First, if you haven’t read Robin Laws’ Hamlet’s Hit Points and played Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco, do so immediately.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can explain what went through my head on my morning jog. One of Robin’s theses in HHP is that in most narrative media, it’s rare for the protagonist to enjoy a string of unmitigated successes. The key to effective narrative is modulating the pass/fail (or hope/fear) cycle. The book offers some pretty compelling evidence for this, and for the sake of this post, I’m going to accept it.1

So in Fiasco, after the Tilt, you know whether or not success or failure is good for your character in the long run. The game encourages you to push for your character to have the same fortune throughout.2 In the Vegas game at GenCon, for example, I had two black dice at the Tilt, so the “best” thing for my character was to keep losing.3

What I ended up doing in our LA 1936 game, however, was pulling a reverse. My burlesque dancer, Holly, had been dominant in her early scenes, especially against other player characters, like when she faced down Will’s nightclub owner. The game told me that I needed to play for white dice. But Will, sitting to my left, also needed them, and by the time it got to my third scene, there was only one left. Will had just done a great, possibly redemptive scene with his character, and I wanted him to win. So I decided to take a dive, and played my next scene to fail, leaving the white dice for him to take.4 I ended up with a fantastic bit of drama involving the revelation of my impossible love for Ryan’s corrupt liquor licensing commissioner, resulting in what Robin would call a dramatic down arrow. And it worked. I felt great about it, and the rest of the people around the table clearly responded to it.

What this game and Robin’s book made me realize is that I love pulling these sorts of reversals5, both because they make the character deeper and more complex and because they make the story more interesting. So thank you, Robin, for seeding these ideas in my head, and thank you, Jason, for making me wrestle with them.

1 The book had such an effect on me that after I finished reading it, I started doing beat analysis on the in-flight movie on the plane I was on at the time.6

2 Excepting that the consequences of your first two scenes don’t play into this, but I’m going to ignore that for now.

3 And boy did I.

4 Which didn't work, because Ryan took it, but I had to try.

5 What I realized this morning is that I’ve done exactly the same thing before, like in the game of Shooting the Moon at Dreamation in 2008, where made my scumbag business unit manager turn a volte face in the final scene to make his wife’s decision to leave him that much more poignant.

6 Which in this case was Shrek 4.

If yesterday was towards the middle of the technical spectrum, today was closer to the far end of it. Things opened with Dave Thomas’ keynote, “An Unplugged Retrospective on the Agile Decade.” It was a fun, fast, shotgun overview of what we’ve doing for the last ten years, with some suggestions about where we should look for the next ten. After that was my first brush with an Open Jam1. Esther Derby wanted to film a short movie on retrospectives that she could put up on YouTube, so she put out the call and a dozen or so of us answers. We improvised a “retrospective from Hell,” after which we talked about a structure to avoid them.2 At the end, we shared a few success stories.3 Esther said she was pleased with the raw footage, and I’m interested to see what the final results looks like after editing.

After lunch, I had two sessions with two of Esther’s co-authors. The first was “Trust, Authenticity, and Forgiveness” with Diana Larsen. Diana focused on trust as the key differentiator between teams and workgroups, on why trust was essential for high-performing teams, and on what we can do to build (and rebuild) trust in the workplace.4 The second was “Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership” with Johanna Rothman.5 Johanna asked the question, what do Agile managers do, given that most managers’ traditional functions should be subsumed by Agile teams. In it’s simplest form, the answer is “act strategically, rather than tactically.” Managers should set strategy by managing the project portfolio, remove organizational obstacles, foster trusting relationship, lead hiring decisions, and build the capacity of the organization.

That both of these two sessions talked about trust as an essential component of Agile teams, and that both presented the same four-step framework6 for offering feedback surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. When we talk about valuing people over processes, we’re inherently acknowledging the need for trust. People build software, and we need to treat them like people, not processes.

1 Open Jams are self-organizing events that occur semi-spontaneously during the conference. They had four spaces set aside for these, and they were organized using a whiteboard and Post-Its, plus a wiki and Twitter.

2 This is the structure Esther and Diana Larsen present in Agile Retrospectives, which we’ve been using for several iterations now and which has given us great results.

3 As well as a few of what might be called “opportunities for learning.”

4 Her working definition of trust came from Roy Lewicki: “An individual’s belief in and willingness to act on the basis of the words, actions, and decisions of another.”

5 Who wrote Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management with Esther.

6 Create an opening – describe the behavior – state the impact – make a request. I’ve seen this somewhere before, but I don’t remember where.

Agile 2010 started today, and I’m already glad I decided to come (and that I convinced people to send me). I picked up my badge and hit breakfast, where I discovered the first of several differences between this and GenCon. Normally, when I see “fruit” on a breakfast buffet, it’s two or three kinds of melon. That’s fine, but I really don’t like melon.1 Here, however, there were strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, in addition to the melon. Considering my normal breakfast at home is berries and yogurt, I was pleased.2

After breakfast, my first session was Janet Gregory’s “The Dance of the Agile Tester: An Iteration-Length Performance.” I have Janet’s book, Agile Testing,3 but I haven’t been able to do more than skim it, so I was curious to get an overview of testing in an Agile context. The session didn’t disappoint, despite be interrupted by a fire alarm. Among my key takeaways:

• Continuous Integration means that a stable, up-to-date build can be pulled for testing at any time.
• It is useful to differentiate types of tests along two axes: tests that support the team vs. those that critique the product, and tests that are business facing vs. those that are technology facing.4
• In Agile, a requirement is a story + an example + a conversation.
• Don’t leave iteration planning without your acceptance tests defined, at least at a high level. Acceptance tests are about intent, so it is vital to develop a shared understanding of the problem.
• Automating tests is what makes time for exploratory testing.

A focus on testing and integration carried over into my afternoon session, “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble and Martin Fowler. This presentation was all about “taking code that works when you hit F5 and making sure it works for the customer.” Their contention is that cycle time5 is probably the most valuable measure of whether you’re doing Agile well. One cause of long cycle times is that the “last mile” of delivering something that works in a production environment is painful. We’ve gotten good at setting up continuous integration systems that verify our code works in a development environment, but that doesn’t always tell us if it will work for our customers. There are usually two forces at play here: poor collaboration between development and operations, which is often caused by organizational structure, and lots of manual work to deploy to a production environment, caused by a lack of knowledge and tools. While Jez talked a little about the former near the end of the presentation, most of the session focused on the latter.

So what is the ideal that we’re trying to reach?

• Getting software production-ready is not a phase; it happens continuously.
• Deployments are reliable and easy to roll back in a rare case something goes wrong.
• Everyone can self-service; there’s no additional overhead when someone needs a build.
• Releases happen according to the needs of the business, not the needs of development.

How do we get there? We need fast, automated feedback on production readiness every time there is a change to code, to infrastructure, or to configuration. When we have small deltas, finding and fixing problems is easier. Getting this feedback requires that we have excellent automated testing at all levels, that we have comprehensive configuration management, and that we have true continuous integration. Martin proposed an intriguing criterion for when your tests are good enough: You should have confidence that if someone had access to your source code and made a change, if all your tests ran green it would okay to ship.6

They talked a bit about specific techniques for building, testing, and deployment, but for me the most interesting other topic they covered was continuous integration. Specifically, Martin wanted to make clear what felt continuous integration really is. For him, it means:

• Every build is repeatable
• Build means test too
• A commit is not considered successful until the mainline goes green
• Everyone commits to the mainline every day
• Feature branches are incompatible with continuous integration.7

All in all, it was great day of sessions. I stayed at the architecture/design level of technical topics, which is about where I wanted to be. I was sorry I missed Matt Smith’s session on improv, but I got a lot value of what I attended. And to think I’ve got three and a half more days to go.

1 I feel this reflects poorly on my character.

2 They had yogurt too, but enough about breakfast.

3 Co-authored with Lisa Crispin, whom I noticed appeared at one point.

4 This is Brian Marick’s 4 Quadrants of Testing

5 Measured in Concept-to-Cash terms: From the point at which you have an idea of something you could sell, how long does it take for you to have delivered it and gotten paid?

6 Because this is what development does, after all.

7 Particularly if you have more than one branch at a time.

I’m in Orlando now, have traveled far and slept little since I wrote last.

As planned, I met up with Will Hindmarch, Ryan Macklin, and Wil Wheaton last night to game. Wil had asked to play A Penny For My Thoughts, but Will and I had another plan. As were sitting down, I asked, “What would you think about trying Fiasco instead?” The look on Wil’s face led to my immediate followup, “Right, we’re playing Fiasco.” Apparently he’d been wanting to play it for a while.1

We picked out Chris Bennett’s Los Angeles 1936 playset, which had finished second in the voting to Vegas on Thursday. We immediately got the right vibe, setting up a corrupt liquor licensing commissioner (Ryan), his good girl secretary (Wil) who was stuck in a frozen marriage to a nightclub owner (Will), and the burlesque dancer the club was named after (me). What was amazing to me was how understated the whole thing was. In contrast to the gonzo of the Vegas game, we played this one relatively straight. Yes, things still went horribly awry, but in a human frailty sort of way. We also managed to tell a great film noir story without telling a hard-boiled detective story.2

The only downside of the game was that it went much longer than we’d planned on, so I had to bail on my dinner plans with my friends Jeff and Mari at St. Elmo’s.3 Fortunately they had a good time together, helped by a shared love of martinis, and we met up afterward to hang out, eventually joining the our usual crowd and migrating from bar to bar as they closed. I was loathe to go to bed, knowing it was my last night at GenCon, but when 6 AM finally rolled around I said my final goodnights and turned in.

I somehow made it to convention hall before noon today4 and made my last few passes by booths. We had a great signing event for The Bones, which made me realize just how many cool people were involved with that book and how happy I am to have been a part of it. Then it was off to the airport and on to the next stop on my whirlwind tour. The trip to Orlando was relatively uneventful, though I did manage to read a good chunk of Robin Laws’ Hamlet’s Hit Points on the plane.5

So goodbye, GenCon, for another year. You’re always too short, always too far away, always too big to throw my arms around. There were old friends I missed, new friends I met, and people who get to spend too little time with. We should do this again sometime.

1 Yes, it’s a little strange to push someone else’s game instead of my own, but I’ve played Penny with Wil before. Plus, Fiasco is awesome.

2 Though Wil and I did get to help out Ryan, who was struggling a little bit in a solo scene we’d set him up in, by playing two guys who came in through the door with guns.

3 Was a double wound, as I didn’t get to have dinner with them and I missed out on good Midwestern beef.

4 For the first time this year.

5 Considering it contains a beat breakdown of Casablanca, my favorite movie ever, I’m predisposed to like it.



I’m starting to get into a rhythm here at GenCon, which is a sure sign that it’s going to end soon. As much as I hate leaving on Sunday, I have to do it this year.1 And perhaps I should talk about what happened today instead of focusing on my imminent departure.

Once again I availed myself of the opportunity to sleep in and stay well-rested. This time, instead of grabbing lunch before heading to the convention hall, I went straight there and ended up, as I usually do, at the IPR booth. For the third year in a row, lunch serendipity occurred. This is a phenomenon where you run into someone with whom you have not been able to spend much time with, who then happens to mention in your brief conversation that he or she hasn’t eaten lunch yet. You say that you haven’t either, and spontaneously you decide to get food together, thus allowing you to spend more time with each other.2 Last year, this happening to me with Mike Mearls; the year before it was with Judd Karlman. This year, I was fortunate enough run into a hungry Daniel Solis at the right time. Dan actually seized the initiative; it turned out he really wanted to talk to me, and he ended up buying me lunch in return for advice on game design.

That Daniel Solis wanted my perspective on game design was a little boggling to me at first, but it started to make sense as we talked. We’d each published our first game in the last year, both of them significantly outside the mainstream design ethos of the RPG hobby, and we have similar concerns about the explication of rules and procedures in book form. We ended up having a great discussion about Daniel’s game in development, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, and I think both of us learned a lot from it. There was lots of scribbling on napkins, long pauses to think punctuated by excited verbal exchanges, and generally a sense that the things he was worried about were issues of presentation rather than design. It was cool to discover that I did have something to say, and I’m glad I was able to give Dan something that will (hopefully) help Do be a better book.

That was pretty much the highlight of the day, though the day isn’t over yet. Tonight is the meeting of the Wil(l)s. Apparently Wil Wheaton told Will Hindmarch that he wanted to play A Penny For My Thoughts with him. Will Hindmarch then asked me if I could bring my materials and join in.3 Ryan Macklin then caught wind of this and demanded the fourth spot. So now I’m grabbing my stuff and heading out to meet up with the three of them to play my game. Seems like a good way to start my last night at GenCon.

1 I usually stay until Monday and meet up with my parents, who drive over from Iowa, but because I’ve got the Agile 2010 Conference starting Monday morning, I have to leave early.

2 These moments, by the way, are one of the biggest reasons I love GenCon.

3 He caught me just as I was packing on Tuesday night, so I was able to grab my demo kit before I left home.