Category: Student Posts

Fiasco is a cooperative multiplayer role-playing game that generates During Fiasco, our group weaved complicated narratives and challenged each other’s creativity through unexpected narrative switches. Fiasco’s rules and setup encourages innovation by the players. The limiting dice choices and permutations forces players to navigate through unique relationships that might have not been produced without the imposed restrictions.  In addition, the Tilt creates new and different additions to the narrative that must be incorporated. The game of Fiasco makes each player strive for originality, cooperate with other players, and develop critical thinking skills.  

In our individual game, we played with five players for roughly three hours. We told a pseudo-revenge story with each member wanting to “get even with this town for what it has made you into”. My character’s direct relationships were being drug friends and ex-spouses with my two neighbors. As my drug buddy was also the mayor of the town, I adopted a more radical representation of a drug-user and barely spent a minute sober. Consequentially, other’s needs and wants were prioritized over my own as play commenced. I offered comic relief, advanced other’s narratives, and cooperated for the best of the group. At times, I felt like a secondary character being used to push forward the storyline and solve or create a problem. Consequentially, I found enjoyment in trying to be the creative storyteller; whenever it was my turn, I would try to establish an innovative scene. For example, roughly a quarter way through the game, we had been trying to figure out what to do with a briefcase of money and drugs. During my turn, I asked where the briefcase came from and offered some possibilities: divine intervention, the mafia, and a hidden camera game show.  Though we decided that the mafia would be involved, having the options encouraged discussion about where our plot might go. These types of decisions are inherent in the game of Fiasco.  

Fiasco’s structure is unique due to the combination of freedom and structure. Compared to other board games or role-playing games, a significantly larger portion of interactions are set. For example, in first person games on consoles, interactions are prerecorded, but a player has agency to decide which path to choose. In Fiasco, not only are degrees of freedom infinite, but the scenarios are also being created. The guidelines and rulebook act as a primary way of sparking interest rather than forcing players to follow a path. However, Fiasco still provides many of the same functions as traditional boardgames or role-playing games. Much like creative writing, the processes and decision making is very similar; the difference is how much time is allotted to make a decision. In Fiasco, a player must commit to a path directly after being given a scenario. In contrast, one creating a novel or short story could create unbounded permutations of the same story until it’s satisfactory.  

Personally, Fiasco helped me progress by forcing me to step out of my comfort zone. I’ve always acted and been involved in theatre, but with people whom I am comfortable with. I joined the Fiasco group very late and didn’t anything about the group members besides their names. Fiasco challenged me to learn about myself and others through the decisions we made in certain situations. Not only was it very enjoyable, I learned that being the scapegoat can be entertaining and fulfilling; in addition, I also learned about my peers, developed my problem-solving skills, and worked on communication and collaboration with peers. 

#fiasco

I am recently into the Lego DC Super-Villains game, playing monthly with my friends on Switch. Therefore, the game piece that I thought about for the 3D printing project is a Lego toy. Although Batman is not the protagonist in Lego DC Super-Villains, he is an imposing figure in the DC universe, and most importantly, it is almost all in black that could save me time to put on color.

However, unexpectedly, the TechLab mistakingly printed my Batman with the white plastic, and I had to color it by myself. It is hard to paint color on the slippery plastic, and there are unapproachable cracks that don’t take color. After my painting, it is even less persuasive that this 3D printed piece is not a naive Japanese childish cartoon figure whose name I could not recall but Batman.

I began the process for making my podcast with the idea of nostalgia in video games. I thought that revisiting games from my childhood would be a good starting point. My main two ideas for games were Runescape and Minecraft, but since my associate producer Michael never played Runescape, we settled on Minecraft as the better option. After a meeting with Professor Morgen, we decided to shift the focus from nostalgia in Minecraft to explaining and analyzing how Minecraft shaped our values and experiences as kids to us as adults in college. We both decided to play the game again for about an hour to reflect on how the experience has changed. Being the executive producer and having played Minecraft more than Michael, I came up with most of the framework and ideas and wrote some scripted parts before we met to record and discuss the game.

Our primary goals of the podcast were to address how Minecraft has affected us as kids, the relationships that were formed around the game, and the affect of playing the game again with these nostalgic memories. We had this framework before we started recording, but we also wanted to unscripted moments and conversations between the two of us. To get through the unscripted portions, we wrote bullet points of different topics we needed to cover as we talked and we went from there. I made a podcast with audacity before in senior year of high school, so fortunately I already had an idea of how it worked. I could cut, stop, and go as we went along going over our primary goals. At certain times we weren’t confident in our unscripted moments, so we recollected our thoughts, thought of new ideas, and tried again. Overall, the recording process went pretty smoothly, as did most of the editing process. I decided to do the editing because I had the most important position and Michael had a lot of work. I found an artist on Free Music Archive that I liked, so I just used his music. The rest of the editing consisted of sound mixing and deleting the “um”s and awkward silences between takes.

By making the podcast I was able to compose a form of English utilizing modes. The first was a scripted introduction, conclusion and description of the game, and the other was transforming that writing and outline into unscripted verbal communication with another person while arguing its beneficial effects to convince an audience. I was also able to summarize and conclude my arguments succinctly in my conclusion. After meeting with Professor Morgen, I revised my main thesis from being analyzing nostalgia to analyzing the effects of Minecraft on myself and Michael from past to present. I utilized the Yeti microphones in the library, reserved a private room to make sure there were no outside noises, and enhanced the podcast with Creative Commons music. Making this podcast improved my skills with verbal communication, technology as a form of media, and revision of work as a way to create a new, strengthened, product.