Gaming and Change Control, I warned you
I’m sitting in the service room at my car dealer getting a tune-up and a tire repaired. How exciting. They don’t even have wireless, what sort of two-bit operation doesn’t have wireless? Okay that’s a silly question as many places don’t, nor do I tend to use it when I’m out, but given that car dealers have their clientele rather captured it would be nice if there was wireless. Course they’d probably be like most café’s and make me pay for it (I’m rather against that idea, free wireless for all!)

Since neelk asked, and since I don’t feel like doing real work (I took a vacation day to do this why should I work?), I will think about a few of my ideas on change control.


There are five critical parts of pharmaceutical change control: Training, Communication, Early and continual regulatory involvement, Documentation, and Cooperation. Lets cover each of them as I see them applying to gaming.

Training: Amazingly enough I find this to be one of the areas that most non-D20 gamers ignore to their own detriment. One of the strengths of D20 is that most everyone understands the rules, understands the core-story of the game, and has bought into them. I’ve been in, and participated in, too many games where everyone doesn’t understand the system. And by system I mean it in the larger context. I’m probably bad about this as there have been several games I’ve been in that I’ve never learned the rules for and my game play suffers. If I’m going to do diligence to jeffwik’s new game, worldonfire, I really should learn the rules. It goes without saying that this ‘training’ on the game needs to be equally available to all, see communication below.

Communication: It’s just not enough to express what is going to happen in a game, its important to express the why and the how. Good two-way communication amongst a group is crucial. Communication is the key to success of a game, as sharing information helps everyone understand the purpose of the game and creates a feedback loop amongst the group to ensure future fun is had by all. I’m amazed how many groups have poor communication.

Regulatory: Okay now you are thinking Jere has lost me, there’s no outside agency peering into our games. To which I answer thank goodness. But there should be internal regulation so that everyone is happy and functioning on the same scale. Part of this falls into communication above, but there is also a big part of updating and make sure the documentation below is relevant, especially the social contract.

Documentation: There are all kinds of documentation that’s important to a game. There is the mechanics, and I’m amazed how many times I’ve run across house rules and interpretations (and every game has interpretations of the rules) that are undocumented. I think the adage “If its not written down it doesn’t exist” is a good one to take to heart. There is setting material which while I’m a big fan I don’t think is crucial. There’s an account of what took place in a given session, which is more important than you might think as I’ve found that any two people will have differing views on a session (its natural given the nature of what we do) and it’s crucial to have a shared understanding as a baseline from which interpretation can build off. And then there’s the social contract. The crucial thing to remember about documentation is that it needs to be a living, changing beast.

Cooperation: I’ll be frank I don’t understand antagonistic styles of gaming and I’m often accused of being a big curmudgeon who likes to argue. For me gaming thrives in a cooperative atmosphere. It’s essential to build the tools to foster that cooperation, which includes social contract.

Okay so there are some thoughts on theory. Next time some actual tools that I think can be borrowed from change control management best practices.