Pure, Deep Gratitude From My First NASAGA Experience
I want to share a story about a powerful moment from the third and final game night at last month's NASAGA conference in St Louis.
Right away, I'm going to give away the Shyamalan-style twist: the person at the center of the story is me. I’m the player who experienced a mind-blowing A-HA moment. It was quite the turn of events, as I’m usually the facilitator of other people’s transformative game moments.
The game was Blood on the Clocktower, a complex social deduction role-playing game. There were about 12 of us playing, all of whom I had just met over the course of the previous few days at the conference.
In the game, everyone plays a character. Most are well-meaning townspeople, and about a third are evil demons. The evil characters are trying to sow mayhem and distrust, and the good characters are trying to figure out who is evil before they all get "killed" off. It's very Agatha Christie. The game requires massive amounts of individual strategy, shifting alliances, and double-crossing. And the story is complicated. Way more complicated than the games I usually play.
Right from the start, I was profoundly uncomfortable, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. It wasn't that I felt unsafe, or that I didn't like the other players. Quite the opposite: I don't know that I have ever felt quite so welcomed by a group of people in a professional community in my 20+ year career.
I’m going to pause here and tell you a few important things about me.
First, I have many skills, but lying is not one of them. I value honesty and integrity, and I have a really hard time with people who outright lie. Also, I have no poker face, so I can’t hide that discomfort.
Second, my goal when playing games is not to win, but to have a shared experience that everyone will look back on fondly. I come in looking for a positive opportunity to get to know and connect with others, and I bring my earnest, authentic self.
Third, I like rules. I like knowing what I am supposed to (and not supposed to) do. I usually don’t fully engage in a game until I have some basic sense of what the heck is going on.
You should now see why I felt so far removed from my comfort zone from the very start of this complex game that I had no clue how to play, and that has deception baked right into the premise. In Blood on the Clocktower, you never know who to trust, and some characters have to exhibit behavior that in normal life we might call gaslighting, but in the context of the game was just good ole’ role-playing fun.
I actually tried to drop out of the game about one minute in, but I was convinced to stick it out by the wise and patient game facilitator. I’m grateful to him and to all of my fellow players, who supported and encouraged me the whole way through.
While I never got swept up in the fun of the game, I was determined to figure out what was making me so uncomfortable, despite having my hackles fully up for the entire duration.
About 90 minutes into the game, right after my character - an honest monk who was trying to protect other people (pretty on-the-nose, eh?) - died, it hit me: the game was a brutal combination of the antithesis of those three fundamental truths about me.
For the first 90 minutes, my experience was this: I was in the middle of a complex game for which I did not know the rules, and my willingness to be transparent about not knowing the rules and asking for help made me an easy mark for the more nefarious characters to try to manipulate for their own success in the game. Amidst this discomfort, the real-life me was interpreting that duplicitousness as me being taken advantage of, which then kept me from building stronger relationships with my fellow players. And since I wasn’t super motivated to try to win the game, it felt like a missed opportunity to strengthen new connections.
Once I could see this, I was able to appreciate the personal growth moment taking place. There was nothing wrong with me, nor with the game. The game is brilliant, and everyone played it perfectly. Even me, ironically.
Blood on the Clocktower just didn’t allow me to get the benefits I look for when playing games. And that’s okay. I probably won’t play it again. What I absolutely will do again, though, is play games with the NASAGA community.
After the game was over, many people came over and were willing to help me debrief my own experience. They shared their own stories of confusion and discomfort, and how they worked through them. They complimented me for how well I played my role, even though I didn’t realize I was playing it. These engagements turned into deep conversations about the power of games to explore the contradictions and complexities of the human experience.
As with the games I facilitate, the true meaning and impact came in the debrief. I am truly grateful to everyone who played that night, and who attended the conference. It made me a better player, facilitator, and human.
Alex Suchman is CEO and Cofounder of Barometer XP. Her mission is to foster thriving teams, so work can be a source of genuine meaning and connection for everyone. She uses games and play with her clients toward various learning and development outcomes in order to build stronger workplace cultures.