec to use your metaphor earlier. When we’re kids, we can snap into a space of play. But a lot of those sort of implicit capabilities that we have that enable us to share narrative, enables us to engage with others, that enable us to work through conflict and, and do these sorts of things.

Our conjecture is that sometimes we need reminding around that kind of stuff, or practice in those sorts of things cause it’s not a fluency that we have. And there’s something really unique about games as a context in which that can happen. And, you know, when you were talking Kiri about how do we ease the shock of people going from, “okay, I’m learning rules” [00:36:00] to “now I’m in a play state”. How do we enable that and support that kind of movement into that sort of space that that’s actually really, really deep stuff.

Kiri: I hadn’t actually- I don’t think we’ve actually characterized it in these words before.

And I feel like having this conversation is making me think there’s probably more that we can do if we hone in on like ‘that’s what’s happening here, is we’re shifting phase from instructions to play’. There’s actually more we could do to help that.

The other point that I’m holding is, I had this beautiful moment- So I’m a professional facilitator and one of the things I notice like role-plays are often a big part of the kind of facilitation work that I do and they’re necessary. And some people really hate them. And I have had this fear about Green Hollow that like, “oh, some people are going to hate this”. But I came across someone at a playtest who’s like, “oh, I hate doing [00:37:00] role-plays, but this is different. This I loved because I wasn’t being assessed. I didn’t feel like I had to get it right. I didn’t feel like there was a right answer.”

So that’s a really qualitative, substantial difference here. When we’re talking about role play the emphasis on the play and not on the performance.

Hailey: Wow. That’s powerful. But that in sales materials,

We’re working out aloud, right?

If no one’s holding another point I want to pivot us to talking about some of the design iteration process and maybe getting a little bit more technical. We use a tool called Story Synth, which is developed by our friend Randy Lubin, who’s an applied game designer and just a game designer, especially in story games out of San Francisco.

And he made an online platform that lets you design [00:38:00] and run, initially Descended from the Queen games but now it’s expanding, online. And there’s a couple elements here I want to bring in one is that it happens in your web browser. And so in this era where remote is so dominant, that you can easily play these games alongside a video call.

And because they’re just based on cards, we don’t need a 3d simulation environment to push cubes around and with a 3d camera to manage that scares people off, or it doesn’t load on their work computer. You know, this is really light software that just helps you move the cards along and kind of does some additional basics around that.

And in addition to that, what is really brilliant is that it’s very prototyping focused. So that if you want to make up your own version of a For the Queen style game or one of the other game styles that he’s enabled, all you have to do is put your data into a Google spreadsheet, and then you take the link to that [00:39:00] spreadsheet and paste it into the StorySynth.org game launcher tool, and suddenly your game is there as an app.

Literally you just make a column. It’s a very simple spreadsheet. You get a template and you just start writing your questions in. And I think that’s how we started prototyping. We didn’t start in paper. We started on Story Synth and one day we had a meeting and just said, ‘let’s write questions’. And we got into, on a zoom call and typed them into a Google spreadsheet.

And I think that that has mostly accelerated and benefited our process than if we were printing out and cutting up pieces of paper every time we wanted it to change the questions.

Logan: I have a point I’d like to bring up at some point around the debrief questions and that being a playground equipment that we brought for the specific context, I don’t know where that fits in.

Jason: Right here, Logan. That’s where it fits.

Logan: Sure. Okay. So another important part of this game that we’ve brought in is the idea of a debrief.

I’m a big fan of [00:40:00] debrief in all story games, but that’s an ongoing thing. And in this particular context, helping teams after they’ve had this experience, this roleplay experience, cognizantly, consciously recognize those sparks or learnings that they’ve had throughout.

That idea “oh, I am really like that”. Or “I would do this in real life”, or “I don’t do this in real life. Why not?” And helping that really land in players and participants. I think that’s a really important thing that we’ve added that For the Queen and This Vineyard don’t have. That’s another play equipment that we, that we had to add.

Jason: Why is debrief so important to you in, in these sorts of story games?

Logan: I think it really helps serve the players to land the experience and come away with something more than a fun experience. So yeah, it’s a fun memory, you had a bit of a laugh, but also there’s, [00:41:00] very often due to indirection, you’re bringing yourself in and there’s a lot you can learn about yourself through role playing games. Any kind of game, you know, Green Hollow, For the Queen, any of the thousands, millions of games that are out there.

And I think there is an underlying acceptance of that, like, “oh yeah, you can learn stuff about yourself”, but I don’t know that everyone really knows how to do that or to land that or to recognize that. So the power of the debrief is making that explicit and again, the way that we’ve designed the debrief in line with Green Hollow and For the Queen, is just further sets of questions that are now directed towards the player rather than the character to draw out what they have learned. And again in other debriefs, I’m a big fan of questions in general, as mechanics.

And I think questions can serve as really good debrief prompts to get people thinking about what they can take away, and what they can learn about themselves. How they can better connect to [00:42:00] themselves and their lives really based on a fun play experience that they had, that didn’t feel like work. It didn’t feel like a self-help class, and yet you can still come to these these realizations.

Hailey: Yeah. Brilliant. And I’d like to add that there’s a function that the debrief plays where these games as applied games or serious games exist in a quote unquote ‘real world context’, they exist in the marketplace.

And the debrief is the point where we sort of excuse the fun from the management perspective. So why would I spend time playing a game or why would I allow my staff to spend time playing a game. It’s like, well, what they do is they have this experience and it’s different in all these important ways that lets them get to a place they wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise because of everything we’ve been talking about today.

And then they have a debrief. The debrief brings the the insights that gives you the takeaways, which translate to the [00:43:00] business value. You could write that down on a one pager, if you needed to and send it to your boss as what you got out of this. And, you know, and that justifies the spend or the time. And that’s, that’s real, that’s meaningful.

And maybe that’s the point for folks who are thinking about designing these kinds of experiences is you need that hook back into the very rational rationale for why we do these things in a business context.

Jason: I’m interested in what we’re playing then. I think that’s heaps. There’s so much richness in there. There is just heaps. I like, I personally learn a bunch about our own process through being in dialogue today. I love jamming with the Amble team and it’s so rewarding to have us all in the same virtual room at the same virtual time. For listeners out there, I’m busy looking at the team in zoom, and it’s a enormous layer of warming to say us all in the same place.

You know, oftentimes we finish an [00:44:00] episode talking about something that we’ve been playing, like to bring it back. This is sort of our opportunity to transition back into the real world from our shared creative exploration and, you know, transition back in.

The debrief, this is our debrief. Yeah! What have we been playing this week? What have we been doing? Anything worth calling out game wise?

I’m still losing at Armello for the record. I just want to share that.

Hailey: Have we mentioned Armello on the podcast before? Armello is a digital board game essentially by League of Geeks who are out of Melbourne. And it’s great because it would be a very complicated board game if you were trying to play it on the tabletop with lots of rules to follow and lots of things to kind of like play along to make sure they happen at the right time. But they have put it into this really beautiful implementation as an app that you can play via the steam store and the characters are [00:45:00] really animated and there’s sound effects, and you’re moving around these hexagonal tiles and we’re all competing to try to take over the throne of Armello. It’s strategic and it’s clever, and it’s cute.

And it’s kind of become our default game that we play as a team when we’re not sure, we don’t want to try anything new and also a little bit of gentle internal competition about who’s won the most games. I think Logan might be leading the leaderboard at the moment.

Logan: I am. Yes.

Hailey: I mean, and it inspires for me, you know, we’re just getting started on the sort of technical side of the journey, but how much well-designed technology can smooth out these experiences and make them really immersive and engaging. I know that’s something that’s interesting to me as well.

Bec: Definitely. It’s very pretty.

Hailey: Well, I know that I’ve just been experimenting with lots of different character builds to understand the game better. So I look forward to climbing on top of the leaderboard.

Bec: [00:46:00] I didn’t even know you could build characters until recently. I was just selecting the defaults.

Hailey: Yes. Oh, it goes deep.

Jason: I love the dice.

Kiri: Oh, they’re so pretty.

Hailey: It’s a pretty game.

Well folks, why don’t we wrap it up there? As always you can find us online at amble.studio. You can find us on Twitter @TheAmbleStudio. If you like listening to us amble and ramble on, we’d love it if you bought us a coffee, there’s a Ko-Fi donation button on our website.

And, yeah, tell us what you’d like to hear about on the amble studio Twitter. And yeah, this has been super fun for us and we hope it’s been super fun for you. And thanks troupe for coming and sharing the amble today.

Bec: Thanks, Hailey and Jase-

Kiri: yeah thanks.

Bec: -Logan and Kiri.

Logan: Thanks everyone.

Jason: Thanks everyone. Bye.

Logan: Bye.[00:47:00]