There was a SMOFcon-type event in the UK last weekend. Alex Holden reports:
Later everyone divided into three teams to play an RPG about conrunning called If I Ran the
ZooCon. It was a nice idea, but unfortunately the game has some pretty major problems – it’s very outdated and US-centric, the scenarios presented have very limited options and often key points of information needed to make a decision are not provided, it hovers uncomfortably somewhere between silly and serious, and it’s much too long to run through a complete game in the hour allocated for it.
(My emphasis in bold. I also note that when we run the game at ConStruction we allow an entire evening for it.)
Alex also reports on discussions about possible venues of a future UK Worldcon. One of the possible sites is Liverpool. Don’t all run away screaming, now. There are a lot of nice things about Liverpool, and it is not Blackpool.
“…Often key points of information are not provided.”
Seems to me that was Tom Cruise’s point when questioning the private in “A Few Good Men.” The fellow knew where to find his meals even though the mess hall wasn’t referenced in the training manual.
When the game was premiered at the 1987 Smofcon in Massachusetts, the macho implication was that if you had to ask, you weren’t a Smof!
However, the truth was there were a lot of people who hadn’t experienced all the scenarios, or heard about them, and you could learn-as-you-play.
Ah, sounds like Alex isn’t the only person who doesn’t get it.
I’ve hosted this game numerous times, and as Cheryl points out, we set aside an entire evening. It takes at least half an hour before the teams get into the spirit of the thing.
Teams always complain about there not being enough information or that they want to respond in a way not listed. I point out to them that the lack of sufficient information and the constrained choices are features, not bugs. In the real world, you don’t always have the luxury of finding out more information, and you usually have only limited choices in what you can do.
While one could certainly update the Zoo game by updating the dollar values to account for twenty years of inflation, I consider that a minor factor. The more interesting thing to me is that the game actually had an intended effect in that some of the lessons the game tries to teach are now taken for granted, even by people who never played the game, because they picked it up at second or third remove.
Besides, the details of the game don’t matter hugely. Understanding the Goodwill/People/Financial model is much more important.
Just to add to what Kevin said, one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Zoo Game is that sometimes you don’t have all the information you need to hand. In running real conventions, mistakes are often made precisely because of that. You can try to avoid it, but sooner or later it will happen.
You could perhaps argue that the game assumes too much knowledge of how a Worldcon is run, but even that is a valuable lesson. Way too many people leap into Worldcon running without much idea of what they are doing, and without taking advantage of finding out how things have been done in the past.
Anyone who plays the Zoo Game “to win” will probably fail to get any benefit from it at all. Many of the most important lessons are lessons about how things can go wrong. It is much better to have them happen in a game than in real life.