Game night at NASAGA 07

North American Simulation and Gaming Association conference in Atlanta

After the concurrent sessions ended for the day, we took shuttle buses to a local training facility, the Knowledge Development Center for a reception. There were people eating, talking, listening to music and playing games. Everywhere.

Later in the evening, the organized gameplay started. I chose to play Lifeboats. We played on five boards with up to six people per board.

The game has wooden boats and crew, along with cards that are used for voting. You vote to spring leaks in boats and to move boats forward toward the destination islands. Your crew is divided up between boats, and one person has to jump out to swim to a new boat every turn. You have Captain cards you can use to try to get control over a decision. But if someone else plays one at the same time, both lose the card without getting to decide. All in all, it is a very effective set-up for conflict.

This game isn’t about conflict resolution, or conflict management, it’s about getting to experience conflict in action. Lots of opportunity to experience power.
I played with five men. They seemed nice. Several had ties to the Peace Corps. I have a tendency toward cooperation. I assumed I was with others who were be similar.

Yea, right sure.

They ganged up and started killing off my crew members. Suddenly, it seemed more desirable to be a bit more aggressive. By the time they had systematically killed off all but one of my crew members, I wanted to kill things. And do things like randomly sink boats for the revenge factor.

Les Lauber facilitated the games. He taught us how to play and made evasive and therefore somewhat evocative comments to us as we were playing.

Some players were wondering how the game could be used for training. Les was particularly effective at debriefing and helping us understand how to call out the various parts of the game and link them to common experiences in organizations. We looked at several factors:

• How well we separated the people from the problem
• What were the sources of conflict
• How we could reframe the problems

We also got a list of principles reflected in Lifeboats. Here is mine.

People who feel they have been punished unfairly often react aggressively.

Hey, I didn’t know I’d want to kill little wooden pegs before!

Other posts about the conference
NASAGA 2007: Pictures everywhere, NASAGA 2007: Games, games everywhere
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