Exploring how running and designing games runs parallel with running and designing facilitation sessions

We invite Amble troupe member Logan Timmins back to discuss his practice as a game designer, and his journey into becoming a facilitator and collaboration designer. Recruiting the gamers and game designers of the world into collaboration practice is core to Amble’s mission, and Logan has been our bellwether as we learn about this. This episode is full of concrete insights into how the work gets done in both worlds, and how skills are developed along the way.

Links to resources

Hanabi on Board Game Geek
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi

Preparing for Paris, by Logan
https://breathingstories.itch.io/preparing-for-paris

Logan’s itch store
https://breathingstories.itch.io/

Logan’s twitter
https://twitter.com/ink_and_stories

If you’re lost you can look and you will find me // Time after time, by Logan
https://breathingstories.itch.io/time-after-time

Sam Smith cover of Time after time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loh6M3VR8jk

Cyndi Lauper’s Time after time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1mqrCTFoz4

Carta by Cat McDonald of Peach Garden Games
https://peachgardengames.itch.io/carta-srd

Other Carta-based games by Cat McDonald of Peach Garden Games
https://peachgardengames.itch.io/into-the-glacier
https://peachgardengames.itch.io/apex-predator

An article exploring the Amble Studio Night Sky Process (and New Moon)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-play-work-good-thing-logan-timmins-he-him-/

An article exploring the Amble Constellations process
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/happy-birthday-amble-year-one-review-logan-timmins/

Green Hollow, by Amble Studio
https://amble.studio/green-hollow-game/

Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon of Possum Creek Games
https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/wanderhome

Amble Studio Twitter
https://twitter.com/theamblestudio

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

Transcript

[00:00:00]

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

Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.

Hailey: Welcome Jase. Jason, how excited are we? Because we have back today, Logan Timmins! Logan, how’s it going?

Logan: Yeah, pretty good. Thanks. I am excited to be here.

Jason: We’re excited to have you here mate.

Hailey: We heard you had some big news last night?

Logan: Yes! So [00:01:00] myself, Kiri and Bec played Hanabi online together, and we got a perfect score for the first time ever. It was very exciting.

Hailey: We’re not talking about Hanabi today, but it is a very super fun game of trying to communicate to each other, without words, about cards in your hand. And it’s really challenging to get a perfect score and well done. Look, if you missed last episode, we introduced Logan then, but we’ll introduce him again; Logan is a tattooed, forest-loving, transgender, indie tabletop game designer.

His games are gifts that move players to tell stories alone, or with friends. You might know him from his first Kickstarter Preparing for Paris, which was a huge success- a game of dramatic supporting teens causing chaos in high school. You can find all his other games on itch, breathingstories.itch.io, and the man himself on Twitter: @ink_and_stories. So all those links will be in the show notes as usual.

As always, we’re going to kick [00:02:00] off talking about a specific game and in this case, Logan, I think you’re bringing one of your games to talk about. You’re going to tell us about ‘Time after Time’.

Logan: Yes. So the full name of this game is ‘If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me // Time after time’. I recommend listening to the Sam Smith cover while you’re playing this game for maximum effect, maximum queerness.

Jason: Who wrote the original mate?

Logan: Oh-

Jason: I gotcha!

Logan: -someone else? You did, you did get- like, when you say the name, I’ll be like, ‘oh yeah,of course!’

Jason: Was it Cindi Lauper?

Logan: Yes! That’s who I was thinking.

Jason: Ah you millennials, I just don’t know…

Logan: Okay, Cyndi Lauper wrote the original, but Sam Smith’s version is very good. I’m also really bad with music though. So that just might be a Logan thing. Anyway, this game ‘Time after Time’ is a two-player tabletop game, that requires just a deck of cards, and you play [00:03:00] as two lovers separated across time, experiencing your relationship out of order, in a non chronological way, trying to reunite across the expanse of time. I’m very proud of this game. It is based on the Carta System by Cat McDonald of Peach Garden Games. Links will be in the show notes. And it’s a very simple system. And what I’m most proud of being able to do with it is facilitate a conversation between two people who care about each other, who love each other, to reflect on their relationship and feel gratitude and maybe cry a little bit.

Hailey: Yeah, thanks Logan. And let’s get into it more. One of the reasons we’re starting off with this game is because what we want to focus on in today’s episode is as we’ve discussed with Amble, we have this hypothesis that there is a borderland between Ways of Working and games and that people can move across that border land and bring the [00:04:00] sort of beautiful treasures from one land into the other.

And Logan being a game designer first and foremost, unlike Jase and I who have been facilitators first and foremost, is someone who is currently migrating their way across that border land from the world of game design and into the world of facilitation. And so today is really a deep dive into Logan’s experience on that journey.

And so we’d love to just start by drawing out more questions about how you see this particular game being a gameful facilitation tool for people, and then we’ll go from there into some other aspects of this topic. So what else can you tell us about how it works? Tell us how it’s played, you know get into the nitty gritty, the moves and the rules and stuff.

Logan: Sure. So as I mentioned, you play with a deck of cards and each card has a prompt on it, a little snippet of information, and then a question that you ask your partner and a question that you ask yourself. And they’re very open-ended questions meant to help you and your partner reflect on things [00:05:00] that have happened or explore how you might approach certain situations together if they haven’t happened in your relationship. And there’s an ongoing tension, with each card you may gain or heal ‘time sickness’. And if your time sickness gets too high, you basically lose all memory of this other person. And you will eventually meet them but of course, if you don’t remember who they are, that reunion is quite different. It takes a different turn.

So, it’s very light, self facilitated this conversation, but it can get really deep and go to a lot of very touching and meaningful places. But because it’s through a lens, through a setting of a game, it can feel somewhat safer. Or, often these are conversations may be a big deal to have, but if you’re sitting there and you’ve got cards in front of you, moving a cute little token around on a table, it can feel a bit more accessible.

Hailey: And so you’ve had some [00:06:00] pretty meaningful experiences playing this game, or you’ve had other people reporting meaningful experiences. You know, you can play it with a partner, with a romantic partner, with someone that you have a close relationship with. You can conceivably play it with someone you know a little less well, but what are some of the experiences that you’ve been having, or you’ve been hearing about from people playing this game?

Logan: I’ve played it twice with my partner, which is Kiri. And Kiri’s, played it with her other partner, Mel as well, which has been great. And I have a friend who played it with her partner. And pretty much every time that I have received feedback there have been tears involved, which is great.

It just means that people are having really deep and touching conversations with each other and overwhelmingly the messages that I receive is that the game and the conversations that it creates space for really bring the people playing to a place of gratitude. Hence [00:07:00] the tears most times.

Yeah, so it’s just a really soft, nice game. You know, there’s no winner, it’s not competitive. It’s more about the exploration of the questions and the conversation than the end game and seeing if your two lovers do meet in the end and how that ending goes. While that still can be an impactful ending, the journey is much more what players leave thinking about.

Jason: That’s the thing that really inspires me about this style of game and in particular what you’ve been working on as a designer, this sort of idea that you have. You very distinctly using games as a context to have conversations that count. The bit that was interesting to me that you raised earlier was this notion that these are questions or prompts that you may naturally have with a partner, but often don’t get around to, don’t have the time to, don’t feel safe to. What does it mean to explicitly [00:08:00] bring those things into a game context to provide- I guess safety? Is it safety or what is it? What do you see as the designerly process of choosing the things that go into a game like that?

Hailey: Yeah, I want to know did you, you know, write down on your cocktail napkin or yellow legal pad, ‘make them cry’, ‘ ugly tears’.

Logan: No, I did not write that down on any form of paper or otherwise. I drew a lot of inspiration from my relationship and moments that I have found really beautiful, moments that I treasure and moments that I look forward to. And each of the questions sort of captures these moments. Anything from a first kiss, a chance meeting, to a really mundane moment together, or setting a firm boundary. Things like that. All things that I find very important in a relationship. And, yeah, I wanted to bring those forward so that we [00:09:00] could talk about them and recognize them and celebrate them.

Jason: Thanks, Logan. Yeah, there’s something in that. That’s the magic of design, or the magic of designers that ability to translate a experience into a context in which others can experience it. There’s something in that. And the reason I’m pushing on those sorts of things is because part of this podcast is us doing our working out aloud work.

And we have the hypothesis as Amblers that the games world and games design, and the world of ways of working and facilitation, collaboration, innovation, et cetera, cross over quite heavily. And beginning to identify some of the things that do cross over, is what we’re trying to do here with you in the actual practice of you making games, for a specific purpose.

Just please pull me up if I get too analytic or start stripping the magic out of things, but it’s important for [00:10:00] us to be really explicit in our working at aloud, in order to enable other folks to be able to design for themselves experiences and games and bring gamefulness into processes that count for them.

Logan: Yeah, there is intentionality in design, right? So coming at it analytically doesn’t necessarily strip the magic away because you know, intentionality is important in any sort of design whether it’s experience design or process design or game design. And yeah Time after Time in particular, the intention is very explicitly to have a conversation or conversations, which is not the same of all games, but yeah, that was a very explicit intention with this game.

Hailey: So, let’s go another level down on that. You have an intention. You have an inspiration of the kind of experience you want to create. You’re drawing from personal [00:11:00] experience. Can you walk us through a little bit actually then starting to translate that into a playable game? Down to the choice of format or what genres you might be pulling from. I think this was part of a Carta jam, tell us all about that process. I think that might be a nice on-ramp into getting a little bit more deeply into the, vocation of game design that we wanted to talk about.

Logan: Sure. So Carta is a game system by Cat McDonald of Peach Garden Games. And they released an SRD, a system reference document. Which is a document that allows you and helps you to make games using the same Carta rule set. And originally the Carta games that Cat has made are solo games, usually focused around survival and/ or exploration. And I was really interested to see how I could make Carta, a [00:12:00] typically solo game, into a duet game because I love playing games with Kiri. So that’s kind of where it started and being a huge romantic, it was obviously going to be a romance game.

Hailey: You?

Logan: *Laughs*

From there, the idea of time travel was intriguing to me in some way to explore that as a form of separation. Of that being the obstacle, the conflict that the players have to overcome was time rather than some conflict between each other or explicitly in the relationship or fighting a dragon or what have you. Time being the conflict was an interesting concept.

And then, one of the main recurring themes of Carta is exploration. And so for a while [00:13:00] I was pondering how does exploration look when you have time travel involved? My first idea was that the players would explore a town that they were both familiar with and see how the town had changed in each past, current, future era, while still wanting their relationship to be important.

And then I realized that what I want to explore, isn’t really a physical place at all. It’s their relationship. It’s how these people have known and will know each other. So I tossed out the whole idea about exploring a town or a place, and instead focused all the gameplay on their relationship. And so the way that Carta works is that you have a tableau, usually four by five of cards. And each one has a prompt on it. So each prompt now relates to a specific moment in a relationship. And from there, it’s just writing prompts. And [00:14:00] basically putting that into a rules document, clarifying the rules to make it duet rather than solo. That was about it. Put it in a document, put some free images on it, chuck it on the internet.

Hailey: that, “and then there’s just writing prompts”.

Jason: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.

Hailey: Can you frame a question there Jase, for Logan?

Jason: Yeah. I was going to point to the idea that there’s a lot in that “there’s just writing prompts” and that comes to the art of game design. The question that would sit around that is, What makes a good prompt Logan? And Why did you choose the prompts that you chose? What attracted you to those particularly? How do you know they’re working?.

Logan: Well, yeah, a lot of the prompts for me came from important, memorable moments in my relationship. Those start the prompts and set the scene. And then with each question, there’s a question that you ask your partner [00:15:00] about the scene and a question that you ask yourself. So in each prompt you’re either moving the story forward or learning something new about each other and exploring how you respond to events. And in some ways how that clashes or aligns with how you expected your partner to respond to that event. A lot of exploring each other and reactions, and what’s important to you. And then there’s other, just lighthearted prompts as well, you know, to mix it up.

Hailey: Yeah. I mean, that just immediately makes me think of, you know, in running a workshop as a facilitator, that designing of the questions is often so much of what we do and it’s the art. And if you were to ask facilitators, “how do you know what question to design?” I feel like it would be a very hard thing for a lot of facilitators to answer.

You know, that’s just really where the total universe of concerns [00:16:00] collapses into your intuition. You just have to pluck something out and go, I think it’s this. And then just talk about it. There’s no algorithm for coming up with the right question.

Jason: Hmm. There’s a trust there as well. There’s a trust that the experience that you’re focusing on and you’re trying to capture in that prompt or in that question is one that’s translatable. If you’re thinking about an entirely internal perspective, I’d be interested in your process, Logan, how do you know that the prompt that you’re bringing to the table, or that the question you’re bringing to the table is something that will translate to others? Rather than something that’s a deeply personally held momentary thing. How does it translate into a game for others rather than just a individual reflection, for instance.

Logan: So, first and foremost I designed this game to play with Kiri. Regardless because it’s so personal, there is something about that that people can intuitively tap into. There are a lot of [00:17:00] moments in there that are quite broad or widely applicable, like meeting for the first time. And other things some people dream about and some people don’t like moving in together, going away together, bigger things like that that often, even if people haven’t done them, they can imagine what that could be like. And really when I was designing, I wasn’t thinking about how other people would receive these prompts. Just stayed true to what was important to me and in my experience of designing other games and things that I’ve heard from other designers, there’s something about that, being so personal that people really can connect with.

Jason: Mmm.

Hailey: Yeah, there’s an interesting thread or hook there for me that can maybe expand us into some of the broader territory around designing for the group that’s here versus designing for people in general. Something I was turning over in my mind [00:18:00] was that if you’re trying to make a career in game design how you get rewarded and people buying your games and talking about you and you making an income, comes from in a sense, people in general taking it up.

Whereas as a facilitator more often, it’s a series of designing for specific groups who can hire you for the custom experience. But there’s something in there about patterns or, you know, facilitators often release frameworks or write books or write reusable recipes or modules that other people can use something we’ve, we’ve broken into quite a few times. So I was going to offer that as a sort of way in for you to talk more about what it’s like trying to be an independent game designer. Getting your stuff out there and this translation between really just being concerned with this very personal moment to suddenly having other people be interested, packaging it up, selling it.

What goes into that? Both from a logistical perspective, but also from your personal experience and the emotional journey.

Logan: So [00:19:00] I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, largely as a hobby. But interestingly Time after Time on itch, my itch store, looking at those sales, has been my most successful and it is one that is quite personal and designed for a very specific audience of one. Two, if I include myself.

But now I’ve forgotten all of the questions. Could you redo some?

Hailey: Yeah. Sure. So, and Jase feel free to add onto this. What goes into that move into going from the crafting of the personal experience for the audience of one or two, or just for yourself, through to then going, “oh, other people want this,” what are some of the, just the really basic logistical steps?

And also what are some of the emotional experiences you go through along the way?

Logan: Yeah so using Time after Time as an example, once [00:20:00] the rules document is complete, upload it to my itch store. Talk about it a bit on various social media, largely on Twitter for me and discord as well. And Twitter has been in my experience, the strongest place to find other designers to chat to, find peers in that space and see what other people are doing. Get your work out there. Lots of people are really happy to hype up other people’s games when they find them. So there was quite a bit of social media stuff around when Time after Time was released. And that push, I think lent it to the measure of success that it had.

And yeah, it’s always nice to see when people buy a game, you get the little notification in your inbox and you go onto the website, there’s a little emoji with however many notifications you have. There’s bars and [00:21:00] graphs and things, which is nice, but the real, when you really feel it is when people leave comments or reviews or send messages about, “oh, I played this game” and “this is how I felt,” and “this was my experience”.

And that’s really lovely to hear people’s experience in that the game really took them somewhere and that it really worked for them. And that’s, that’s just a wonderful feeling. That’s some joy, right there.

Jason: Okay. So I’m really interested then in how this personal, joyful designerly experience of creating something initially for yourself or for a very small audience, and then releasing it for others, in many ways it’s an art process. It’s making something that’s very essential and very personal and then sort of releasing it into the wild.

I’m, I understand how that then translates into getting feedback around how the game’s gone. I think one of the things that’d be, I’d be interested to learn from you, is more, how is that [00:22:00] process of yours that designerly, artistic creative process, how have you found that translating into say, what we’re doing as Amble? Like beginning to use some of those skills to deliver specific outcomes that may not be something that’s personally held, or an experience that you’re personally tapping into, but something that is meant to be for others, for instance, is there a tension there? How have you engaged with that?

Logan: As in, is there a tension between my typical game design frame of, of designing personal things and with Amble designing less intensely personal things? No there’s no tension there, it’s just a different lens. It’s just a different framework, which is also still really interesting.

Because our games again are about people connecting with each other. Which is at the core of a lot of my games too. It’s just not on this… using Time after [00:23:00] Time as an example, it’s not on this intensely personal romantic level, it’s on maybe a team level. Teams’ communication, collaboration level.

So there is sort of a synergy there that it’s still essentially about the same thing. It’s about getting people to communicate and learn more about each other.

Hailey: So Logan maybe that’s a good transition. Jason, you’ve been working with us. We started this thing together. It’s been about a year, a little more than a year now, and you’ve had a number of experiences translating your game design abilities into the, into the space. Did any of those experiences stand out? Whether they were things we did internally for ourselves or for people outside Amble? Perhaps where you felt your game design abilities really came in and held you in your ability to deliver something that was more intentional or business oriented.

Logan: Yeah! The first thing that comes to mind is our weekly Night Sky process.[00:24:00] It’s like a weekly-

Hailey: Yeah, go into detail it people.

Logan: Go into detail? Alright, our weekly Night Sky process is where we take time in our weekly meeting to give each other stars to commend things that, or activities or tasks that each of us has done that either grow us as individuals or grow Amble as a collective.

And I had a fair hand in designing that, so did Kiri and other people have as well. But yeah, that felt like it did feel like a gameful design. It’s, it’s been much iterated since the original design, but I was drawing on ideas of thinking of each of us like character archetypes in role-playing games as, as is often the case.

What kind of moves do we want to reward? Because those, you know, when you reward a move that [00:25:00] will naturally become more frequently done. When you reward a move, people want to do it more often. In game design that’s a big part of, of design thought. Like how are you, what is your game say that it does, and how does it encourage players to do that? And translating that to the Night Sky, what is it that we want to be doing as a team and what is it that we want us individually to do and to be able to do, and how can we encourage that? And hence the idea of gold stars reaching back to primary school and that sort of thing, the idea of gold stars being awarded for doing those things.

But because we’re thinking about beyond just grades and A+’s and rewarding these objective, lofty actions. There was a lot of thought put into us as Amble, specifically as the audience. What, what is it that [00:26:00] we care about? That maybe isn’t translatable across every one. So that was a slightly broader audience beyond me and one other person widening it to five people. But I definitely found my game design background… it just felt fun. It felt like it felt like designing a game or a module for a game.

Hailey: It did feel fun and it feels fun to keep doing it. And I think this is actually a really good way in for us deeper into this topic. I’d like to go into some of the more of the details of the decisions that we made. I remember there was a really interesting discussion around, well, now that we’ve got these stars and we’re posting them in our internal digital chat channel, so we’ve recorded them, we’ve captured them so we could quantify them, we can measure them, we can see who’s getting them and that sort of thing, could they become currency that you can spend? What are they for? And there was this really clear place that we landed, which is well, we don’t want to turn them into a currency and make them [00:27:00] trying to get stars to incentivize people to do things for some other sake than the things being good. And I think we, we instead really embraced this metaphor of stars as a form of navigation, as a way of direction finding or knowing if we’re on the right track. And that really relates to another tool that we created as part of this game that, I think we’ve started to call the Amble RPG, the Amble role-playing game for ourselves, that we call the compass. Which we use in our New Moon sessions. Do you think you could explain how that piece of the game works and how that’s evolved?

Logan: Yeah, so the compass has eight points on it. Each of them are areas that we want to as individuals and as Amble focus on in our work together basically. And there’s things like, I can’t remember what the categories are off the-

Hailey: ‘Nourishing self and other’. ‘Stoking the fire slash maintaining the engine’, which is kind of about keeping [00:28:00] the business alive and healthy from a sort of money and sales perspective or a growth perspective. There’s ‘playing together’. What else is on there?

Logan: Tasks, ‘getting stuff done’.

Hailey: ‘Getting stuff done’. Yeah, exactly. ‘Spreading the word and connecting with others’.

Logan: Yeah, so getting our name out there. And some of those are expected, right? Like ‘maintaining the fire’ and ‘getting the word out there’. Like they’re, I imagine in a workplace environment, those are two of the things that are at the top of the, of the list of ‘must-do’s’, if you want to maintain a business. But ‘playing together’ and ‘nourishing each other’ may be lower down or not on such a list.

And that’s where you have to keep your audience in mind and design for purpose, right. Design for what you actually want to see. Cause it’s one thing to, we don’t want to take someone else’s values and just be like, “oh, they’re doing well financially, we’ll just copy what they’re doing” because that’s not going to work for [00:29:00] every team.

Hailey: Yes. Yes. So these things matter for, for each team. And Jase, this really reminds me of something that we do a lot in our world, which is establishing strategic priorities, or maybe values for a group and you know, so much of the question is, ‘so we’ve had a workshop and we, as an organization we’ve discussed what our priorities are and we’ve narrowed them down and crystallized them and what our values are, but how do we actually bring that into being and how do we operationalize it?’

And, you know, we are a small team, so there’s certain things that we can do that would be harder at an organizational level. But I have found that this has been really effective for a team of our size as a way of engaging with these things. Both because of the fun, gameful element of giving stars, and then once a month we have our New Moon process. You know, when the moon is down, that’s the time when the stars are the clearest, and we can see. And so we go into our discard chat channel and we copy all the stars in the last month. We translate them into sticky notes on a shared [00:30:00] Miro board- so a virtual whiteboard space – and we cluster them to each of the points of the compass. And that allows us to see which things are we privileging more, which things are coming out more strongly over the last month, which things are maybe not getting enough attention or which things are just no longer important to us. We also look for things that maybe, ‘oh, we’re doing a lot of this and we’re enjoying it and it’s valuable, but it’s not a point on our compass right now. Do we need to rethink the points of our compass?’

So, we don’t make our strategic priorities once a year and then just never change them. We remake them once a month through this dynamic steering process. And I guess there’s something I’m reaching for here, which is that it’s been a real strength for us and it’s been joyful and we come to the New Moon session excited and ready and with our hearts full and we leave with our hearts even more full. What is it about the game design experience that Logan brought that we all brought[00:31:00] to designing that for ourselves that made it so effective?

Jason: Yeah there’s a massive difference between- just to, again, give it some more context in a traditional organizational framework, it’s not unheard of for teams to track how they’re going against various metrics. Like what’s our sales count? How many customers have we brought in? Are we living our values in a particular way? The difficulty is then how do you keep all the things that are important to you top of mind? And as, as Logan, you pointed out, things like ‘stoking the fire’, is sort of a given ie. Keeping the business running is a sort of a given because that’s necessary to do, but how often do we explicitly bring in nurture and cultivate each other?

How often are those sort of human qualities brought in? And we were really explicit when we designed this around the things that we wanted to keep an eye on. And the beauty for me in that sort of process is sometimes[00:32:00] working with organizations, you get to a point where you have done a bunch of strategic prioritization, or you have done a values matrix, or you’ve identified the relevant norms for a particular project. But then how do you provide a mechanism for people to stay in touch with those and actively engage with them all the time? How do you have a way of making sense of the activity that you’re doing in relation to those things? And there’s something really beautiful in our compass and that’s why we called it a compass, because it is a navigational tool that allows us to orient to the activity that we’re doing and how it relates specifically to the things that we as Amble value.

And yep, some of it’s operational. Like ‘are we stoking the fire?’ But then a lot of the other stuff is much more deeply personal in terms of how we want to self-manage and how we want to run our business in terms of our values. So it’s just a really practical example of games, that ability for designers or design for activity to distill a bunch [00:33:00] of features that count and bring them into a context that enable people to engage with them in a structured or meaningful way.

And that’s, that’s exciting for me as we keep evolving this sort of thing. You know, it’d be interesting to think about whether or not the Amble RPG if we actually continue developing it, to what degree that might become a recipe or, in your words, an SRD that others might be able to pick up and adapt to their business. Like it’s interesting to think through that.

Hailey: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s such a clear analogy there, something that was designed for a very personal experience just for this group of people and then going ‘huh, others might want that’, you know, maybe someone will listen to us talking and go, ‘that’s exactly what I’ve been looking for for my small team, and I’d like to hear more about it’, and that will put the fire under us to write up the detailed blog post about it.

There are some blog posts out there already about the Night Sky. We’ll put those things in the show notes, but to create the SRD. And that happens, [00:34:00] that happens in facilitation world. And everyone has to adapt these things for themselves. They can’t copy paste them and think it’s gonna work. But they can take inspiration.

Just to finish that thread, because we recently had another addition to the process that works so beautifully, that Logan led the way on, just to kind of round out because we had our first Amble birthday. It’s the first anniversary we kind of picked the date of when it felt like, yeah, that feels like when this thing, really all of us were here and we really started last year. We’re going to have our birthday this year, we need to celebrate, we need some sort of reflection process. We need the annual version of the Night Sky process. What’s that going to be? And Logan, you came up with something and you had a really clear intention for the experience you wanted us to have.

And I thought that worked really beautifully, so can you explain this bit to us?

Logan: Yeah. So that was another design that was really fun to create, was [00:35:00] Amble Constellations. Riffing off our ongoing theme of celestial bodies. And the idea was to reflect on all of the things that we’d done over the year and all of the smaller tasks that led to these things happening and really reflect on not only the big things that we did, our big accomplishments, but all the steps that it took to get there. It’s all a big journey and that can often get overlooked , the smaller stars can be overlooked in favor of the big, bright ones. But together is how they make constellations.

Hailey: And what was it you said? You wanted us to look at this and feel pride and joy.

Logan: Yes, feel pride and joy in what we’d managed to do in one year.

Hailey: I was really touched by that because so often these reflective processes can be about spotting gaps or challenges or things that we need to fix so that we can be better next time. And I find it really [00:36:00] heartwarming just going, ‘no, we just have permission just to be happy about where we’ve been and what we’ve done’, and it really related to me for an appreciative mindset.

You know, that argument that comes from, well, it’s not just from this, but, appreciative inquiry is one of the sort of facilitation SRDS you might call them, that says, we do best as a group when we reflect on when we’ve been strong, when we’ve been good, when things have been working well, and try to generate more of that, as opposed to when things have not been working well.

So I think that was a really beautiful insight that came from your designerly perspective, you aren’t steeped in the theory of appreciative inquiry as Jason and I might be. But Jason and I were able to recognize it immediately when we saw it and go, wow. You know, that’s fantastic. It’s exactly what we need.

Jason: Yeah, we love your work Logan Timmins. We love you mate, as simple as that. So just to, just as could sort of keep nudging us along, like I’m, I’m interested in this journey from, deeply personal creative [00:37:00] process into something that progressively translates.

We’ve talked about things that you’ve created for yourself, they’re finding their way onto itch, uh, itch.io, things that we as Amble have created that have helped us navigate in a particular way. What’s it like bringing that sort of stuff into the broader environment, like some of the work that we’ve been doing for folks in the wild. What’s your experience of that been? How has that translation been or that kind of step or that part.

Logan: Yeah, that crossing over into facilitation land from game designer land. Or, still in that mixed border, but closer to facilitation central. Yeah, we did a spate of diversity, equity and inclusion work for a large corporate, which was very interesting to see, to note for myself after years of running home games and going to conventions and running games for strangers, how similar it felt in some [00:38:00] ways. Especially at conventions, right, where you don’t really know the people, like I didn’t know the folks at this corporate. And knowing that they could be anyone and have any sort of reaction to this game that you’ve crafted. And again, could have any reaction to this facilitation that you’re running.

And I was pleased, I guess, with how at ease I felt in that similarity and being able to, rather than running an adventure, running this process, they kind of follow similar arcs. Like there’s an introduction, where you get the players or the employees familiar with what’s going to happen.

And then there’s a deeper middle bit where you really get into the crunch of the game or the crux of the conversation that you’re trying to have. And then you have the debrief end bit. Like you finish your mission or you wind up your conversation. So it was quite interesting to notice my brain wants to say notice similar [00:39:00] narrative beats, even though facilitation isn’t necessarily a narrative or a story as, as we might usually call it. But definitely I would say running games at conventions for strangers helped me have that confidence of holding the space and facilitating an experience.

Right, whether it’s fantastical experience with magic and goats or more serious conversation about diversity and inclusion. Definitely doing one helps me with the other.

Hailey: Yeah. Obviously it did because it sounds like they went really well. And all of us did these. I think maybe another analogy I want to pull through is that these workshop modules were designed by another designer. So it wasn’t us running our own game. Somebody thought really deeply about this experience that needed to be created, on repeat basically for thousands of people,[00:40:00] 10 at a time.

And we were handed down a fairly sophisticated, very well done, 90 minute, adventure module. That was, as you said, had a narrative arc. I wonder if you can see any parallels there. What, what that was like for you to kind of take somebody else’s design and run it in that way.

Logan: Yeah, I’ve done similar things. You know, running pre-written modules of games. You do kind of have to take permissions at some points because there’s rules as written or other process as written, but it doesn’t account for every possible thing that could eventuate during the session.

And so something as a, as a Game Master and a gamer, skill that you get better at over time is improvisation. You know, the players decide, no, they’re not going to go into the cave. They’re going to explode it or something. And now you’re like, oh no, the next plot point was inside there.[00:41:00] Okay, I’m going to move it over here now.

And you have to get good at that, that adaptation. And part of that is really listening and tuning into the players and what they want, what they’re expecting and where they’re about to go before they go there. And once they perhaps hit uncertain beats changing and placing what they need in front of them.

And similarly those, those skills of improvisation, adaptation, and really listening to the people in the room I felt served me in the facilitation work.

Jason: I love that mate, because we spent a lot of time talking about intent and designing these sorts of modules. But what you hit on then was this idea of, it comes alive in the act of play and running a session is that act of improvisational play. It’s the actual playing of the game and being in tune with that. There’s something really important in that it’s not a removed activity. It’s something that you’re involved in with folks that moves and shifts. [00:42:00] And I love that observation about the listening and being with people and adapting to the context as it shifts.

Hailey: Yeah. So you’ve named a couple of things that were clear parallels to the adaptation. And going off script when you need to, or shifting the script. You’ve named the sort of narrative arc. Is there anything else that’s coming through for you as a clear analogy or translation from your skills running games at conventions or for groups running modules, and your experience of running these workshops?

Logan: There’s a piece about confidence. Just really owning that you’ve read the adventure module, and being confident enough to slot in the different parts as you need to, which relates to adaptation and improvisation, but there’s a specific kind of confidence piece there.

Jason: But also the importance of having a module, like having a structure that we’re working off does give us confidence. You know, we know that if [00:43:00] we had to make up a story from the ground up every time, it would be very, very daunting. But having that designed structure there’s a sense of confidence that comes along with that. And and a sense of navigational certainty that comes along with that. I love that observation, Mike mate.

Logan: Yeah. And props to folks who design modules, both games and facilitation as well. You know, well- designed module goes a long way to a well designed process.

Hailey: Yeah. And our ability to create an experience with minimal investment of time and energy on our own part. Not that there’s nothing that goes into preparing someone else’s module, but it surely saves you a lot of time.

I think we, maybe we have just enough time to explore another instance of us taking these skills out into the wild, where Amble is now in the process of adapting one of our games, Green Hollow, which is a narrative storytelling game that we’re going to talk about in detail in a future episode, that’s designed to help teams tell a story about teamwork, about working on a project together, but to [00:44:00] discover the interpersonal elements of that and to, to learn about themselves as collaborators so that they might then understand what they need to develop further or what they need to discuss as a team back in the real world, after going on this fictional journey. And we’re in the process now of taking that to a client who wants to use it in a specific context, working with job seekers, people who are trying to get into the world of work, to help them develop some soft skills.

And I wonder Logan, as we’ve been embarking on that journey, we’ve been starting to hear in more rich detail about their world and the experience that they have and how they are bringing people along on this job seeking journey already. As we’ve been starting to reckon with how might we change and adapt the game and what can we keep and what needs to change and whether that’s been revealing anything for you, or you have any thoughts as a designer about that experience?

Logan: About the experience of altering an existing game to a new audience. [00:45:00] Yeah, it’s fun. I just find game design fun. So I’m going to say it’s fun every time. Yeah, it’s good to stretch the design legs in that way. Changing an existing game to a new, very specific audience and thinking about the different layers, right?

So Green Hollow our first game that is being altered here, had it’s got the content, which is prompts, which holds the conversation for these people, but there’s also how these prompts are delivered. And what happens after a prompt is resolved? How does the story keep moving? And so different layers, you can really break them down to get a sense of, of how you can shift them for a new audience.

And a soft skill that is very helpful in the workplace is conversation. So conversation with your colleagues and with customers, if you’re in a customer facing job. [00:46:00] And originally Green Hollow has you pick up a card, ask a question and answer it yourself. And so one idea that came to the top of my head is what if someone else is asking that question or you’re asking it of someone else, so it’s a small change, but already it’s kind of encouraging conversation.

So just small tweaks like that. There’s lots of different levers that you can flip up and flip down.

Hailey: Even a simple game like Green Hollow still has dozens, hundreds of little design dimensions that have gone into it and choices that we made along the way. And because we were so intimate with making those, we sort of know where all of them are to then just shift them that little bit. And that tiny little shift can have such a big effect on the experience that it creates.

Well, I think we might be coming to the end of our time folks. So to wrap up, this has been a really awesome exploration and it’s opened up as many new avenues to explore. I think I’m also, you know, feeling a little [00:47:00] smug about our hypothesis panning out a little bit here and bringing-

Jason: Oh!

Hailey: game designer in and how quickly Logan’s been picking up the trade of facilitation. The world needs more facilitators. So if you are a game designer and you enjoy running game tables, you might think about looking at a career in facilitation. And it’s a growing field.

So, as we like to do, when we wrap up what’s on the cards, so to speak for this week for what are we playing? What do people have on that they’re excited about? More Hanabi is there some level of perfection further than scoring 25 to achieve? What’s on for you?

Logan: Well, I mean, speaking of Hanabi, we were playing online. The computer does help you remember what you’ve been told about your cards. So there’s less relying on memory. So we did get a perfect score. So I guess the next step is perhaps [00:48:00] when we can meet in person again is to not use a computer and just rely on our own memories. That will be the next step. But otherwise-

Jason: of centauring, never hurt anybody mate.

Logan: Well, I mean, we won. So like I’m still going to take that as a win, you know.

Jason: Yeah.

Logan: Otherwise on the gaming table will be more wanderhome because I love that game. And the book is, the physical book, I ordered a physical copy, it should be coming soon. They’ve been arriving across North America. So probably a couple of weeks to make it to Australia here but it’s close and that feels exciting.

Hailey: Uh, give us the 30 seconds on wanderhome. What is wanderhome?

Logan: Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy tabletop role playing game that can be played with or without a game master in which animal folk travel the land of Haeth, in search of beautiful sights. It is a land that is recovering from violence and as such [00:49:00] violence is not really something that anyone considers anymore. It is a land of animal folk and insect cattle. Everything is very cute, but given that a war has just passed, it’s also a great game for exploring trauma and healing.

Hailey: So a great example of a role-playing game that doesn’t have to be centered around killing other people, combat, struggling to be heroic. And it actively discourages those things and is still just as entrancing and mysterious and has beautiful and surprising moments in it.

Logan: Yeah, I really love it.

Hailey: Well, thank you so much Logan and Jason, this has been a fantastic conversation, and I just want to remind everybody listening that you can find us online at amble.studio. On our website you can find some of our games are available to be played, especially right now, Green Hollow. So you can go and play that [00:50:00] now just by clicking on that from our homepage.

You can also find us on Twitter @TheAmbleStudio on Twitter, and as well as on LinkedIn, you can find us there and Logan who is doing such a great job keeping our social media channels alive with interesting content. So we promise that you’ll find interesting things there as well as this podcast.

We are kicking it into another gear, recording episodes regularly, getting them out there, trying to reach a bigger audience because we’ve heard that you’re enjoying listening to us amble along. So please tell your friends. We’d love the more of you listening, the more of these we can make. And is there anything else folks would like to add on the way out?

Logan: We’re also on Ko-Fi.

So you can find us there.

Hailey: We are on Ko-Fi . There are buttons on our website. You can buy us a coffee if you’re enjoying these ambles or our games. That would be a huge, thank you for us. It would mean a lot.

All right with that, let’s call it an [00:51:00] episode. Bye folks.

Logan: Bye.

Jason: See ya Hails. See ya Logan.