Fiasco Reflection

At the start of Fiasco, I really didn’t know what to expect. I went into the whole experience fairly blind to the world of tabletop role-playing games. I had played plenty of role playing video games before such as Skyrim or Fallout, but nothing like Fiasco before. What I found makes fiasco different and one of the most fun things about Fiasco was the fact that we, the players, were the ones who got to control the story. One of the things that video games do is provide a story for you to enjoy and you can just go along for the ride. Tabletop role-playing games however let you decide what you do with your story and how each character develops and lets you use your own creativity which make them superior to video games in that regard.

We chose to play Main Street as our first Fiasco game. During the game we took turns for who got to drive the story. I think I may have been a little more forceful than others to drive the plot forwards because I got excited about the possibilities of the story and had grand ideas for how to tie certain scenarios that we created together. However, I think that everyone had equal opportunity to participate and there were great contributions from everyone in the group. I think that we may have made an error while playing the game and given everyone too many needs and places to be. However, this error made the storytelling even more interesting. We had to be more creative about how we were going to make each individual storyline come together into one ending. We had more to work with in terms of needs for characters which forced us to be more creative on how to tie the two sometimes very different needs together. I think that these errors made the game more interesting because there was so much more guideline material to work with. If we were to play again making the same mistakes that we did the first time, it would benefit us to have more acts because there was a lot more information to be discussed. One of the things that was difficult about Fiasco was creating dynamic characters. Because we were only given a couple of needs about the characters it was easy to just make those needs define the character and not worry about the rest of the character. However, that left us all with flat characters that lacked true motivations.

Another thing about playing fiasco that was really fun was the laughter. The entire time we were playing the game we were laughing and having fun which is the most important part of playing a game in my opinion. The game made the whole experience of creating this fiasco story enjoyable which I think makes Fiasco a really successful game. Not necessarily successful in the financial sense, but successful in its goal to make everyone storytellers and express their creativity and have fun with it.

I think that Fiasco definitely fulfils the learning outcome for collaboration. Fiasco requires you to collaborate with others in order to play and create an interesting story. It requires you to listen to other people’s ideas and accept them even if they may be different then your own. This is an important part of collaboration because accepting different ways of thinking will always be helpful for obtaining a broader understanding of any topic. Collaboration can help in many ways to accomplish a task that is too great for one person and it is important to learn how to collaborate effectively. I think that this collaborative experience was important for me to have because, unlike many group projects that I have had in the past, this kind of collaboration worked really well. The way I could use this experience in the future is to give collaboration another chance and be more open to listening to others ideas more because they may end up having better ideas than I do.