Game Designer Tales from the LA Fire Evacuation, 1 Year Later: Hostage Negotiation

This time last year I was using hostage negotiation techniques on myself to feel seen.

Maybe the people with the best luck… were those who didn’t have to evacuate at all -but among those who evacuated early 2025, we were lucky, our house is still standing, and we had insurance that covered the 10 weeks that we couldn’t go home. This is a series looking back on what I managed to learn during that time, and how it relates to the video games that are my life’s work.

To keep a D&D group together, I used FBI hostage negotiator techniques - not during the evacuation - back in 2018.

“Seems like you’ve got a reason for saying that.”

That’s one of the techniques that Chris Voss of the FBI would use to keep a hostage-taker talking. The negotiator wants them to feel heard, so he thoughtfully prompts them to explain their worldview to him. The more he seems to “get” them, to validate that he understands how they feel and why they were motivated to do this, the more they are willing to hear him out.

You shouldn’t need hostage negotiation tactics to keep D&D chums from quarreling.

We ought to live in a world where emotional literacy is as ubiquitous as literacy.

Instead, since we don’t get to pick the world we live in, it can be helpful to know how to back out of a tough and sharp-edged conflict.

(A side note: that D&D group eventually erupted because hostage negotiation is only good for a single problem - if I’d known the divorce research of the Gottman Institute, the D&D members could have all talked and repaired our quarrels and used D&D as a launching pad to get to know one another. I learned of the Gottmans’ work in 2024. I ran out of steam and threw a tantrum and erupted the D&D group in 2022. Oops. Part of the reason I am adamant about getting Gottman principles into games is because I was actively seeking ways to help keep my relationships in working order, but the training I needed was too buried in a sea of noisy noise that is our modern media landscape. -Hopefully if marriage counseling research comes wrapped in the clothes of video games, more people will catch onto the ideas in time to save their own friend groups.)

A year ago today, I wrote in my game design journal that if I wanted to, I could use, “Seems like you’ve got a reason for saying that,” on myself, when I’m raging against my own mistakes.

I’d packed wrong when we evacuated.

And I was not being kind to myself about it.

In the year since, there have been articles and testimonials from people who evacuated who have shared the sentiment, “If I’d known we weren’t coming back right away, I would have packed differently.” -So it wasn’t just me who was lamenting the choices I’d made about what to flee with.

But two days after the evacuation, I was trying to use hostage-negotiation techniques on myself, to keep myself calm, to stop my tirade against myself, to change my momentum and reflect on how I got there, instead of chastising myself for my situation.

Hopefully, the games I’m making will help spread the word, of all the tools and techniques we have, as a planet, for hating-ourselves less.