GAME Description
Engage your customers as being a character of your Product Development Hero Quest! – “The Drama Game” is a story telling game to identify stakeholders' behaviours and to unveil their hidden expectations – involved in a product development project.
The game objectives are to interpret all crucial real-life project incidents/situations as a Hero Quest on a map, and to write stories reflecting personal feelings, thoughts, words said and heard. By this, all participants create a common understanding of their mutual behaviours.
Surplus: at the end of the the game all stories can be compiled to a script-book for a marketing video or a trade show theater play, if needed.
The game can be played during the running product development life cycle in retrospectives incessantly, or afterwards as a kind of post-mortem analysis. Of course, playing it during product development has more value since hidden impediments are unveiled.
You can play the game with unlimited many participants. For a large-group game build teams with equally mixed roles & responsibilities.
The duration to play is 2h to 1 work day depending on the number of players and the stories' granularity of details.
The game objectives are to interpret all crucial real-life project incidents/situations as a Hero Quest on a map, and to write stories reflecting personal feelings, thoughts, words said and heard. By this, all participants create a common understanding of their mutual behaviours.
Surplus: at the end of the the game all stories can be compiled to a script-book for a marketing video or a trade show theater play, if needed.
The game can be played during the running product development life cycle in retrospectives incessantly, or afterwards as a kind of post-mortem analysis. Of course, playing it during product development has more value since hidden impediments are unveiled.
You can play the game with unlimited many participants. For a large-group game build teams with equally mixed roles & responsibilities.
The duration to play is 2h to 1 work day depending on the number of players and the stories' granularity of details.
See also my other game for agile product development: Product Owner Challenge.
GAME USAGE
Play the game in two retrospectives flavours — a retrospective is a regular session to look back at events that already have taken place:
Play the game in two retrospectives flavours — a retrospective is a regular session to look back at events that already have taken place:
- Standard "look back" retrospectives since the last retro only:
How to play: time-box the discussion of each incident. Do short group voting (thumbs-up) to identify the role of all players in each incidents in question.
- Final "post-project" retro when a project finishes aka "post-mortem review".
How to play: consider the whole project life cycle. Use story cards with empathy map to discuss each role participants play in each incident.
GAME OBJECTIVES
- All stakeholders are involved as players: customers, dev team, architects, and QA, etc.
- Identify crucial events and incidents during the product development life cycle.
- Reflect player's behaviour (personal feelings, thoughts, consequences, actions, and sayings) in these events and incidents (Personal Stories).
- Team reflection of roles switching and value changes during the project.
- Unveil hidden impediments.
- Create and communicate a common, sharable story, representing the interpretations of all participants.
Gaming instructions
You can play the game in two ways:
- To spot a realistic correspondence with your real product development life cycle play the game with a thick cord (2-3m long), and 12 pins/needles.
Pin the cord as winding road on a wall or floor. Make the distances between pins corresponding to real-life time intervals of your project. Stick the quest name tags to each. - If you do not want to play with needles and pins, use the Game board.
How to Play
- Sketch the Story: ...through a short retrospective select in the team crucial real-life situations ("incidents") happened in your actual product development:
• discuss with all players the proper mapping of each incident to the symbolic quest marks (you can map multiple incidents to marks #6-#7);
• write the incident as headline (summary) on the associated name tag;
• each player or team of players chooses a coloured twine. - Write the Drama Stories: ...for each mark of quest:
• describe from your point of view only for each incident, what you personally had observed,
felt, thought, said, and heard in this situation; use the empathy map on the story card for
collecting and clustering information;
• in case you play with teams, each team member writes her own story; create then a joined
story; - Cast your Drama Stories: ...for all stories at a certain quest mark:
• discuss in the team which role character (including the "Treasure”) fits the story description
best;
• pin/paste the associated role stickers to the story card and beneath the quest mark in
question;
• each author team connects her role stickers of the current quest mark with one of the
previous quest mark by her coloured twine;
Note: role assignments may switch due players can switch their perspectives and motivations;
• update a record which characters enters the first time the “scene” incessantly. - Write the Common Story: ...combine all individual stories to a common, sharable Story. The Common Story should reflect all personas and their interpretations.
- Debrief: ...reflect in the team switching of roles and values changes during the project.
- Publish: ...share the Common Story.
For sure, there are tools and online services in the net to write and publish your stories. E.g.:
- Google Story Builder (free)
- Smaply.com (princing model)
Gaming material
Downloads
- Gaming instructions and templates for all game materials
- Posters to illustrate the game
Game Board for playing at table or floor. |
Character / Role Stickers
Story Cards with Empathy Map
(Empathy map template is proudly stolen from: http://business901.com/value-stream-mapping/mapping-personas/)