In this paper, I attempt to broaden the focus of gaming experiences analyzed in Well-Played as well as start us on the path of developing understandings of the meaning of narrative, collaborative games. Toward
this end, I have focused on a story-based, tabletop role-playing game: Fiasco, created by game designer Jason Morningstar (Morningstar, 2009). Fiasco provides us with a number of interesting and unique features that make it worth investigating in this context, and illustrates a number of potential mechanics that provide provocative instigations to the game-based learning community. In particular, I focus on the game as system in which a collaborative narrative is created by its players, as well as one in which failure is featured — not just as an acceptable outcome, but as the ideal one. As Wil Wheaton’s quote from The Fiasco Companion (Morningstar & Segedy, 2011) indicates, the fun of “everything going wrong” is a central component of this game. I argue that Fiasco provides a distinct contrast to the forms of play that often dominate mastery-based forms of game-based learning, and implicit conceptions of failure that have been argued as being central to understanding games (Juul, 2013).
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