jeregenest

Games go wrong, fact of life. And hopefully people do post-Mortems on games, figure out what went wrong, why, and what they can do better next time. Frankly all the learning is on the wrong end this way, but what would happen if more games did pre-Mortem’s? This is something I do in projects all the time, because ideally team members, with all their collective experiences, can usually see the bad assumptions that go horribly wrong and the things that bring us off-track. And we can thus open a space at the inception to directly address the risks. This is similar, but different from the more formal risk analysis in that it is more designed to tap into experience and intuition. This probably raises the importance of an exercise like this to game groups, who usually have a lot of experience but few real formal risk management tools can apply easily to the decision (yes I want to do a FEMA on Fiasco).

So start with the simple question, “What will go wrong?” or corollaries like “What will lessen play.” This will allow the group to name risks or elephants lurking in the room. The exercise is deceptively easy and exists to deliberately create a space to share past learning at a time when the gaming group can best act on it. Closing the exercise it is probably good enough to do some social contract brainstorming to address the concerns or take other game based document decisions (house rules etc).

Peaseblossom and I recently did this for the game and it went well. The real issues were around grind, how depressing, the issues of victory, and content. There was also a good discussion on sexualization of NPCs. It lead to a great discussion, that I then was easily able to apply to my thinming and game development.