Fiasco: Our Story

I’m not going to lie, I felt pretty overwhelmed going into the meeting with my Fiasco group. I had looked over the instructions on how to play the game, but I was very confused about how the whole thing worked.

When I met with my group, it took us almost an hour to get started because we couldn’t quite grasp the concept; however we decided that, whatever we didn’t understand, we would just improvise. We first chose Boomtown as our playset because we found the name captivating. Then, we each determined our relationships with those around us. My relationship with the person to my left was that we were both Chinese Opium sellers and the person to my right and I were both criminals; this ended up working perfectly for me because I was a criminal who sold Chinese Opium. Our story turned out to be an odd and dramatic one; odd in the sense that we all wanted to kill people in the story. For example, Frunk Trump (the person to my right) and I turned out to be secret lovers and it was my goal to kill him. I teamed up with one of the players and we were going to go kill him. All the while, Frunk was at the dentist where player 4 was selling Chinese Opium. Yes, this part of our story was odd indeed, but hilarious to recount. It was interesting to see how, although we would have to choose weird objects or needs, we were able to connect them all to produce a story that, although not completely realistic, was indeed enjoyable. As we fell into the flow of telling our story, I continued to gain more and more confidence in what I wanted to say and how specific I was in my moves. I was originally scared to maybe say something foolish or out of place, but I noticed that the main point of Fiasco is to make this game your own; it’s a great way to let go and create your own story. As a group, I think that we all worked well together. We all seemed to have the same mindset of making our story playful and entertaining as opposed to a structured and serious one. For example, I wanted to kill my secret lover, another player kills the current mayor and takes over, and so on. Neither of us was concentrated in winning, we were just focused on having fun by creating a story of our own; one that was interconnected and engaging. All in all, I think that we did a great job at creating our story. Although we might’ve misread a couple of the rules, we still made it work. We all worked together and, whenever it was needed, we helped each other add to the story. By the time we finished, I felted relieved and content: relieved that playing the game didn’t turn out to be a disaster just like I thought and I was content with what we had produced.

Starting the game was indeed hard, but getting into the flow of the game turned out to be rather easy for us. We didn’t use any particular strategies that I can recall, but what we did do was pitch in good ideas when one of us didn’t know how to continue the story. Also, my group was very good at being patient and explaining certain rules or turns when someone didn’t understand. I think that these qualities were what helped us succeed. Playing Fiasco was definitely unlike anything I had ever done. It’s weird to think of this game as a form of writing, but after having played it I realized that it really is. You’re creating a story with very little guidance; we were able to be as explicit or as concise as we wanted to be within our turns and we were able to each add a significant piece to the story. This was without a doubt a great way to explore a new form of writing and broaden our perception of what can account for being a written piece. With this, we definitely put into use our rhetorical composition learning objective. By playing Fiasco we were able to explore a new form of writing while adapting our story to any new constraints that came up. It put into play not only our teamwork skills, but also our creativity. We also exercised the writing as a process learning objective because we all had to pitch in ideas and new plays which in the end led to a conclusion. It took a lot of different plays and moves from each of the players involved to create the final product.

All in all, playing Fiasco was a great experience. The feeling of confusion in the beginning later turned into excitement which allowed me to become fully engaged in the game and take the most out of it.