An overview of key topics, and introducing our hosts

In this first episode, we set the scene for the journey we’re embarking on. We explain how games work, how facilitation works, and how the two are more connected than you might think. We also take a bird’s eye view of the field of applied gaming, pointing to the many and varied ways in which games are intentionally being applied for purposeful outcomes.

Links to resources

Dungeons and Dragons
https://dnd.wizards.com/

Magic the Gathering
https://magic.wizards.com/

The Maze of Fitzroy
https://tcg.tabernaclegames.com.au/

MG Taylor Tool Kit
http://www.matttaylor.com/public/mgt_tool_kit.htm

Theory U
https://www.presencing.org/aboutus/theory-u

Cynefin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework

Agile method
https://www.atlassian.com/agile

Collabforge method
https://collabforge.com/collaboration-design/

Scan Focus Act
http://legacy.mgtaylor.com/mgtaylor/glasbead/SFA.htm

List of Role Playing Game system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_role-playing_games

Playing at the World by Jon Peterson
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/new-d-d-history-book/

Serious Games by Clark Abt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215079.Serious_Games

WarGames movie
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi805486105

Megagames
https://www.megagameassembly.com/

Machine Learning President
https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/25/18010142/machine-learning-president-2020-election-larp

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble, the podcast where we explore the intersection of games and collaboration. I’m Hailey Cooperrider.

Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.

Hailey: Good morning Jase.

Jason: Morning Hails.

Hailey: How’s it been since I saw you last? It was yesterday I think.

Jason: It would have been yesterday.

Hailey: Get any gaming done in the meantime?

Jason: No gaming done in the meantime, but watched Ready Player One for the first time last night. Um, enjoyed flicking through all of the pop references that were there, including the tomb of horrors illustration on the back of the van. That was a particularly nice moment for me.

Hailey: Yeah, no, I liked that one too.

Hey, let’s, let’s jump in. This is our first episode of the Amble podcast, but this recording session is actually happening a few weeks into the process. So we had a few goes at recording on some different topics, exploring some different things, and we feel like now we’ve kind of found our feet. So we’re coming back [00:01:00] and providing a sort of brief contextual introduction, and then we’re going to drop you right into the conversation.

But yeah, we thought we’d start with the basic idea. And the way I’d put it is there’s kind of these two lands, right? There’s the land of games and gaming and applied games. So that includes video games, digital games, as well as tabletop games. Games that are more about strategy and competition like Risk. You know, or Monopoly or, and obviously like more crunchy games that gamers play. Uh, and games that are more about story like Dungeons and Dragons or some of the more interesting story games. The whole world of games.

And then there’s this other territory, which we think of as the land of ways of working. Collaboration, systems-thinking, innovation, agile. Things that are quite important in the organizational sphere, you know, and, and trying to get things done in uncertain environments, in [00:02:00] the more complicated world we’re facing. More and more, we’re seeing people embrace these more sophisticated ways of working and, and Jason and I both work in this field, uh, helping people to bring those together.

And we believe that there’s a sort of hidden borderland between those two worlds. Where there’s a possibility that games can be used to help people increase their capability, uh, in these new ways of working. They can be used to actually do the ways of working. They’re, they’re actually part of the real process, not just learning to do the process. And also that because games are more accessible, they’re more easy for people to sort of pick up at home on the kitchen table or wherever they are, we think that games can help spread these advanced sophisticated ways of working more broadly. So they’re not just the sole territory of large organizations who have a lot of resources to sort of deploy, to, to use these new ways of working. Does that sound about right to you?

Jason: Sure does Hails. I mean, the other piece that I think [00:03:00] we’ve talked about, um, as an adjunct to that is that there’s also in this hidden sort of border land, there’s the potential for gamers to be utilizing some of these implicit skills or capabilities that we’re hypothesizing we as gamers have. And bringing them into their every day, into their local community doing, um, you know, convening conversations or, helping people work out what direction they need to go in their you know local school guild. Or enabling people to learn more effectively or sharing ideas a little better, or bringing people together to collaborate on a project more effectively.

Hailey: Nice. So the invitation is to come along with us on this amble. So we use that word very intentionally. An amble is a, is a purposeful, but undirected walk.

Uh, so, so we’re, we’re walking with purpose, we’re exploring, we’re trying to discover things. We don’t necessarily know which way we’re going. Um, and so [00:04:00] we may stumble into territory that we frankly don’t know that much about. We’ll probably still make whatever observations we can. Um, we’ll, we’ll do our best to talk about it, and then we’ll take that as maybe a bit of homework to be, go and find out some things or find some other experts to talk to.

Um, but we’d like you to come along with us, you know, with your, um, your backpack full of supplies. Your wand of curiosity, you know, just in, in that, in that open mindset, to maybe discover something new. Other areas we will know better, and we’ll have more authoritative things to say.

But that’s, that’s it, if you, if you’re gonna keep listening then yeah. Expect to discover some interesting things about this boundary land that we’ve been discussing.

But we thought maybe Jase, as a way to get started, we just tell a little bit about ourselves. Um, so both of us have an interest in games, both of us have an interest in collaboration. So why don’t you start? What, what was your first, um, experience [00:05:00] with games or most memorable, early experience with games?

Jason: My first, um, memorable experience with games. Oh, there was… so there’s games have always been a part of my life. I have two significantly older brothers and some of my earliest memories are trying to join them at the table, um, while they were playing D&D.

Now to give you some sort of indicator of time, that was AD&D. And for my, might’ve been ninth birthday? Eighth, or ninth birthday, I got the red box from my middle brother, Bruce. And that set off, you know, it kicked off the world of, um, narrative adventure for me in, in Dungeons and Dragons. Um, yeah, that was my first sort of, that, that would be my first kind of conscious games experience.

Hailey: For me it was, um, as a family we played monopoly and the game of life and that sort of stuff. And I always loved it. I couldn’t wait. And I was always the one begging for family game night.

Then one [00:06:00] Christmas without even asking for it, I opened Hero Quest and this was like, unbelievable. You know, I just went off into my room and I opened the box. There’s a little skeleton miniature and I’m reading the cards. I’m reading the background information about the skeleton and I come running out to where the rest of the family is sitting and watching football and I go, “did you know that this skeleton was animated through an arcane ritual?!”

My mom’s just like, oh, that’s nice. And my brother is just like, shaking his head, you know, can’t believe how nerdy I am.    But it was funny because yeah, it didn’t really have the context around it. Uh, so I feel like I only really, uh, the people who really wanted to do that kind of really heavy nerdy gaming. Um, so I think it really took me into my thirties to kind of find D&D and Magic the Gathering and these more crunchy, complex games. But I really love them now.

Jason: Nice. What’s on the gaming table at the moment? What are you up to?

Hailey: I mean, [00:07:00] just, um, two nights ago, uh, the party that I had Dungeon Master for in D&D got to level twenty. Um, which is one of those bucket list achievements. And trying to figure out what the final epic confrontation is gonna look like. Um, but yeah, anything else just exploring Hanabi, you know, a communications game. Um, keen, hanging out to play Mysterium. And we’ve been trying some, some of the more indie story games and that sort of thing. And I’ll say it, playing a lot of Magic the Gathering still.

Jason: Nice. It’s worth sort of pointing out I guess, that’s how we got into this kind of Amble and discourse was at the, um, friendly local game store, over here in North Fitzroy, Victoria. Shout out to the Maze of Fitz. Hi folks!

Um, Yeah. I mean, and, and through the course of a shared interest in MTG, [00:08:00] you end up talking about, you know, part of the magic of Magic is the gathering. The bringing of the folks together. And, yeah, you end up talking about all manner of stuff. And we found that we had, um, a shared sort of background in, in this thing called collaborative practice or collaborative design or facilitation .

And that kicked off, uh, “oh, you work with those guys!” “Ah, you work with those guys.” “Cool. I really like what you do!”

But then, um, you know, the, I guess naturally being in that game’s context, we got talking about how we use games in our practice or, you know, the sort of crossover points between what we do in gaming and what we do, um, with people. And yeah, it set off a chain of dialogues, um, over coffee, over wanders, over literal ambles through various-

Hailey: Yeah through Edinburgh Gardens.

Jason: Yeah, totally.

Hailey: So, for the facilitation nerds listening- so facilitation is, [00:09:00] roughly, making things easy for people. They’re trying to get something done. They bring in a facilitator, the facilitator makes it easier. Um, through any sort of interventions, anything from bringing water to the table all the way through to designing complex activity sequences that are gonna help the group think together and strategize together better.

Uh, so yeah, for the, for the people process geeks out there, what is your preferred facilitation method. And why do you like it?

Jason: Sure. I mean, I’ve been doing this sort of thing, um, for the last decade now. Largely just in the context of the professional services. And a lot of folk would know that the in, in that sort of space… so through institutions like CapGemini. Back in the day, it was Ernst & Young. KPMG, PwC, um, PwC’s ‘The Difference’. There’s a modality that’s sort of largely based on the MG Taylor series of models and facilitation methods. So I guess that’s sort of my, um, [00:10:00] background and kind of a grounding in that. Of course in the contemporary year most folks , you know, it pays to be model agnostic.

Um, I’ve done some work with the Theory U folk. Started hanging out with the Cynefin meetup, the local Cynefin meet up. Um, I’m a trained agile coach! So we will use whatever techniques that are appropriate to the challenge that folks are facing. You know, we’ll work with people to use the techniques that are useful to them. Not necessarily, you know, a specific one.

Hailey: Yeah. Nice. Uh, my journey, I think I got into the world of collaboration through things like Wikipedia and open source software. So these large, global digitally distributed collaborations that happen. Whereas M G Taylor, in theory, you, um, mostly are about people being in a room for, you know, a few hours or a few days and hashing some stuff out.

So, yeah, I ended up working with a fellow named Mark Elliott who started a firm called Collabforge. And so our [00:11:00] method, our favorite method was the one we developed, of course, uh, the method for scalable collaboration. So any, any scale of people ranging from two to 2 million, any context, not that we actually necessarily pulled off the extreme end of that scale, but that was the goal was to try to have a comprehensive meta theory that helped you think about collaborations over the long-term and with large numbers of people.

And what that often did was we ended up drawing on all these other models that were more appropriate to specific situations and kind of tying them together through our own theory. Um, so ended up working with a lot of MG Taylor practitioners and, and using a lot of that stuff.    Theory U as well.

Well, why don’t we, uh, dive in?

Jason: Yeah, let’s get in. Get into, drop into the conversation. Do you have a starting point, do you think?

Hailey: Yeah. So I’m just going to throw us into, um, a topic that had come up a [00:12:00] lot previously in our conversation.    And just, just throw it into us in the middle of things.

There’s a sort of analogy here that keeps bearing fruit between what game masters do in these complex story games that have a, sort of a simulation and strategy element, and what facilitators do. Maybe you could explain what happens in a Dungeons and Dragons game. So explaining it to the people geeks who maybe don’t know about D&D and then that’ll allow us to then explain to gamers some of the facilitation patterns.

Jason: Yeah, okay. Wow, I’ve never really explicitly articulated what happens in a Dungeons and Dragons game. So a Dungeons and Dragons game is a fantasy role-playing game where you bring together a group of people around a table and invite them to create [00:13:00] an adventure. Um, create and adventure in a world together. In an imaginary world together.

So there are two main roles in, in that. One is a sort of collective role, and the other one is a sort of more, um, enabling role. So the players, the people who are coming into the world-    your friends- take up a character, a Player character. A mighty warrior or a powerful wizard or a healing cleric, or any other manner of character that you can imagine.

And, um, they have skills and abilities that they bring and help the group achieve sort of goals with. Most of the time this is sort of questing like, in a traditional fantasy adventure sort of scenario where you’re trying to rescue something or defeat a monster or solve a particular puzzle or, um, journey to a new place.

The other role is the enabling role known as the Dungeon Master. So they’re the person that I guess creates the rules construct [00:14:00] and, is sort of the arbiter of rules and decisions and creates the world space and holds the world space and directs the narrative so that the players can interact with this world.

In many ways, the Dungeon Master is responsible for creating the world in which the Player Characters then interact. The interesting thing about Dungeons and Dragons though especially in the context of what we’re interested in exploring here Hails, is that D&D is about a group creating a shared narrative.

You’ll hear Dungeons and Dragons, you know, there’s a lot of caution in a game of Dungeons Dragons. It’s about the group as a whole. Everyone. Dungeon Master and Player Characters, creating that world together.

Hailey: Before we go too much into the, into the theory. Give me an example. Um, so I’m, uh, I’m Uliah, you know, the barbarian warrior princess of my tribe. I’ve got a greataxe. I’ve created my character. I’m very strong. Um, I’m not that smart. I like to smash [00:15:00] things. Um, what’s show me what the DM does, what the Dungeon Master does.

Jason: Um, okay. So. Uliah you find yourself on an open plain, .Uh, looking out it’s sandy. You’re not sure, quite sure how you got here, but you’ve been to this place before, perhaps it’s been in your dreams. On the horizon you see, um, dust rising. And coming towards you what, what looks like a caravan of people. What are you going to do?

Hailey: Uh, I’m going to, is there any high ground around?

Jason: Over to your left, it’s mainly desert, but over to your left, you can see a small copse of trees.

Hailey: Yeah. I’m going to go over to that copse of trees quickly keeping low, and I’m going to try to climb up and I’m going to watch and kind of try to see who these people are.

Jason: Okay.

So in this sort of context, there might be things that we need to [00:16:00] do now. Like has the caravan of people seen Uliah the barbarian? Does Uliah successfully climb the trees or does she slip and fall as the weighs on? And the role of the rule system that sits around Dungeons and Dragons is to enable that interaction to happen consistently.

And the Dungeon Master, I guess, is the arbiter of that kind of thing, but in that sort of scenario, that was a shared narrative that we creating.    One person’s creating context or that, you know, um, there’s a context created and then the characters interact within that context.

Hailey: I think that the relationship between the rule system and the story is one of the things that’s really worth interesting. And maybe isn’t clear for someone who hasn’t played. Um, so I like to compare it to imaginary play when you’re a kid.    And when that’s going well, it’s like “I’m the barbarian!” And I’m the, you know, “I’m the merchant caravan”, I mean, I don’t know that kids would be a merchant caravan. “I’m traveling through the desert with my wares, trying to sell them.”

And when they say, “well, I attack you and try to rob [00:17:00] your stuff.” And “well, I run away” and like, “well, I catch you”. And then sometimes it can be good and fun, and the improv is flowy and like they stay in the world. But a lot of times I remember it goes like, “well, I have a force field, so you can’t hit me.” And eventually it just escalates to who’s dominating the sort of shared creation of the shared world more. And the beauty about having a rule system is that you have these structures and these, uh, these rules to refer to that, actually determine whether who’s successful in what they attempt and whose ability to hide, versus whose ability to perceive sort of supersedes who. And often a dice roll is thrown in there as well to add a little bit of randomness to that.

And there’s something about adding in that sort of third point that you know, that, um, third point of reference that sort of adjudicates the shared story-making that I think makes shared story-making a lot more accessible to people who aren’t necessarily [00:18:00] into improv, or aren’t actors or artists, or writers.

Jason: Yeah. In many ways, the rule system acts as a scaffold that helps everyone, um, agree to the type of interaction that’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen. And I think that’s the, that is a definite parallel to the facilitation environment. I’m not sure if we want to go there now. Um, but before we do, there’s, there’s also sort of probably two elements of that.

One is the formal rules-based structures of the Dungeons and Dragons game system that tell you how you roll to hit something or how you roll to climb a tree, or how you roll to perceive a caravan in the distance. The other piece is there’s a bunch of social norms or social contracts that sit under that- and, um, this is something that we’re going to unpack later- that help a game work really effectively. Like really experienced players will find there are, there are the things that make playing together fun. There’s a whole bunch of social [00:19:00] contracts that sit in there or social norms that, um, or social rules that exist.

And in many ways, some of those that happen in really mature playgroups, ie. equal turn-taking, not dominating the narrative, allowing space and being open to creativity. All of those sorts of things are actually really important in other environments as well for getting work done.

Hailey: All right, so let’s do this again, but, uh, for facilitation. This time, you’re a facilitator that’s been hired by a group of merchants seeking to cross the desert. How would you design an experience for them, uh, to allow them to come up with the best plan for how to safely get across the desert?

Jason: Sure. So there’s probably, you know, in the facilitation environments that we normally work in. I’m talking you and I , because you are dealing with real world contexts, there’s a lot of-

part of a lot of the, the challenge that goes into it is the [00:20:00] preparation and understanding enough of the context, um, so that you can create it effectively in session or in simulation. So normally what we would do in this sort of scenario is spend time with our merchant caravan, understand what goals they’re trying to achieve, understand the things that they have access to, or the sort of constraints of their environment.

You know, we might try and understand the domain space that they’re working within. How hot does it get in this desert? What’s the projected, hotness, you know. What are the hard constraints that sit around that?    What does success look like for you? Are you happy to tolerate a 50% caravan loss? Are you happy to tolerate, you know, like, do you need to get everyone successfully across there?

How much, um, merchant-ware do you need to be carrying?    What, what are all those, what are all the constraints that would make this journey effective for you or a sign of success? And then given that, that begins to, form up, I guess, the problem space for the [00:21:00] group. Which then says, well, if it’s, over 40 degrees for most of the day, we’re going to have to think about heat regulation, and where we get water from. And if we’re walking through a desert, then what are the potential ways that we could interact with things like oases and who are the potential other competitive caravans that we might need to either engage with or outrun in order to kind of get to the resource more effectively, et cetera.

And then you would create, like, this is the sort of the problem-scoping side of things. So once you’ve come to some sort of common understanding of what the domain space is or problem that you’re seeking to engage with is,    we then create modes of exploring the challenges that are associated with that.

And I guess in many ways, it sort of simulating or modeling or designing potential responses to those things. And the challenge in complex environments is it’s not in- [00:22:00] well the recognition I guess- the thing that makes this sort of work in market effective for people is that there’s a recognition that in actually challenging environments, you need a way to get a group of people; A. heard. You need to hear multiple perspectives because you never know where good ideas come from. B. you need to draw on multiple sort of capabilities and perspectives because you need all of those capabilities working effectively together. You also need to get people aligned around what a common vision of success is, because if you, and I understand ‘how it is too hot’, differently then we might have a bit of a challenge when we get to the point where, oh, well I’m a bit hot.

Well, how hot too hot, hang on. We didn’t have this conversation before. And you know, when you’re in the midst of a desert, it’s, it’s not a really good opportunity to have that conversation. Do you know what I mean? In the middle of a desert, you want to be having that beforehand.

Hailey: Yeah. And thinking maybe we shouldn’t hire mercenaries that wear full plate armor.

Jason: Absolutely.    [00:23:00] This is the case, exactly. You know, um, Yeah. And who thought to bring the supplies, et cetera. So all of these sorts of things, um, helping groups identify what they need to do, agree on the way they’re going to go about it, identify the stuff that they’re likely to run into, um, and how they’re going to meet that.

But even things like, um, and, and then you’ll take a group through even, um, that sort of scenario around, ‘oh, if we run into trouble, who’s going to be on point for defending?’ Oh, well, um, if we run into someone who speaks a different language, you know, like even things like sorting out roles, and how we respond to that kind of stuff can be really, really valuable.

Hailey: So once they’ve explored all of the problem space and all of the possible responses and all the what-ifs, how do you get to a plan and implement it?

Jason: Um, there are multiple different ways of going about that. I mean, we can go into the tech of you know, facilitation deep dive sort of later. But generally it’s about playing with [00:24:00] various scenarios and from, or modeling out potential solutions.

So in, in their multiplicity, um, stepping back, looking at them from various vantage points and saying, ‘In what ways are they valuable?’ Like this solution; ‘If we take heaps of camels, we can bring back heaps of loot.’ ‘Hang on, but if we take heaps of camels we’re going to need heaps of water and heaps of people to look after them.’ right. Okay. ‘If we only take one camel we can’t bring back as much stuff, but it’s much easier to control.’ So you might that that’s, you’re like how many camels do you need to take?

You might step back and look at it from, ‘who do we need to take on this adventure?’ Do we have a doctor? Do we have someone who can, um, speak multiple languages? Do we have someone who knows how to fix things and tend to camels? Like you might talk about, you know, the sorts of capabilities you need to bring to bear. In that sense you would be, you would be appraising the solutions that are in front of you from a different lens. And by [00:25:00] looking at all of them, it gives you a perspective around what’s valuable to the group.

And again, here’s, here’s the interesting thing though; in worlds where we’ve come from in the past, where there’s a singular great solution- so this is the beginning to talk to the complexity stuff- if you’re talking about ‘How do I put up a brick wall?’ People over many, many thousands and thousands of years have been working on ways to put up brick walls. We’re really, really good at it. You don’t need to bring together multiple perspectives, people with different skills to kind of talk about how we’re going to put up brick wall, because people know how to put it, put up a brick wall.

Whereas if you bring it people together around something complex, well, something that’s unknown. There may not be a best-case solution that you pull off the shelf. In which case it’s equally as important that people share a common understanding of what good looks like and what they’re trying to achieve as it is that they have a clear vision of how they’re going to [00:26:00] do it. Because in any caravan adventure, stuff’s going to change. You know, you might find one of your camels runs off and you have to deal with that. And a group that shares a common understanding of what the goal state is and what they’re trying to achieve and who each other are, and the sorts of challenges that they might encounter, and maybe have some idea of how it is they’re going to go about resolving that as a group, are better equipped to meet that sort of challenge.

Hailey: So maybe another way to put it is that a group- people in general- are good at the tactical specifics, about using the tools that are there in the moment to do something. And that’s often where we’re strong. And so as long as they’re, they’re kind of clear on the bigger picture, then the smaller picture becomes a bit easier.

The question I want to ask though, is why is that conversation or that process going better because you’re there. Why couldn’t they do this themselves?

Jason: Huh, [00:27:00] that’s that’s interesting. Um, and this speaks to    the deeper value of convening. And I wonder if we can approach it from two directions. I’d really be interested to, to play with this from the DM perspective.

So if we come to the gaming sort of scenario, we take it back to the Dungeons and Dragons table. You know, we’ve said when we’re kids and we’re playing out sort of ideas, you end up with conflicts around, you know, a lot of the times. Sometimes when you’re playing make believe it, it works really well and you’re playing ‘suppose’. And you know, people, people play well together, but sometimes you get this escalating. Well, ‘I’ve got a forcefield’, ‘well, I’ve got a bigger forcefield’. ‘Well, I’ve got a bigger force field’ and that becomes a contest of wills for instance. And a common rule structure that’s external to individuals allows, um, gives you something to refer to, to arbitrate between those sorts of things.

That’s possibly one reason, right, to help resolve conflict.    So in the case [00:28:00] of the, um, a Dungeon Master, you know, Dungeon Master can refer to the rules as the arbiter of the rules to help resolve conflict. It’s the same way in the facilitation space.    The facilitators, not necessarily- and I think it’s important to explicitly acknowledge this- shouldn’t be responsible for the solutions. The solutions come from the group. In the same way that on a Dungeons and Dragons table, the narrative comes from the group. But having an external party holding space, as we would often call it. Or keeping mindful of the constraints of the problem, like what it is that we’re actually there to solve for, how we’re going to go about doing that. Um, so “we’re not having a conversation now about how many camels Hails, we’re having a conversation about how much water we need. We’ll come back to the camels at a later stage”, for instance.

Hailey: One of the things that we noticed in our practice, as in so many different fields of expertise, is there are patterns that are universal- or for [00:29:00] the most part universal- across different contexts.

You know, it doesn’t matter which problem they’re solving; building a spaceship, getting across a desert, uh, agreeing on how we’re going to frame the quarterly report in our financial services company. And facilitators recognize that, and they, they build tools that they can use when they see those common patterns arising.

So you were really speaking to methodology in the earlier parts of our conversation. And so this is where, and I heard in your plan for the merchants crossing the desert, a bit of ‘Scan, Focus, Act’. You know, could you maybe explain in a sense, how a facilitator uses method and a sense of rules framework to guide people through.

Jason: Oh, this is going deep now. This is really, really, really interesting. So, um, in the facilitation or collaboration or people enablement or, you know, group dynamics or social technologies ‘kit bag’, there’s a variety of things that [00:30:00] you could draw on. There’s a variety of sort of tools that that might be there. So if we’re, we’re bringing it back to analogy in the same way that there are multiple approaches to creating a shared narrative game like Dungeons and Dragons. There’s Dungeons and Dragons, there’s Pathfinder. There’s a whole bunch of structures like-

Hailey: GURPS, Powered by the Apocalypse.

Jason: Yeah!

Hailey: Blades in the Dark. American free form. Yeah, it’s endless.

Jason: Yes. So these, these all go out. Then there are also various flavors of facilitation techniques that sit out there, or, you know, collaborative techniques that, that sit out there. And in many ways part of the challenge is working, is matching, the sorts of, uh, technique that you’re going to bring to the group.

And, you know, we talk about the idea of ‘crunch’ and, you know, applying a rule system, that’s a requisite to your participants all the time. So, you know, some games groups really like an open, free form sort of narrative. [00:31:00] So the last thing that you want to do is bring them into a context like GURPS where, you know, everything’s sort of structured and has, you know, has, has a roll associated with it.

In the same way that there will be different social, different facilitation challenges or, you know, organizational challenges or people challenges that needed particular type of approach that you would bring to bear. And again, I think part of our challenge or our exploration through this is about, you know, talking through possibly some of the broader markers around how you make those sorts of decisions.

So a really good Dungeon Master has a great kind of grip on which rules, you know, when to flex the rules when not to flex the rules. Yeah. Do you do know what I mean? Um, I think, you know, what we want to do is begin talking explicitly about those decisions to make it easier for people to pick up, you know, tools and use them in their local kind of context or local community.

Hailey: A lot of the hypothesis has been [00:32:00] driven by this intuition that there’s a sort of analogy here that keeps bearing fruit between what Game Masters do in these complex story games that have a sort of a simulation and strategy element, and what facilitators do. You know they, they guide people through a process. They try to make the people the sort of stars of that process. And they’re the ones actually leading the solution, but they’re providing the container in which that process happens. They’re accessing a whole world and library of things that are feeding in. And a lot of our mode of exploration has just been pushing into that analogy and looking for examples and going, ‘what things do we think could exist that don’t exist and what might we make?’ Uh, or ‘what might we help others make by articulating the space?’

Jason: You know, it’s an invitation to, to community, to begin exploring this with us. Like this is, um, and this is something that we’re going to refine and evolve together. And, you know, the purpose of setting [00:33:00] up the doing as well as the talking is so we can learn from both directions. But it’s something that we want to do in concert with other people. And that’s, that’s really exciting indeed, to see something like that kick off.

Hailey: And that’s where that name Amble comes from, it’s that exploration that wandering. We talk a lot about a disciplined wandering, uh, not rushing directly into, ‘we have the right answer and we’re going this way’. And we’re doing this openly because we want to go on that disciplined wander with lots of people. Encourage them to go on that disciplined wandering, and maybe our paths will cross and we’ll have a chat and then we’ll keep going.

One of the things we’ve been, we’ve been talking about is, um, why collaboration skill sets and these sorts of facilitation skills are becoming more important, right? Uh, the world in a sense is becoming more complex. There’s a lot more moving [00:34:00] parts in the world in the 21st century than there was in the, in the 20th century or in the 19th century. Uh, things are more interdependent and connected globally. If the electricity grid goes down, you know, there’s going to be a lot more, it’s going to be a lot harder to get by than maybe when we were a little bit more close to the land. That’s a kind of dire perspective. Maybe appropriate in these days. Um, and you know, in past times maybe the approach to solving problems was, you know, ‘we need to go in this direction, find the solution, implement the solution, and then we’re done’.

And now, well in this world, the solutions in a sense are out there. So often we’re going, we already know how to fix this. We already have the technical capability. We got to the moon, you know, 50 years ago. Um, why can’t we seem to take those solutions and actually make them real in the world so that people can have better lives. Um, you know, why is there so much inequality still? And, uh, so, so many people suffering when we, when we have the incredible capability that we do.

[00:35:00] And I think the, the answer to that is it’s not really the solutions that are hard. It’s how to bring people together around a shared agreement about what’s the future they want, or what’s the world they want so they can figure out how to sort of squeeze that solution into their local context, uh, with all of its uniqueness and, and, and, and kind of make it fit.

Jason: Yeah. The challenge nowadays is how you bring people together to work more effectively together. Because you know, the sorts of solutions that are out there probably have to come from different parts at different levels of a system. You know, from different sites of representation. How do you bring those views together and get them working effectively together? And then how do you sustain that work over the period of time that’s required to get the job done to completion? You know because big challenges, sort of complex challenges, in the same way that a really rewarding D&D campaign takes a long time to play [00:36:00] out, you know. Like the sorts of complex challenges that we’re facing are, things that do take time and take sustained effort, um, and take a group of people that will continue showing up to the table over a long period of time. Organizations have begun- I don’t think it’s been, you know, it’s, it’s deeply embedded- but like places that have the resource and the time and inclination to improve their working processes have really seriously, begun to invest in these sorts of, um, social technologies or social processes to get work done more effectively. You’ll hear it under the banner of, um, different ways of working or, of course in market there’s been agile ways of working has been, uh, very, very popular.

But the, um, you know, and there’s an increased discourse around things like collaborative ways of working or innovative ways of working, et cetera. But what it refers to is how people do work together to get the results that they need to.

And the recognition from certainly [00:37:00] corporate or organizational spaces is that yeah, when you get to a certain size or complexity where you need multiple parts of an organization to come together to do something. Then you need ways of organizing that that are possibly more effective than just sitting around a, a meeting table or handballing emails backwards and forwards or getting the powerpoint.

Hailey: The takeaway for me is collaboration just doesn’t happen naturally. If you just throw a bunch of people into a room and say, “You’re on a project now collaborate!” Uh, you know, or if they’re just emailing around and that the, you know, large resource rich organizations know this and they hire people like us to come in and fix that issue for them.

Uh, and the, the challenge I see is if, um, you know, one of the vision statements I’ve been working towards for a long time now has been ‘global collaboration capability’. Everyone has the ability they need to collaborate well to realize the futures that they most desire and whatever that is in [00:38:00] their context.

So continuing to deliver services to large organizations doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone in the world is going to actually lift their collaboration skills. And I think that’s where some of the intuition for Amble came from. I played my first proper D&D game about seven years ago. So I was a lifelong gamer, but a little late, to the real, you know, heavy, kind of complex, serious games that I’ve been enjoying so much. And sitting there going, ‘wow, like we are doing this amazing, collective simulation story creation experience with essentially free equipment. Um, and no one here having collaboration training.’ I mean, I was the least experienced player at the table, despite having the most training in these sorts of formal skills. Um, and the ‘ah ha!’ is, ‘Well, surely we can take what we do as facilitators and try to make it accessible to people at their kitchen table, in their garage, in the basement where they’re already playing D&D. These people who [00:39:00] run, uh, these games. Could, could the Dungeon Masters of the world potentially become the facilitators of the world?

Uh, and there are for sure, lots of books about facilitation, lots of training, lots of places that make it easy, but there’s something about packaging it like a game, making it kind of meet those people where they are, and also, um, really harnessing the power of that games brain in terms of bringing things together into like a nice tight experience, uh, that we think hasn’t really been fully realized.

Um, and that, that, I think it gets to the core of the hypothesis here is this sort of DIY, at home, kitchen table, game-inspired collaboration movement.

Jason: Yeah. Nice. I mean there is, there’s two things that I’d really like to pick up from that. One of them was you, you began to talk about that, this idea when you were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I think it’s, you know, something that all groups who are reasonably experienced, you know, who have had engagement with a longer game or with a tighter group of friends or, you know, a [00:40:00] game that’s been running for a while does experience. And that, you know, that idea of what it takes for a group to create a shared narrative and sustain it together.

Now there’s already parallels in this idea of, you know, shared narrative building, creating a common vision, um, sense-making together, or, you know, giving sense to a new scenario. That is, you know, part of leadership programs out there in the world and you find them articulated really explicitly in organizational contexts. Is part of our challenge saying, “Hey, you know, this thing that you’re doing in the context of a game? Like that’s actually really valuable skills that can be used in other sorts of places and have real tangible value in contexts, you know? And in any context that you want to work in, um, there’s something, there’s something in that.”

That’s sort of the first bit. The other bit is how do you then make, um, tools or platforms or how can we [00:41:00] begin playing with the things that are going to amplify that experience and make it really explicit? Oh, right now, here’s a way that I can help a group get better at telling narrative. Or here’s a way I can play with my group to, um, help them stay organized as they deliver on a project. Or, you know, here’s a way that we, as a group, can bring our multiple perspectives together and go, well, what is it that we want to take forward? Like all these sorts of things, you know, being able to make explicit what those sorts of tools are and what’s happening, I think will benefit both sides of the equation.

The other piece in that is of course that there’s a, um, you know, part of seeing both games and collaboration thrive- if that’s the, if the conjecture is that sort of what’s needed in a growing, growingly complex kind of environment and world that sort of is rich in solutions, but, possibly not as rich in the way to bring them together and the way to get people rallied around them and the way to sort of sustain that movement [00:42:00] going forward- if that’s, if that’s a conjection, then part of also this is, is increasing the way we talk about it. Because people don’t often talk about this kind of thing. Um, outside of our small community of facilitators, for instance, you know, or outside of agile practitioners, outside of people who are into group narrative building or whatever, it’s not often talked about.

And, um, I think it’s useful to start saying that, you know, it doesn’t just exist there. These things that we’re doing to help people work more effectively, um, you know, they probably exist in many spaces and we know that they’re valuable. So why wouldn’t they exist in many parts of a, a diverse ecosystem?

But you know, our interest is in saying well, in the game space, we seem to see all these parallels all the time. So how do we lift it out of there and start making it explicit, you know, and making it something tangible that we can begin talking about, that we can begin exploring together, that we can begin testing new ideas on, that we can begin making stuff to [00:43:00] enable people to do things with.

Hailey: Okay. Right. So in that spirit let’s go a little deeper. So as you’ve just been saying, we’ve got these two groups, the facilitators, the process geeks, the people geeks. And gamers, game designers, serious game designers. There’s already an overlap in that Venn diagram or that multitude of circles that are overlapping. There’s the cluster there. We’re trying to make that overlapping zone bigger and clearer and easier to understand, to open up more possibility for people to move in there and create things. New sort of hybrid possibilities, whether it’s products or systems or toolkits, or just clearer thinking so that we see more of this in the world.

Jason: This crossover between games and bringing people together to do work more effectively is not new. Um, I think you mentioned, you know, the idea of sand tables, you know, and simulation like games as simulation. So, you know, let’s mock up our caravan [00:44:00] scenario and pretend that we’re actually doing it and, and physically model out what happens in each step. Like that sort of strategy simulation thing is used quite often.

Hailey: There’s a book called ‘Playing at the World’, which is the history of Dungeons and Dragons and a big part of it is the war gaming scene that it came out of. So people modeling different historical battles with miniatures on a table, and then using these rule systems and dice that we’ve been talking about to allow them to pretend to be opposing generals, um, moving their armies on the field and seeing who wins in different scenarios. And one of the things that that author pointed to was that in Prussia, in the late 19th century, this is literally how they trained generals. So they would have a referee who would set up the scenario and judge whose moves were successful as they moved these little figurines around the table and tried to defeat each other.

And that has grown into war [00:45:00] games and military simulations, which have been a very big part of sort of driving the serious games movement. Uh, there was also a book from, I think the sixties called ‘Serious Games’ by Clark C Abt. And the examples in there, are things like ‘what is the likely next nuclear use in the world?’ and creating, using game theory and this really complex stuff, to allow experts in world governments to model out what are the likely scenarios of people using nuclear warheads.

Uh, and it’s, it’s possible that their ability to reason through these games actually allowed them to not do it. You know, there was that really popular movie in the eighties, I think called ‘War Games’ that sort of spelled that out, you know. Spoiler alert, you know, the only way to win is not to play as the, you know, the supercomputer concluded at the end.

Um, so yeah, very much that’s not new. And there’s also the world, the aspect of serious games, which has more to do with simulation and training. So, we want people to understand how to [00:46:00] behave in a certain environment, how to say, maintain a park full of trees. I don’t, I don’t know where I’m getting this example, but you could create then a virtual reality simulation of this park, where the plants are growing and going through their natural cycles and you have to actually move around and feed them or prune them, do the things that are required to make them happy. And the simulation will give you feedback in the form of actual story. You know, these trees are dying, these trees are flourishing, to let you know whether your behaviors have been successful. And I think one of the things we’ve been talking about is a training simulation like that in a sense is based on settled conclusions about what works and doesn’t work.

You as the designer of the simulation need to know what you’re trying to show the player is, is true and not true, or what works. Um, and so there’s not a lot of room for exploring new possibilities in that space. And that’s, and that’s, we’re saying that that stuff is amazing, and it’s something that I feel I don’t even know enough about, [00:47:00] and there are probably all sorts of lessons and nuances in there that people who know more about this will hopefully tell us if they, if they get this far. Um, and we’re searching for a possibility that is more in this open co-creation, complex problem-solving side.

Jason: Yeah, I think the open, co-creation, complex problem-solving piece is a great point of emphasis because when we’re talking about those defined conditions like simulation, someone has to make a call around how big is the domain space? What are the potential outcomes? How do things interact? And that’s where it’s possibly more like a structured, um, Dungeons and Dragons system in the, you know, there’s a distinct outcome for a particular role that’s defined. Whereas I, believe, you know, the, the nuance in our hypothesis is that the enabling people to work more effectively, or enabling the shared narrative to emerge, or an [00:48:00] enabling the exploration of unknown sort of spaces, require slightly different skills.

This is not to say that you don’t need the simulation. You need enough reality there, you need enough context and understanding of the problem space to make it tangible, to make it to mean that you’re able to do things. But when it comes to getting groups to move into specifically unknown or complex sort of scenarios where there’s no existing precedent, um, requires different sorts of skills.

Um, so that’s, yeah, that’s the parallel with say strategy simulation or simulation, games as simulation. Do you, is there a, um, you mentioned games in education, like, uh, in this, in sort of that earlier discourse as well. And how do you see that as being allied or next to, or responding to what we’re, what we’re trying to get up to?

Hailey: So I think, um, I mean, there’s a lot of amazing teachers out there just exploring every possibility in terms of using [00:49:00] games to educate, and educate in that really broad sense of, um, helping people become better versions of themselves. Uh, and so I would think that some of what we’re exploring here with Amble we’re likely to find some teachers already doing it. And that I can’t wait. Um, and I have kicked over some rocks and found some examples. Um, and some of it would be in a sense, simulations. They might not be as sophisticated as an immersive virtual world. They might be board games or moving things around, uh, that, that teach people about systems, complex systems, or complicated systems.

I think there’s another big category that you’ll see in education, but also in sort of behavior change attempts where, um, you know, a government or a non-for-profit is hoping to shift people’s attitudes about CO2, or about refugees, or something like that. And that’s where you use a game that gives people, uh, an immersive experience that isn’t necessarily training them to, to influence a system, but it’s giving them a [00:50:00] chance to live and inhabit the role, to walk a mile in the shoes of somebody escaping a crisis situation. And to, to literally have to get past a border checkpoint and, you know, figure out how they’re going to get to freedom. Uh, and the theory there, I think is that by having someone inhabit that role, they’re going, their empathy is going to deepen. And it might be in fact a transformative experience that might shift the way they think about a political issue.

Um, I think kind of in that camp as well, there’s an emerging thing called mega games, which are kind of a hybrid of, of workshop and serious games. So one that I know of is called the machine learning president. And the goal there was to educate progressive activists about the role of technology in elections. So we had 2016, we saw the role of that Cambridge Analytica, which was this incredible human and tech system that took profiles of every [00:51:00] human on the internet, developed a sense of who they were and you know, where their proclivities were and what kind of messages would work on them, and started hyper targeting them with political messages to influence their voting behavior. And it’s credited with the election of Donald Trump.

Uh, so they, these people who created machine learning president created this game where a hundred people could come together and take on different roles of candidates, trying to get elected, factions like black lives matter, corporations like Google. And they went through this sort of simulated role-play process where they would buy new technology from the technology bazaar, they would spend money on ads. And ultimately the players trying to win where these four different political campaigns. And they had, so they had facilitators moving through this process, they had a spreadsheet in the middle where they would take whatever decisions people made in each round, input it into the spreadsheet, and what the spreadsheet would output was what is the polling saying? Or [00:52:00] what does the voting say about which candidate is in the lead? And they went through three rounds of that. And at the end, one of the candidates won this game. And people came away with a deepened understanding of this complex interaction between, um, politics, technology, media, and different political factions.

Jason: How do you see, how do you see the intent of Amble or you know, the sort of work that we’re interested in exploring as different to the strictly educational, the simulation based stuff? Because that’s really important work, like giving people a deep, felt understanding of what can happen in a given system or, you know, giving people insight into the behind the scenes and mechanics of particular social processes or, um, broader system impacts.

Um, and yes, possibly some of the challenges of building any game system is the, and this is one [00:53:00] for potentially our game designer friends, how do you begin distilling some of those simple patterns into something that’s approachable for people, et cetera? Um, and that’s a really important component of game design, qua game design.

Is there, uh, I guess what I’m asking here is, how do you see the Amble project as differentiated from that sort of game designers learning piece?

Hailey: Yeah, I mean, there’s a few things there. I think I’ll focus on the biggest one, which is, there’s just, it’s just not serving enough people yet and it’s not accessible enough.

So the same way we talked about how the best facilitation practitioners are often hired only by the most resource rich organizations. Um, things like going to a mega game… it’s, you’re already in a, sort of a culture, a context, a bubble that’s not necessarily for everybody yet. Or the ability to, um, to show up and spend an entire day doing that isn’t necessarily for everybody. And to be [00:54:00] really clear games are never going to be for everybody. Some people just do not want to play games. And I don’t think the goal is for Amble to become some universal thing that everyone’s doing, but there’s this whole huge world of gamers and game masters playing games everywhere, and that’s growing.

And that’s something we can potentially talk about more in the future is the explosion of this hobby. Whether it’s board games or Dungeons and Dragons. I think one of the core visions of Amble, as I said this at the beginning, is the tabletop version of excellent facilitation and collective problem solving.

Um, and I think what’s driving that is a sense that, uh, I mean, regardless of where we are in history, people need to be able to do things for themselves in their local context. You can go from an idea about how the world could be different around them, to actually doing something about that. And the one of the intuitions is that, um, part of what’s blocking them is maybe just not, not knowing that they already have the [00:55:00] capability to guide themselves or guide their friends through the steps that would make that more successful. The kinds of behaviors and tactics and strategies that make getting things done more likely to get done.

Um, and especially in a world where it’s becoming more complex, there’s less ability for leaders and institutions to kind of set the playing board for us, and then us just to go about our business. We’re, we’re going to have to take more agency in our local communities, where the actual solutions and the science and the knowledge are becoming cheaper every day on YouTube and Wikipedia, open source and all these, all these areas. And our main challenge is how do we kind of download them into our local reality? Uh, Amble is trying to be one option where people can do the, that deep thinking for themselves about how to get their merchant caravan across the desert.

Jason: In closing, I think there’s so many important discussions that we can have in this space. And I think it’s important to return to these sorts of [00:56:00] ambling digressions from time to time, because in a new domain, it’s this sort of discourse that begins to clarify the terrain or the topography that we’re going to explore. So, if you’re excited about a particular thread in this discussion, please let us know and we can circle back to it in future discussions.