This section goes in-depth with reasoning behind the Deployments and Disasters' rules. It’s intended for disaster masters, so if you are interesting in hosting a session yourself feel free to explore this.
Additionally, reading on the game’s design can help you understand ways in which the game can help your company. Because of that this section can be interesting to you if you are considering introducing something like this to your organization.
Key goals There are 3 key design goals that influence all decisions in Deployments and Disasters design. Those are: Game should be scalable. Game should teach players to cooperate. Game should inspire players to improve. There are individual sections dedicated to each of the goals. There you can find a more detailed explanation of each goal and motivation behind it. Impact of goals Some sections of rules, provided scenarios or other pieces of content on this site will call back to a design goal they reinforce.
Motivation Deployments and Disasters is a tool for educating medium to large engineering teams about incident management techniques and procedures. Its usefulness grows with the size of the team. For example, in a 5 person team a new procedure will be communicated easily and all team members will be on board with it quickly. Contrast that with a 100+ people engineering division. At that scale communicating the existence, let alone the details of, a new procedure becomes challenging.
Motivation Incident management process involves people from various roles. Those may include developers, ops engineers, support personnel, dedicated site reliability engineers, database administrators, etc. In order for the incident to be resolved efficiently they may all need to work together. In addition to coming from different backgrounds and being used to working in different conditions those roles also have different goals. For example support staff may be trying to send some kind of notice to clients that are suffering degraded performance.
Motivation In order to facilitate the other two key goals of scaling and cooperation the Deployments and Disasters rules gamify the actual process of resolving the incident. This means that players don’t experience using the tools and performing the management actions directly. Rather they explain their actions and intent, throw dice and disaster master determines the outcome. Despite not featuring concrete tools directly, this format is a good way to promote certain tools.