Like mainstream role-playing games, many indie RPGs situate themselves in relation to familiar genres and settings from other cultural forms. A handful of these games go one step further, however, simulating not only the kinds of stories told in other media, but also the narrative form of those stories. Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco (2009) is one RPG that succeeds at this approach. The games imulates the kind of blackly comic, often excessively violent caper-gone wrong films–or what J.P. Telotts calls “fatal capers”–associated especially with the Coen brothers. Fiasco can be seen as a sort of colloquial, playable form of film criticism: the game must establish certain theoretical premises about caper-gone-wrong films and how they work in order to simulate the sub-genre in terms of a system of game rules. Because it produces a simulation, this game system is selective and simplified. Nevertheless, simulations are value-laden and never neutral, always highlighting and de-emphasizing aspects of the source system. To say that Fiasco simulates the Coenian caper film means that the game presents a specific conception or interpretation of the forms and conventions of the films that inspired it.
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