Level up your Incident Response with gameplay

Creating a sustainable on-call culture is critical to avoid engineer/SRE burnout. Companies like Google create a learning culture by running regular disaster role playing games. The RPG game created by SRE’s, often called “Wheel of Misfortune’’ or “Walk the plank”, is an exercise that allows junior SRE’s or on-call engineers to walk through an incident and their response to the incident in a safe environment with feedback and hopefully with some fun thrown in. I am going to go through the variation we use to up skill our on-call engineers we called “The Kobayashi Maru”.