How facilitators make collaboration happen, and how games can help

We explain how the best facilitators intentionally create the conditions that make fruitful collaboration possible. Then, we explore the different ways in which games can become part of this process, or can help develop the skills and mindsets necessary to participate in an effective collaboration.

Links to resources

Mordheim: City of the Damned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordheim:_City_of_the_Damned

Song of Blades and Heroes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Blades_and_Heroes

The Quiet Year, by Avery Alder
https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year

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

Session Zero
https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-session-0/

Lines, veils and other safety tools
https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/opinion/lines-and-veils-rpg-safety-tools

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
https://cci.mit.edu/

Embodied Cognition
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble, the podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderlands of new ways of working and games.

I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.

Jason: I’m Jason Tampake.

Hailey: Hey, Jase! Good to be back with you. How’s your week been?

Jason: Good Hails. This week I’ve had a little bit of time to rediscover an old pastime. Been painting miniatures, been painting, getting my paint on. It’s been fantastic.

Hailey: It’s not something I ever got into. I don’t think I have the patience or the manual dexterity for that, but I like to see the results. Hopefully once the lockdown ends, we can, we can play some games with your minis.

Jason: Yeah. I’d love that to happen. Um, I’m really enamored at the moment with that sort of crossover between narrative RPG and tabletop sorta simulation. So, [00:01:00] you know, um, things like Mordheim or, Song of Blades and Heroes. Those sorts of games where you build a band of adventurers and take them out to battle. There’s a little bit of narrative that sits around that, which is kind of nice. And that sort of process of creating your character and painting all their bits and the assortment of folks that they have around them, that’s it’s actually really quite rewarding.

Hailey: Well, that’s probably a good segue to what we’re going to talk about this week, uh, which is collaboration design and its intersection with games. And I think where it intersects with games is generally a lot of it is in those kinds of, um, story co-creation-adventuring-party sorts of games. I think is what’s on our docket to discuss.

So what do I mean by collaboration design? And just when I think about that, where I think about…    So it means actually designing, not collaborating on a design, but designing a collaboration. Being intentional about how a group is trying to get something done, wants to work, saying we’re going to do things in this order [00:02:00] and not in that order. We might change that. We might move, that we might shift that over time. But you know, we’re looking for these outcomes. And so we’re going to do these activities in this sequence. Is that roughly how you think about it Jase?

Jason: Yeah I’d agree with that. You know, it’s often, it’s not often thought about really explicitly by most folks, you know. How do we work together through this problem that we have? What are the sequence of things that we’re going to do? What are the topics that are in discussion, not in discussion? What are the activities that we’re going to do as part of that collaboration? Um, and how are we going to go about them?

Hailey: Cool. So today we’re going to talk about some of the ‘why’ of collaboration design. What’s the benefit to being that intentional?    Why it matters, but also the ‘hows’, some of the, the key bits- it’s a huge topic. You could talk for hours and hours and hours about it. And, and I know I do. Um, but today I try to just start to lay out some of the key elements, but especially talk [00:03:00] about how that intersects with games.    We, in some of our prep for this, you know, noticed that a lot of collaboration design capabilities and practices are really already expressed in games.

So to begin with, we’d like to start off with a game that we think might set up the topic for us in an interesting way. And that game is The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. And you want to tell us about that Jase?

Jason: Sure. It’s, The Quiet Year’s a beautiful game. It’s a narrative, a collaborative narrative building game, based around map-making. It’s a game that takes, where the players become responsible for expressing the story of a community that’s rebuilding over the course of a quiet year or ‘the quiet year’ after civilizational collapse. And it uses some really, really simple techniques to create a container in which people [00:04:00] can construct a group narrative together and generate really beautiful story with a map that accompanies it together.

Hailey: So they’re literally drawing on a map as they go?

Jason: Yeah. So you play a, um, each person takes a turn and there’s a map which sort of outlines the general features of the land in which the community is rebuilding. The community starts with a bunch of scarcities; things that they’re in short supply of, and a bunch of resources; so things that they have plenty of, and a few key kind of map points. And then each turn is a week in a year of that community. And each player is responsible for narrating and drawing on the map what happens in a week of that community.

There’s various actions you can take. You can create, you can start a project for your community, sort of building something new, you can introduce a challenge. But the way that this is sort of structured is that [00:05:00] Avery Alder uses a simple deck of cards. So 52 weeks in a year, 52 cards in a deck,    to express both the four seasons of the year; so heart, spades, clubs, diamonds. Not necessarily in that order. And then for each card, something that triggers a narrative point or challenge that triggers a narrative point.

Hailey: Yeah. Thanks. And, uh, I did play this. I played it for the first time with my partner, Allie, about a week ago. Uh, and you, I know you’ve played it quite a few times. So, you kind of, you printed it out and said, “you’ve got to try this Hails”. You know, and that, yeah, it was interesting. Um, we, we had a pretty good time. We actually got through the whole game. It takes about four hours if you play the full length game, um, helped along by a bottle of wine. And I think what’s, what’s sort of a couple things stood out. So one is that, and I’ve noticed in a lot of these story games, is the way they manage the tension between [00:06:00] co-creation and turn-taking.

So, if you were just to say, “Hey, let’s imagine a post-apocalyptic settlement and what happens there and what are the things we’re doing,” and you just started improving and jamming, I think a lot of people would find that hard. Um, so having the game say that on your turn, you have full authorial control to sort of change the map and change what’s on it ends up making it a lot more generative. Um, because the other person can’t, uh, say, “No, I don’t like that. That can’t happen.” As long as what you’re doing, kind of fits the spirit of things, it doesn’t kind of create a logical paradox, you can, you can make that input. All they can do to show their unease is to, is to take a contempt token and put it in front of them. And those have no mechanical input on the game. It’s just there to symbolize the tensions in your community. And also, I guess, kind of between the players and that’s, that’s part of what, and it’s kind of an engine for drama. It’s always pushing you to kind of make the more [00:07:00] dramatic choice that leads to more interesting stories and decisions.

But I think what that generates is by the end of, you know, even even five turns, but, uh, surely at the end of 52 turns, 52 weeks, your map is massive! And so much has happened there and there’s all these characters teeming. I just remember thinking, ‘geez, if we had sat here for four hours and tried to invent this world without these tools, we would have had maybe like, you know, 20% of the kind of interest and creativity and depth’.

And, and so it’s sort of surprising, you know, divergent pieces of puzzle. And that to me, I think sort of speaks to the, to the power of how games can move you towards a really generative outcome.

Jason: Absolutely Hails, that that’s a beautiful summary. It sounded like was like it was a good time. It’s amazing how many plot threads sort of emerge and then you have to choose which ones you’re going to pursue and which ones you’re going to pare back. It gives you all of that sort of option space to play with, but in a really directed way.

The thing that was interesting in, that you raised was [00:08:00] around that idea of the way that constraints or, you know, sort of rules or boundaries of the game, drive action and enable a lot of creativity in a way that just having a greenfield or an open kind of playing space-    theoretically, that would give you every option available- but you, it makes it much harder to begin telling a story or begin getting output.

And when you have a few sort of constraints built in; 52 cards with prompts, you can generate a lot of really, really interesting options and narrative fragments that the group can then pursue.

Hailey: Yeah. You know, that’s the piece to me about one of the kind of tensions in collaboration design, because you can kind of go, “Right, so there’s going to be a start, and we’re going to create the container- which is our sort of facilitator speak for you know, doing all the things that you need to do to, to make it work at the outset- and then [00:09:00] we’re going to have this activity, then this, then this, then this, and then we will converge, you know, on a correct answer and it will be done! But that’s very much like designing in a vacuum. And what really- the other kind of layer of collaboration design. Is that sense of that tempo. That rhythm, that kind of interaction with the rhythms of what’s already going on in the rest of the world, and how you kind of pull your ideas back or shift or tweak the activity sequencing, or go in a different direction or, you know, stretch things out that need to be stretched things out, or compress things that need to be compressed. And having that kind of sense of forward momentum really matters. A lot of times it’s about generating legitimacy for the collaboration in the external environment, or just giving the group a sense of progress that allows them to go further. And there’s something about the way that the turns are so elegantly designed in a game like The Quiet Year that I think performs a similar role of kind of keeping the momentum going. So there’s just always something being added to the map. And every [00:10:00] turn in fact has like three sub stages, right? So sometimes you’re adding three, four or five new things, or things are changing on the map in one turn. And that sense of momentum or tempo is really meaningful.

Jason: So that’s, you know, the role of the design of the game. Contributing to the momentum of the group. And it’s funny because you know the 52 cards, there’s a distinct end. You know, when you draw, you know I’ve forgotten which card it is that you draw, king of spades, right? When you draw king of spades, that’s it that’s the game end.

So there’s this sense of, you know that this is coming at some point and your narrative is going to come to a close. And the, having each one of these sort of sequences to scaffold from allows the game to continue moving towards that sort of conclusion. And you do feel that sense of growing interest and momentum in the story that you probably wouldn’t get, if it were just a completely open-ended narrative.

I wonder if it’s useful to talk [00:11:00] about the role of like the two sort of features of design that are evident in that, that we would use in collaborative design?

Hailey: Yes. Yeah. Let’s like, let’s look at the game through those two key features that we identified. I want to put a, like a bookmark on this point about how games have the ability to just say ‘that’s the end’ or kind of, to kind of close the space. And also around the outcome of a game is just, that was fun and interesting and satisfying, versus the outcome of real-world collaborations. Is one of the key tensions, I think between games and actual collaborations. And where the sort of resonant analogy breaks down. Um, but maybe that’s a future episode.

Jason: That’s interesting. I paused on that. I really liked that bookmark. Let’s, let’s definitely bookmark that because I think in some sense the satisfactory experience of a game is actually arriving at some sense of [00:12:00] outcome. So there is in-built even in games I would conjecture like, or game design, a parallel around what a meaningful outcome experience for a game is. And in the absence of that, you might end up with a not particularly satisfying gaming experience. I agree that, you know, the sort of outcomes that you’re looking for or that we’re looking for in a collaborative design sort of sense, in a real world sense, is going to be more specific. But that sense of having a adequate conclusion is really, really important. That’s one for unpacking later on.

Hailey: Cool. So yeah, the invitation was, let’s look at how The Quiet Year expresses creating the container and sequencing activities as a way to introduce those two. Yeah. I found that, um, it had pretty minimal container creation. I think what games often do in creating the container; 1. Is some level of shared world-building. [00:13:00] So the players sort of decide what world they want to play in. And in this case it just says, ‘yeah, have brainstorm some ideas about where your encampment exists. Is it in a mountain range? Is it down by a beach? Uh, spend two or three minutes on this,    don’t let it linger. Just get something that everyone’s nodding about and go.’

And then the other piece of it, I think it really does is just tries to bring people into the rules of the game really smoothly through suggesting that you read aloud, that you take turns, reading aloud different parts of the rules to help people understand. To make sure it does recommend that you have a facilitator who knows the game really well. And I thought, I think a lot of care was put into making sure that you can get into the game very quickly and smoothly and start creating. With minimum kind of uncertainty.

Jason: Yeah. There’s a lot of- I’d like to call attention to that as well- there’s a lot of care taken to, in facilitation terms, creating context. Like, here’s [00:14:00] our opening story. Here’s why we’re here. And then reading out aloud things like, ‘here’s the stuff that we’re going to use. This is our map. You know, this is how a turn works. You know, this is what we’re going to do with these dice in terms of managing our projects. You know this is our deck of cards, which is going to prompt things’. That, there was a lot of effort put into helping new players create strong context or create strong sense of what we’re doing here together and what all these tools are with their players.

Hailey: Yeah, it’s a sort of summon into their mental model. All of these pieces, and kind of how they work together and what they represent. So there are project dice; when you start a new project, you put one down and then every week it will tick down. Understanding that is really necessary to participate in this sort of shared hallucination of this camp. And the way that they guide you through those first steps, sort of ensures that everyone’s got the sort of furniture of that shared [00:15:00] imagination space in the room and relating to each other.

Jason: So you mentioned that you felt that The Quiet Year was reasonably minimal in its set up, in its sort of provision of that sort of stuff.

Hailey: Yeah.

Jason: What do you, what do you see as the intent of that? Like, why do you think there wasn’t, you know, a whole bunch of crunchy- in gamer terms- detail put in that sort of space?

Hailey: Uh, yeah, I think it had a fairly strong opinion of the mood it was trying to create.    And that’s what a lot of good games do. Some games are more engines or sandboxes or construction kits for any sort of mood or space that you want to create and they have fewer opinions about that. But I think, I think a lot of smaller indie games are saying, no, I’ve crafted this mood the way a novelist would, in a way a filmmaker would. And I’m giving you some ways to play within that. Um, so I think because it was fairly opinionated, you know, the deck of cards, the prompts, they [00:16:00] have very specific things in it. Like the parish, you know this- and they don’t tell you what that is- but they give you lots of moody stuff and they tell you, you are an enclave in a post-apocalyptic world.    You’ve just fought off this group called the jackals. Now you have a quiet year and then the quiet year ends when the frost shepherds come. And they don’t tell you a lot about what those people are, but it’s very, it’s very tight and bookended and yeah. I think that’s because if you really want someone to have a rich satisfying experience within four hours and minimize the risks that they kind of get lost, you tighten things up, you cut off a lot of possibility.

Jason: Okay. So that’s, that’s beginning to get to the role of collaborative design isn’t it? In talking about when you’re constructing a experience or an engagement for people, designing the types of constraints, and thinking about the sort of mood that you’re trying to evoke in a game scenario or, the [00:17:00] kind of outcomes you’re trying to drive in a collaboration scenario. The type of information that people require brought into that scenario, the type of activities they need to engage with. All of those things need to be thought about. And if they’re designed, you’re likely to end up with a more, I mean the conjecture is you’re likely to end up with a more engaging and rewarding experience.

Hailey: And if we’re going into more of a real world practical scenario, you’re more likely to get to a solution for your challenge. Or a pathway forward or a roadmap that not only seems plausible and highly likely to deliver the impacts that you want, but also one that people buy into, understand, and know how they can independently go about implementing when they leave the facilitated space.

Jason: So what sort of stuff do we characteristically see? I wonder if it’s worth then pulling out the things that we characteristically see as being [00:18:00] important when scoping, or creating the container in which collaboration sort of happens. Like, so when, in the same way that Avery Alder’s game used a sense of created tempo via the use of cards to prompt actions with it throughout the course of a year, what are the sorts of things that we would begin looking at, or we would take into account when we’re designing for collaboration?

Hailey: Sure. I might go a little bit philosophical here because I think that the, this sort of scoping phase, so often, if you’re trying to design a collaboration, you have to sit there and think about how you want it to go.

It creates a bit of a dilemma, a bit of a chicken-egg paradox, because if you really want to be honest about bringing the genius together and not assuming things and trying to get the hidden possibility, that’s actually the best possibility. Then you don’t want to design the pathway in advance, where you’re just sort of facilitating people towards an answer that you already believe is correct.

But at the same time, you [00:19:00] need to create a really supportive process and container and set of conditions in which people are going to have the best chance to get to someplace good. You end up doing a kind of microcosm of the collaboration and the scoping phase. It’s sort of like a, a one sort of amble around the space of the collaboration.    I used to use when I was thinking about ‘what are all the things I need to think about in designing a process?’ I used to use these shapes. I mean, I think I still do. I used to draw them on the whiteboard. I don’t do that as much anymore, but there’s a triangle, a circle and a square.

And the triangle is the sort of space of outcomes. What are we trying to do? You know, the vision is up there at the point of the triangle as the sort of thing we’re striving towards. And there’s a layer beneath that, which are the tangible outcomes or changes in the world that start to become quantifiable, or things you can really touch, whereas the vision is fuzzy. And then the activities are the things that we’re going to need to do to drive [00:20:00] those outcomes, to make the vision real.

So there was sort of like an implicit theory of change that you were starting to build. And that also tended to include defining the problem. So we may not want to be too specific about vision or outcome viscerally in the collaboration, but at least we want to start to point at ‘this is where we see the challenge’.

And even that we want to make sure that the people that we’re inviting to the collaboration have a chance to co-define the problem, and to inspect and explore and agree on the nature of the problem together. But you need to kind of gesture at ‘there’s something wrong here’ in order to even frame an invitation.

The circle is really about ‘who?’ It’s about, there’s all these different stakeholders, decision makers, organizations, kind of who’s on the map. And also who’s invited. Which can be a really difficult question because if you invite everybody, you’re not likely to get them. And it’s really hard to hold a process with a lot of people.

So, do you choose representative people? You know, how are you kind of slicing and dicing the demography and [00:21:00] the sort of stakeholder map and deciding who comes?

And then the square or the rectangle is basically the plan. You know, what’s the sequence of things that are going to happen. And generally the way I usually thought about it was, we could be very specific about the left side of the plan, the left side of the square, and then we would be increasingly fussy about the right side and, you know, leaving it open. But with an idea of where we’re going to end, or usually at least we knew when the budget ran out. And that was kind of a thing that forced us to be a little bit more specific about that.

And what we would do is we’d probably have a vague sense of that, and then we would invent a scoping phase where we would try to get a representative group out of that circle map and get them to help us design the process to which we would then invite a larger group . Does that resonate with you?

Jason: Absolutely. I think our experiences are very, very similar in that space. Certainly in terms of when you’re working with large organizations or larger groups of [00:22:00] people, the vast majority of time in this sort of creating the container or scoping phase is spent defining the problem. So someone comes to you and says, “look, we need to get on the same page about our strategy”. It’s a very broad kind of question. It’s a, it’s a very, very broad challenge. And part of the scoping process or creating the container or creating context to enable effectively working on that problem, is actually drilling into well, which parts of the strategy? What aspects of the strategy are we talking about? Who is not on the same page about the strategy? Why don’t we understand those kinds of pieces? What’s the information that seems to be most contested in the strategy? How is that expressed differently in different parts of the organization? So part of the challenge of scoping is again, putting those constraints around, well, what is, what is the problem in focus? What is the thing that we’re [00:23:00] going to agree to spend our time, energy and effort on? What’s the stuff that we are going to really, really focus on.

Now, if we can get aligned on that, then we can start saying, well, who do we need in the room in order to contribute to the solving of that problem? What’s the information that we need to help us meaningfully contribute to that challenge? And then you can start talking about, to your point, what’s the sequence of stuff that we need to do to make sure that in the limited time that we’ve got together, we get a decent outcome? And what does a reasonable kind of outcome look like?

So, um, and I’m with you. My experience has been the same, you know, you end up with these tight constraints early. Around look, these are the boundary conditions of our problem. Here’s the information we all need to know. Here’s the stuff that, you know, the landscape, as we understand it. Let’s play with kind of, that sort of stuff.

And then progressively it gets, I guess, the agenda or the design of the collaboration gets more and more open as you have to respond [00:24:00] to where the group’s going. And you used a model there earlier talking about thinking about, to enable you to think about, how group collaboration happens. And there’s, there’s many of those, right.

There’s, there’s many ways that that can be expressed. And there’s probably two things there. 1. is that it shows that we’re using, like, it is a genuine design process in that the structure or the way to think about designing for an experience or a collaboration. There’s a sort of a method or a methodology there that sits behind it, or a philosophy or a model.

But then the other piece that’s in there is the one that I’m really interested in exploring now. These are all kind of decisions that need to be made. Like what goes into the collaboration and what doesn’t? What goes into the problem and what doesn’t? Who needs to be involved in the solution and who doesn’t?

These are all decisions that need to be made by design. [00:25:00] And really effective collaboration gets done where people, where to the best of our ability, we’re making sure that we’re adequately bringing together the requisite parts of the challenge.

And there’s the $60 million question that I think will is probably- when I say $60 million it’s probably hyperbole- but there’s, there’s a massive question that needs to be resolved. And that comes to; to what degree do we tightly design the activity, versus to what degree do we need to be open to responding to something?

So that’s that age old question between constraint and openness. And I think game designers, like in game design, in elegant game design, that sort of stuff is a question that game designers work with all the time.

To what degree are we directive about our rules in terms of this is how you do a thing? And to what degree do we allow people to be free to express their narrative? To write, to [00:26:00] draw on the map whatever they want, where they are, where their license is. And then how do we enable people to bring all those parts together?

Hailey: Right. So if collaborations are multiplayer reality games and us facilitators are the game masters, you know, are we railroading? Are we sandboxing? How do we keep the experience relevant, without having it feel aimless? Uh, that’s, we’re getting now into I think some of the parallels that we really want to draw out, right, between games. To try and unfold some of the potential we’re seeing about bringing more gamers, game masters, game designers into this collaboration design practice.

Maybe just before we dive into that, one thing I feel we haven’t quite touched on is ‘why’. Why collaboration design and maybe like a really tight way, a tight game we can play to get into it is um, when you’re pitching one of these really involved, time consuming, expensive collaboration designs, one of these processes to people who maybe don’t [00:27:00] normally work in this way, how do you get it across the line, what do you tell them?

Jason: So, I mean, there’s a number of different ways that you can approach that from a real world perspective. One of the things that we definitely know is that the there’s value in engaging in these processes where you have a complex challenge, where you need to bring multiple parts together. Where the solution is, where the problem is not very well-defined, where there may not be prior solutions that are available to take off the shelf because you’re operating in a new, completely new market environment or environmental context or policy environment, whatever that happens to be. The reason that you invest in something like this is because for challenges like that, you want to give every opportunity for that kind of intervention to succeed. Now we know just from the case study, I think there’s a classic McKinsey paper that says ‘70% of transformations chan- um, fail’.

[00:28:00] Hailey: Right.

Jason: And not because of their, the adequacy of the solution. Like someone’s thought really hard about the strategy. Someone, you know, you’ve got a whole bunch of smart people who have put together a great roadmap. But it’s because of the inability of the people who have to enact it to maintain focus, energy, attention, to see it through to completion. All right.

So there’s a lot of things that go into how you maintain that focus, energy and sort of drive in a group of people. And one of them is making sure that folks have a common understanding from the ground up of what it is that we’re actually doing. So, this is not saying, you know, it’s not real fun to play a game- let’s use the game analogy. It’s not real fun to play a game in which the dungeon master or the games master has come out and said, “This is exactly what’s happening. And now you’re doing this and now you have to do that. And this is where we’re going to go”. It doesn’t give a lot of [00:29:00] the experience as a player in that sort of space is not a particularly good one. Um, you might think, ‘Oh, why am I playing this game? Why am I being asked to do you know, if I’m just being told to do something, it’s not a lot of fun’.

Now, I think you can run- it’s not meant to trivialize the sorts of real world action that’s required in seeing organizational change- but there’s something very, very deep in allowing people from whatever layer of the organization that they represent to have a common understanding and importantly, a meaningful understanding about how they need to work towards a common goal.

And this sort of alignment, people alignment, this sort of group awareness or group sense-making comes from people getting involved in collaborative design. From people going through a collaborative process together to orient to a common understanding of the challenge, to contributing to how their piece of the puzzle or [00:30:00] how their skills or how their- in games terms- what their character is going to do to contribute to the solution. It helps them to understand what their fellow party members are going to be doing. So, what other parts of the organization are going to be doing to contribute to that.

Hailey: Yeah, so most of the work of change happens outside the discussion room. And if you want to increase the chances that all those people independently working to try to bring the desired change about are going to do it well and in an aligned way, without having to constantly check in, then you want to, you want to do this thinking together process really well. So a really well held process that takes the appropriate amount of time to get people into coherence will actually save a lot of time later in terms of people running down the wrong direction. Or just misunderstanding, or not feeling clear or empowered, or needing to have more, lots, [00:31:00] more future conversations. Just circling back to what are we even doing again? And this, this still doesn’t make sense to me.

Jason: Totally. A simple, I mean, a simple analogy might be something around, along the lines of- if you consider in a game- part of the reason that we use a rule set and establish session zero, or, you know, how this is going to work, is that it enables us to focus on the things that count.

Playing the game, creating strong narrative, solving the quest. If we had to stop at each juncture and consider ‘oh, how do we resolve this fight? How do we know who wins and who doesn’t?’ At every point in your developing narrative, if you had to stop and work through that it would really halt your progress.

Hailey: Right.

Jason: If a group can agree, you know what? We’re going to play 5th ed Dungeons and Dragons, and this is how we resolved combats. Or this is how initiative works. By having all of those strong boundary conditions sort of set, it allows the group to focus on what’s important.

[00:32:00] Hailey: Even down to, um, one of the things that groups often establish is norms around rules. Are we the kind of group that when a rules question comes up, we stop the game and we open the rulebooks? Um, which you know, which can be great and you, you solve it and you figure out. Are we a group that leans towards no, we’ll just make a call on the fly. We’ll look at the rule books after the session and we’ll do better in future sessions.

Jason: Nice.

Hailey: And that’s the kind of thing you discuss in a session zero. Which we thought, I think when in our prep was a good analogy for the creating the container process. So, I seem to remember you hadn’t actually heard of this term before?

Jason: No, it was a new term to me Hailey.

Hailey: Yeah, so it seems to be something that’s really grown in popularity as the hobby has expanded, especially expanded across different demographics, different types of players who might be more interested in role play or more interested in tactical combat. There’s fewer assumptions you can make about how your fellow players want to engage in a game of [00:33:00] Dungeons and Dragons, let’s say, because there’s so many different dimensions to how people want to play. Different feelings about the kinds of subject matter, which is allowed on the table, level of violence, what people might experience as a squick or a trigger or something that sets them off.

Um, and so there’s this very growing in popularity thing that groups do is, when they gather for their first session they don’t start playing the campaign. They don’t actually do any game play in that first session. They call it session zero. Maybe they’ve already completed their characters. Often they have ideas for characters, or characters that are half finished. They sit together at the table, they chat about the characters , they get information out of the game master about what’s what’s this world that we’re in. How much do we know about it? How much do our characters know? You know, if my character has this, does that kind of not fit into the world? That kind of stuff. And also generally cover things like things like Lines and Veils.

So, a Line is ‘we don’t want any violence against children in our game. It [00:34:00] just doesn’t happen. We’re just gonna not do it’.    And Veils, which are, ‘we won’t mind if there’s a little bit of sexuality in our game, but maybe, you know, we fade to black. Or the camera pans away, you know, to a window curtain like swinging in the breeze. When that happens, we’re not going to actually act that out’.

And what that does, I think is it really saves on misunderstandings later in the game. And yeah, it creates a sense of safety and trust that, yeah, this is the kind of game we’re here to play. And the sort of fun factor and, you know, the epic moments that you get through the course of the campaign, probably go up. I wonder if there’s research on this, but it’s, it’s certainly a growing phenomenon.

Jason: I mean, anecdotally the fact that it continues to be something that people are doing. Yeah might- it’d be interesting to learn if there’s anybody out there who has any experience, you know, you know, looking [00:35:00] at how session zero improves the value of their game or the experience of a game, et cetera. It’d be really interesting to hear about that.

Because it’s certainly, from a collaboration design perspective, that idea of being explicit with the key players involved in the collaboration around what’s in scope what’s out of scope. What are we going to focus on? What are we not going to focus on? What do we do when conflict arises? You know, that sort of idea of what goes in a parking lot for working on later, versus what do we bring forward and address now? All of those sorts of things, that being very, very explicit about the way we are going to engage with the collaboration game, if you will, is vital to ensuring the success of really, really good outcomes.

Hailey: Yeah. I think that’s a good moment to really tie this back to the kind of whole thing we’re trying to do here with Amble; is this intuition [00:36:00] that the world needs more new ways of working facilitation, collaboration, design, collective imagination. At the large scale, but it happens a lot at the large scale already.

But at the local scale, you know, where people who are realizing, seeing a changing world, a lot, a lot of things are going to be changing about very basic stuff. Like that you know, the way they are going to be finding their food, the way that they teach their children. They’re having to invent new ways of being. And the hypothesis is we’re going to need a lot of collaboration designers and facilitators to help with all of this change that’s going to continue to come for a while. I mean, you know, when it says, oh, you know, what’s the ‘new normal’? And I think the new normal isn’t likely to arrive anytime soon. I think the new normal is that normal is going to keep changing a lot in the coming years. So the hope is, in a sense, that by painting a picture of these resonances and these [00:37:00] analogies between collaboration design and the way gamers and game masters and game designers are already working, you can kind of… we can increase the crossover between these two territories and hopefully recruit some game masters into, to become facilitators at their local level.

Jason: Totally, it’s drawing an explicit awareness to the need for groups. Especially going forward when you’re dealing with community challenges, complex challenges, et cetera, to be very, very intentional about how they work together. Because that is going to really enable their success, like a, a really satisfactory kind of outcome.

And I think the important thing to note is that it’s not trying to say somehow that this is something very, very mysterious. I think all of these kinds of norms emerge naturally in tight knit groups. So for instance, in the absence of a session zero, [00:38:00] I’ve been playing a long term Dungeons and Dragons campaign with a group of friends now for two or three years. And we know the things that sort of, we talk about and the things that we don’t. We never sat down and had an explicit games zero where we explicitly scoped that out. But we’re a group of mates that have a history that goes back and we sort of understand one another already, there’s already an implicit shared language. There’s kind of ways that we can communicate and say, “oh, that’s a little bit out of bounds” or, “well, hang on, let’s not do that”, or “yes, let’s do this”. For groups that are coming together as new groups, and specifically if you’re coming together to achieve something really, really rapidly, being really intentional and being really explicit about ‘What are we going to cover? What are we not going to cover? What’s inbounds, what’s not inbounds? What’s the outcome that we’re seeking to drive?’ That sort of stuff is important. And I think there’s something there’s something in that. And it’s not that-

Hailey: It makes me think of the role of culture. You know, if you’ve heard this [00:39:00] term, uh, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Culture is actually the thing that drives work and drives change.

What I was hearing is your group had a culture and you could rely on that culture. Whereas the, yes, I’ve been DM-ing a campaign for almost five years now. And the players are on level 19, you know, which out of, out of 20. And I knew a couple of them, but three of them were completely new, but over the time we’ve developed a culture and have become friends and, you know, have we chat at the beginning and the end and, you know, we share things in our Facebook chat that are not related to Dungeons and Dragons. And that culture is what really holds you. Especially if things get a little bit hairy or someone’s having a bad time, as well as it tends to have a big influence on what kind of story you tell.

Jason: Is it worth also then talking about the thing that that’s bringing to mind; is the difference between if we use this idea of being intentional about how the game’s going to run, establishing the boundary [00:40:00] conditions, the norms, and the rules of the game, in inverted commas, of ‘the culture’ of the game upfront. There’s a difference between a group that’s been playing together for, you know, a number of years, and say, going to a convention and sitting into a pickup game. I mean, is this where it’s sort of day zero or game zero culture, session zero culture comes from is that?

Hailey: No, I’m not so sure about that. I think in a pickup game, generally the facilitator there is designing that explicitly to kind of minimize the need for a lot of session zero culture building. The characters are pre-generated, the quest fits into three hours, you know, they roll into it really quickly. And also people who are at a convention generally are fairly supported by the culture of the convention. And the rules and the norms and the sort of protective safety layers. And just that yeah, you kind of know how a game, how a convention game table works. And if you don’t want the person sitting at the registration desk will spend a minute with you to make you feel comfortable. But yeah, good provacation.

Jason: Yeah. It’s [00:41:00] interesting to think through, because I guess what is the, if we were to think about this as a parallel going forward, what’s the equivalent of hosting collaborative conventions for challenges that count and establishing a common culture around being able to drop into a pick-up game of let’s solve this collaboratively?

Hailey: Yeah. Well, this is interesting, right? Because there are real world implications for solving these problems and often the commitment is really high. And the level of expertise and investment that’s required to deeply understand the full complexity of a real world challenge, people’s actual lives and wellbeing is at risk. You’re encountering different ideas about what’s good. What kind of future that people want, which people will struggle mightily if they think that you’re taking the future in a wrong direction.

And yet you still see things like sustainability jams and design jams and design [00:42:00] competitions, social change incubators. There’s a lot of these processes that are essentially invitations for strangers to come together around a need or a topic to form teams, and then be supported through a process that hopefully at the end, usually a few of those teams kind of pop out as maybe doing something that might actually be useful. And I think the reason, that’s the reason why those are often structured as competitions with prizes and incentives, is to try to focus people to be more decisive about what does the world actually need, as opposed to just what’s a story we might have fun telling, or that you know, that where we’re excited about this piece of tech or about this idea.

But the judgment or the desire for the prize focuses the mind a little bit on, ‘oh, but do people really want that?’ And there’s often coaches in these processes, they’re saying, “Hey, are you thinking about the user? Who’s your user? What are their real needs? Like, are you actually matching a problem? Are you replicating [00:43:00] something that someone has already tried? How did you go and check?”

That stuff doesn’t matter as much in a game context. And this is where the analogy starts, for me, to break down a little bit, or it’s a dilemma that I haven’t fully gotten my head around. In terms of a story, it doesn’t really matter whether it connects to reality or not as long as it’s fun. It’s a little bit of a tangent, I think, from what you started, Jason.

Jason: Yeah. So I guess then if we’re thinking about the, that, that was sort of, I guess, an amble around the idea of creating context, establishing what’s in it and out. Designing the container or the rules of the game. The other feature that we were going to focus on was the idea of sequencing events.

Hailey: Yep.

Jason: Do we want to talk about that?

Hailey: Yeah, sure. I think we’ve got some time still for that.

Jason: I mean that’s sort of agenda design, really in many ways, isn’t it. It’s sort of thinking about in what order should we do activity and what is the best activity to do to get the outcomes that we need.

Hailey: Yeah. And I was reflecting on, you know, how does [00:44:00] sequencing of activities happen in a D&D game? Generally what the dungeon master has is a sense over the longterm of where the story could go. If they’re being a little bit more authorial or railroady, they might have a sense of ‘the story is going to unfold on this arc’, and ‘I’m going to give the characters hooks that make sure that they stay involved with kind of this unfolding story’ and ‘this bad villain, that’s changing things in the world that they need to destroy’. Versus a more of a sandbox where they’re like ‘the world’s just happening. There are these forces happening in the world, but the characters can wander into any aspect of this world and do things there.’ And I think that the, if they want to take a sandbox approach that really reduces the amount of planning they can do. But even regardless of how open they’re being, usually they know what’s going to happen in the next session or roughly they have a sense of like three or four different places the characters can be so that they can prepare the enemies [00:45:00] they’ll face or the non-player characters they’ll face. And they can kind of focus in on that part of the experience.

Jason: So there are different arcs. What I’m getting from that is there are different arcs in sequencing. You might know that our quest is to defeat the Raven king in the Southern lands.

Hailey: Yeah.

Jason: And that’s the overall outcome that we’re aiming at. And there’s naturally a sequence of events that will lead towards that. We might have to find a particular object, get information about the Raven king, traveled to the destination, do battle with the Raven king. But the how we go about achieving each of those tasks is largely open to the group. So that’s one sort , that’s the macro narrative structure.

There’s also, I think in Dungeons and Dragons though, if we’re talking about agreeing to an adheered set of rules, sequencing becomes very, very important. In something like combat, for instance, where we roll for [00:46:00] initiative, then you have very, very specific, you know, ‘I have an action. I have a bonus action. I have a reaction’. Do we want to, what do you think about that sort of, that really tightly constrained sequencing that happens in the context of combat.

Hailey: This is where I think collaboration design and sequencing and role-playing games comes closer together. Because facilitators use this sort of turn-taking structure a lot.

They say, “okay, we’re going to go into a brainstorming activity or feedback activity. So you may come up with three ideas”. Or “generate as many ideas as possible within two minutes”. Or, “when it’s your turn, I want you to respond to these two prompts. And we’re going to take turns and hear from everybody”.

That is very similar to the way that turns in games work. And I think it’s for a similar reason where you’re trying to take a lot of complexity and a risk of a lot of things trying to happen at once and actually have them happen in a sequence [00:47:00] so that everybody can witness and understand these different aspects that otherwise would happen at once.

It’s sort of taking simultaneity and stringing it out along an artificial sort of timeline. You know in a combat with the way a turn works in Dungeons and Dragons, it’s really interesting. I’m glad you brought it here because on your turn, you’re in combat there’s enemies around you, everybody in a real battle, it would all be happening at the same time. People shooting arrows, people swinging swords, people shouting, casting spells. But what they do is they break it down into, “okay, it’s the barbarians turn”. Your turn represents six seconds of in game time. There’s no explicit time limit on how long it takes that to unfold in our, at the table, rolling dice and looking up rules in the rule book and, you know, just clarifying, you know, where you want your character to move.

Someone’s turning can take 10 minutes sometimes for them to all unfold their portion of that six seconds. But literally what happens is the barbarian runs 30 feet swings his sword [00:48:00] three times at two different enemies, and then goes into a defensive stance. And the way that works is there’s one round where each person takes each the, you know… the elf takes their turn, the spellcaster takes their turn, goblin A takes their turn and goblin B takes their turn. Each of those is a six second slice of time, but actually that whole round of turns represents the same six seconds of in-game time.    And the initiative that you mentioned is basically how we determine which order we resolve those six second turns in.

So that doesn’t mean that they actually happen in a sequence in the in-game time, but initiative is a sort of shorthand for saying; ‘this person had the jump on everyone else, relatively speaking’. So it’s just this very, what games do is this very clever way of taking simultaneous complexity and sequencing out. I think that’s essentially what a lot of workshop activities do.

Jason: Totally. [00:49:00] And one of the things that I’m really interested in that space is, what are the sorts of- and again, this is probably part of the broader endeavor- like what is it that we’re trying to do to enable that? To enable a seamless structuring of collective activity. Like how do we consciously break apart the activity that needs to happen so that it can be meaningfully engaged with by everyone, and everyone can have access to what’s going on.

So, and a lot of this is sort of driven by- just so we’re not, you know, it’s not arbitrary in many ways- there’s the MIT center for collective intelligence, for instance. Those folks with the, one of what the three features of high-performing, collectively intelligent sort of teams. You get equal turn-taking, equal information sharing and turn-taking, knowing the mind of others and high proportion of women is a third one. But the conjection is that that is because there’s a natural affinity for one and two.

But thinking of those [00:50:00] things, you have groups that perform particularly well when they do that, right? When you have evidence to suggest that groups perform well when that happens. What we’re doing in collaborative design is trying to create in some instances, trying to explicitly create the context in which that can happen.

Hailey: Right. For people who don’t have culture to rely on. Because, because some teams, because I’ve seen other, other conjectures that are ‘well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be turn-taking if you have a strong norm that everyone in your team happens to be comfortable with around talking over each other’, that can also work. But maybe turn-taking is the form that more people can access by default, but some people really hate it, it really grinds them. You know, if they’re more of talk over each other interrupters.

Jason: Sure. Yeah, but that idea that it’s important to hear the voices from across the entire system. To hear every input, to have access to every input. And if you think about a D&D combat, it literally structures up. Now, the elf takes a turn. Now [00:51:00] the barbarian takes a turn and now the- right? And it allows us to coherently navigate a really, really complex, messy sort of combat scenario that takes it’s sort of six seconds in a structured way.

Hailey: And to tie it back to that point of what we’re about here with Amble is that gamers and game masters are already practicing the skills of high-performing teams. Game masters in particular are really, I think good ones, are generally thinking about the mind of others. Particularly ‘how is my group experiencing this right now? Are they having fun?’ Predicting ‘is it going to go somewhere satisfying? Oh, geez. They’re killing this guy too quickly. This is going to be really dissatisfying because they’ve been building up to this fight for awhile, I’m just going to add some extra hit points to this enemy’. Those skills are portable. That’s the exciting potential.

Jason: Well that’s the intuition. That’s the hypothesis.

Hailey: Yeah.

Jason: The only other thing- okay. So if we started talking about sort of sequencing and the importance of breaking [00:52:00] a process apart in order to allow people to engage effectively with it, is there a, are there any other examples that you wanted to bring to the table around how sequencing applies in sort of games?

Hailey: You know, there are, but I think I think maybe we might need to save a deep dive on sequencing for another time Jase.

Jason: Sounds good Hails.

Hailey: Yeah. I think it’s a huge area and you know, there’s so many, if you look at the different types of games and different categories of games, they all deal with this sort of turn-taking and sequencing and stringing out simultaneous complexity in their own way. It’s a really rich field. So let’s put a bookmark on that one.

Maybe start to sign off what’s on your agenda for gaming this week? Gaming or collaboration design.

Jason: There’s a couple of things on the boiler this week for me. I really, really want to get back into my love of embodied cognition. So I’m going to dip back into that kind of stuff. I picked up a couple of books. I’ve been a little off the [00:53:00] pace lately, and it’s an opportunity to just kind of dip back into, to that domain.

Other than that in the gaming realm there’s nothing really outside of the painting table at the moment. What about yourself?

Hailey: Oh, well, you know, since we’ve talked a lot about being a game master in D&D , I’m running a session with my longtime group this week.    They are in the hell dimension looking to pull a heist to capture the true name of one of the arch devils so that they can use him to defeat the big boss back in the prime material plane.

And yeah, I think an interesting relationship to what we’ve been talking about is I tried to experiment a lot with Sandbox and world simulation and letting them kind of decide what they wanted to do. But I think I learned that this group just didn’t really want that, that much. They kind of wanted a railroad. They wanted to have clear quests and clear decisions and just role play and use their [00:54:00] ingenuity within some goals that were fairly clearly defined. And so I think I decided for this end game for these last two levels that I would be a bit more railroady. And literally when they got to hell, they got on a train going down a railroad.

Jason: That’s hilarious!

Hailey: But it was very symbolic and I think it’s really working.

Jason: Well, that idea of designing for the group that you’re with or meeting your players where they’re at is probably something we should pick up in a future episode. Does that sound appropriate?

Hailey: Absolutely.

Jason: Cool.

Hailey: This has been great.

Jason: I’ve really enjoyed this one Hails. Thanks very much for your time.

Hailey: My pleasure. And we’ll pick up some of these topics next time on Amble. Ciao! [00:55:00]

Jason: Ciao!