Games for Training Purposes

 Games for Training Purposes

About 7 years ago, I was invited back to my alma mater, SUNY Geneseo, to teach some workshops to undergraduates pursuing a degree in theatre. I love teaching and was more excited for this opportunity that I can possibly express! For anyone who doesn't know me personally or hasn't been with this blog since the beginning, for nearly ten years, I ran a theatre company called Solid Lines Productions with the stated mission of "fostering community action through theatre about socially-relevant issues." It meant producing difficult and triggering shows, facilitating uncomfortable conversations, and doing our best to forge meaningful, thoughtful, and productive relationships with people and organizations doing extremely difficult and necessary work in our communities. I was proud of this work and confident that I had things to share with these undergrad students. But I was not the only person returning to teach workshops that weekend! My good friends Melissa and Chuk would also be teaching workshops that weekend!

I have a habit of surrounding myself with extraordinary people who I admire and aim to emulate. Melissa and Chuk are no different in that regard. Melissa is a writer/producer/actor/teacher who has done some really outstanding work, not the least of which is her contribution to documentary theatre. Chuk is a writer/producer/actor/director/dancer/teacher who has spent countless hours doing antiracist work in addition to all of his other accomplishments, not the least of which is traveling to different U.S. cities to provide empathy training for different police departments. I'm telling you: I'm so damn lucky to know such incredible people! But knowing that Melissa and Chuk would also be teaching made me anxious because I was having difficulty coming up with anything I could teach these undergrad students that Melissa and Chuk couldn't already teach better. The three of us have done some similar work, but where Melissa and Chuk branched away from one another, each of them had branched further than I had. So I struggled with it for awhile until I realized that my contribution to these workshops was not to be how we could use theatre as a tool for social justice. My workshop would be all about running a theatre company and why people shouldn't do it. In short, too many of us start a theatre company because we're not getting hired by the companies for which we want to work to do the work we want to do. So we start our own companies. To be clear, I believe it is dumb specifically when it's yet another white guy like me who starts it for that reason. We've already got too many white men running theaters across the United States. In those cases, it's about ego and not about assessing community needs. Plus, it's always more work than we think it is because too many of us come to the business of theatre without any business experience; we're artists just "trying to make it work." So I took one of my favorite games of the time, Red November, and adapted it.

For anyone unfamiliar with Red November, it's a co-op game by Fantasy Flight Games that features a team of gnomes trying to keep their gnomish submarine in one piece long enough to surface. It means running around the sub, putting out fires, bailing out water, and fighting off the kraken pictured above. It's a brutal game, but I think it's fun as long as players don't take it too seriously, and I think it's got a terrific time mechanic: the more time a player spends on a task, the more likely they are to succeed, but the more likely other disasters are to erupt in the meantime. It's a matter of striking a balance between spending enough time to be successful at an important repair and spending too much time on that repair.

In other words, it's basically the same as running a theatre company.

So I changed around some things (needing to replace an actor instead of bailing out water, finding additional funding instead of aborting the self-destruct, etc.), made sure I'd simplified some of the rules, and figured out how I'd get it played on a chalkboard so I could teach in the space with minimal tech. And let me tell you: not a single team made it to opening night of a show. I think I ran the workshop twice and so had something like 25 students in a total of 6 different teams running their companies, and not a single one of them survived a month of production to successfully get to opening night. Plus, despite knowing it was a game and they weren't being graded, most of the students said that the exercise stressed them out as they watched one problem be suddenly replaced by three. We spent the debrief period talking about why I would discourage people from starting their own theatre company as well as how realistic these obstacles were in the running of said company.*

*For the record, this is an entirely different discussion filled with nuance that I'm simply not exploring here because this is a gaming blog, after all, and not a theatre blog.*

I mention all of that above because I think there's so much to be gained from adapting board game design to training exercises. I find this more difficult with sensitive material, of course. Playing a game with low stakes and little chance of someone encountering triggering material (such as the above example of running a theatre company for a month) is very different than doing antiracist training or teaching nurse practitioner students how to recognize the red flags that accompany victims of human trafficking (both of which I've done as ED of Solid Lines Productions). The perception that we as trainers have reduced such traumatic and very dangerous topics to games meant to be played is a very harmful one and runs counter to the objectives of such training. So how do we walk that fine line?

I can't answer all of that here because I truly believe the lines one should not cross move from topic to topic as well as facilitator to facilitator. But some of the things that games do to engage us can be applied to trainings in order to engage attendees!

• Present challenging, but clear objectives and rules
• Encourage cooperative work
• Elements of chance (as even the best intentions can sometimes yield unintended consequences)
• Agency in our actions
• A narrative

I think there is a lot of value in adapting board game mechanics for training purposes. Some require more adaptation than others, of course, and some are altogether inappropriate. But being railroaded in a game is frustrating and boring, and the same is true of trainings. If I feel as though this training can proceed with or without not just my input, but the input of any attendees, then this is a training that could've been an e-mail.  If the end of a training exercise seems predestined for failure just to make a heavy-handed point, then none of my choices matter and it never feels good to be without agency. If no narrative emerges from an exercise meant to engage attendees, then it's so much less likely that attendees will retain that exercise and its intended lessons for any period of time once the training is over. Humans like to tell stories. It's a really good way for us to retain information. It's why (for good or ill, and it's often some of column A and some of column B) anecdotal evidence always seems to make a bigger impact on people than empirical evidence. Even just enough "plot points" in a training will allow trainees to write their own narrative during a training. I cannot for the life of me remember the details of why each theatre company failed in my Red November adapatation at SUNY Geneseo. But each of the teams had their failure unfold in its own unique way because the design of the game provided just enough information for the story to unfold of its own accord based on the actions the students took.

I can offer more specifics in future posts, but only if folks are interested in them. If you are, drop a comment and I'll circle back around to see what else, if anything, I can share that might be useful!