This week playing Fiasco was interesting. I’m not sure what the normal group dynamic is playing this game but I played with a group of friends that all knew each other and I had a fun time, but I don’t think we played the game very seriously. It was humorous, and we spent 90% of the game laughing, which made it enjoyable. I think next time I’m going to watch a more comprehensive instructional video before playing the game again because I think we were overall a bit confused and were unsure if we were playing correctly. It was fun to listen to the different story lines people came up with, but I don’t know if I was really good at this. I think I was good at connecting ideas, but coming up with new plot or story lines was somewhat difficult for me unless I had a really good idea. The hardest part was getting started. After choosing our locations, needs, objects…etc, we had an adjustment period of just not knowing what to do next but once we had a story going, I think we all became invested to an extent.
Because of commitments I have next week, I told my group in the beginning that I wont be here next week to play part 2 of the game, so we decided in the beginning that my character would die at the end. I think deciding this in the beginning almost made the story easier in a way because while we were interested in having subplots and other things needed to happen so people could fulfill their needs, we knew that the one thing we absolutely needed to do was kill my character, so there was a common goal established. My main need in the game was to get rich through fraud and trickery. This need was met pretty early on in the game because one of the other girls playing had established that we were government officials that were embezzling money, so as long as I had maintained this status, I didn’t really have any motives except to help keep the plot moving in the direction of me getting killed. I was unable to relate a lot to this game, but I can see my own values modeled loosely in the game. Because my character was made to be devious and a fraud, I feel as if I can somewhat relate to this persona of being secretive and mysterious. I don’t share myself and my emotions easily with strangers, so few people really truly understand who I am and what I’m about because I have a lot of hesitations about opening up to people who I don’t know for sure genuinely care.
As far as a general play synopsis, my character’s name was Lady Victoria. Lady Victoria was a government official with Sandy. Sandy and Lady Victoria were embezzling money and Sandy decided she didn’t want to be a part of it anymore, so she asked Dobby(another character) for help in murdering me. Dobby had already been to jail before and had a need to repair his reputation so he didn’t want to be caught up in a scandal, and they devised a plan to blame the murder on Papa Elf (another character.) Gianna had a motive for murder, so she joined in the plan with Dobby and Sandy to kill me. Papa Elf came home from the bar and accidentally knocked on my door, thinking it was his own house. I took him in because he was very clearly drunk and we thought we might have some fun so I turned off the cameras, showing him where the cameras were. While I was sleeping, he cut the cameras so that when I’m murdered, nobody can see who did it. I don’t remember all the connections here, but this is most of what I remember.
I think this game can tie to leadership because leadership requires adaptability. When someone starts to have ideas for the storyline that you didn’t have and starts to bring the game in a new direction, the characters have to be adaptable so the game can keep moving. Leadership also requires keeping the bigger picture in mind during smaller interactions. It could have been easy to take the story away from where we had intended for it to go, just like with leadership it’s easy to get caught up in the details and stray away from the most important tasks at hand. I think my friend Josh would really enjoy playing this game because he’s super smart and can easily create stories. He loves creating interesting conversations and I think he would be able to create some really crazy plot twists and character connections. I am interested to know how the game is supposed to end though because I also can see it being difficult for him to enjoy if there’s not a clear winner or clear team winning at the end.