Introduction: Turning Outages into a Traveling Fair

Most organizations treat incident response practice as a closed‑door activity: a tabletop exercise in a conference room, a private game day in a staging environment, or a simulated outage run by a small core team. Useful, yes—but not exactly engaging, inclusive, or memorable.

Now imagine something different: a traveling analog reliability fair, set up like an arcade line at a conference, meetup, or internal tech summit. Everything is paper‑based and tactile. Participants move between stations—like carnival booths—each one simulating a different aspect of an incident in an industrial control system (ICS) or complex production environment. They pick roles, roll dice, draw event cards, and make decisions that shape the fate of a fictional but plausible system.

This is the idea behind the Paper Reliability Arcade Line: a portable, low‑tech, high‑interaction format for practicing incidents in public.

In this post, we’ll explore how to design such a fair using:

• ICS‑style tabletop exercises (TTX) as the foundation
• Clearly defined incident‑response competencies
• Structured injects to create evolving scenarios
• Proven simulation frameworks like the WHO Simulation Exercise Manual and the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP)

The goal: turn serious reliability work into serious play, without sacrificing rigor.

Why Tabletop Exercises Are Perfect for a Traveling Fair

Tabletop exercises are already the backbone of ICS incident‑response practice. They:

• Provide a safe, low‑risk environment to experiment with bad days
• Focus on decision‑making and communication, not tooling
• Work well with fictional but realistic scenarios

That makes them naturally suited to a public, analog format.

In ICS contexts, TTX often simulate situations like:

• Anomalous readings from sensors
• Unexplained equipment shutdowns
• Unusual network traffic or PLC behavior
• Conflicting reports from remote operators

Translating that into the Paper Reliability Arcade, you create station‑based TTX, each one focusing on a slice of the incident lifecycle. Instead of sitting in one room for two hours, participants:

• Rotate through multiple short, focused exercises
• Try different roles and responsibilities
• See how early decisions echo into later stages of the scenario

The low‑tech nature—just paper, pens, tokens, maybe a timer—also makes it:

• Easy to ship and set up in different venues
• Accessible to people who aren’t deep into the tooling
• Intrinsically “public”—people can see the activity and walk up to join

Designing a Fictional System People Can “Take Charge” Of

To make the arcade compelling, participants must feel like they’re responsible for a real system with real stakes, even if it’s fictional.

Step 1: Define the System

Create a simple but coherent ICS‑like environment, for example:

• A water treatment plant serving a medium‑sized city
• A wind farm connected to a regional grid
• A cold‑chain warehouse monitoring temperature for vaccines

Document this system using:

• A high‑level architecture diagram (printed poster)
• A 1–2 page “system briefing” for participants
• A catalog of DevOps/SRE decisions they can make: logging strategy, redundancy choices, deployment practices, alerting thresholds, etc.

Step 2: Embed Reliability Trade‑Offs

Participants should have to choose DevOps/SRE practices and architectural patterns that affect:

• Reliability (uptime, resilience)
• Risk (impact, blast radius, safety)
• Observability (how well they can see what’s going wrong)
• Response capacity (who can act, how quickly)

Examples of trade‑off cards they might pick:

• “Centralized monitoring stack with detailed dashboards, but only one shared on‑call engineer.”
• “Redundant controllers, but minimal logging for performance reasons.”
• “Weekly change freeze, but emergency hotfix pipeline is lightly tested.”

These choices are made at an early station and then referenced by facilitators at later stations when injects hit. The message is clear: architecture and process decisions shape your bad day before it begins.

From Training to Fair: Turning Practice into Play

The “arcade line” concept borrows heavily from interactive fairs and public demonstrations. To make incident practice feel like a fair:

1. Break the Experience into Stations

Each station is a short (10–20 minute) exercise focused on a key incident competency. For example:

1. Station A: Detection & Notification

   • Goal: Recognize that something is wrong and ensure the right people know.
   • Activity: Participants review printed logs, alerts, and operator reports; decide whether to escalate and how.

2. Station B: Triage & Prioritization

   • Goal: Decide what matters most under uncertainty.
   • Activity: Sort and label issue cards by severity, safety risk, and business impact.

3. Station C: Incident Command & Coordination

   • Goal: Establish roles, communication channels, and a shared picture.
   • Activity: Assign Incident Commander, Operations, Communications; run a short “status briefing” round.

4. Station D: Surge Capacity & Resource Management

   • Goal: Decide when and how to scale your response.
   • Activity: Limited resource tokens (people, tools, time) must be allocated to competing tasks (mitigation, forensics, stakeholder comms).

5. Station E: Recovery & Demobilization

   • Goal: Restore service, document outcomes, and stand down safely.
   • Activity: Choose restoration steps from a menu, manage rollback risks, and define “incident closed” criteria.

2. Make It Visually and Tactilely Fun

• Incident cards look like trading cards with icons and brief descriptions.
• Timers and “pressure meters” make urgency visible.
• Role lanyards or stickers (“Incident Commander”, “Comms Lead”, “Ops Specialist”) help clarify who does what.
• Score sheets track not just success/failure, but collaboration, clarity, and learning moments.

The aesthetics should feel more like a board game than a compliance drill, while still representing real stakes and consequences.

Building Around Clearly Defined Competencies

If you want this to be more than a fun distraction, you need to anchor the design in explicit competencies. The arcade should exercise skills such as:

• Incident command: role clarity, decision authority, communication cadence
• Detection and notification: recognizing signals, avoiding alert fatigue, routing alerts to the right people
• Triage and prioritization: balancing safety, customer impact, and technical risk
• Surge capacity: knowing when to call for help, how to onboard extra responders
• Recovery and demobilization: structured rollback, verification, post‑incident cleanup

Before building any station, write down:

“After this station, participants should be better at _______.”

Then design the station’s rules, materials, and injects to explicitly surface that skill.

This competency‑first design also makes the arcade more evaluatable: you can observe how different teams perform on the same station and learn where your real‑world preparedness is strong—or fragile.

Using Structured Injects to Simulate Real Incident Flow

Real incidents rarely present all the information at once. Situations evolve, new data appears, and earlier assumptions get overturned. To mirror this, you use injects—scripted events introduced over time.

In the arcade format, injects can be:

• Cards handed out at specific time intervals
• Envelopes opened when certain decisions are made
• Announcements from facilitators (“New info just came in from the field…”)

Examples:

• Early inject (detection): “SCADA dashboard shows intermittent packet loss to remote site; no alerts firing yet.”
• Mid‑incident inject (triage): “Field operator reports strange odor at Pump Station 3; safety risk unclear.”
• Late inject (recovery): “Emergency patch causes unexpected restart of backup controller.”

Injects are the backbone of pacing and tension. They:

• Force participants to update mental models under pressure
• Reveal how earlier architectural choices shape what’s visible now
• Let you simulate escalations: safety concerns, media attention, regulatory oversight

Because everything is scripted and timed, the arcade remains repeatable: different groups can run through the same scenario and be compared.

Grounding the Arcade in Established Frameworks

To keep the fair fun and rigorous, borrow structure from established simulation frameworks:

• The WHO Simulation Exercise Manual outlines how to design, run, and evaluate simulation exercises in public health emergencies. Key concepts you can reuse:

  • Clear objectives linked to competencies
  • Realistic but manageable scenarios
  • Defined roles for facilitators, observers, and players

• The Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) provides templates for:

  • Scenario development and inject planning
  • After‑action reviews
  • Improvement plans

Even though you’re building a playful arcade, you can:

• Use HSEEP‑style templates to script injects and time flows
• Conduct short, focused after‑action huddles after each station
• Capture observations systematically (e.g., simple observer checklists)

This makes the Paper Reliability Arcade Line not just a novelty, but a portable serious‑games platform for real capability building.

Why Make It Public and Collaborative?

Running these simulations in public spaces—conferences, all‑hands meetings, shared office areas—has powerful side‑effects:

• Shared mental models: Cross‑functional participants (SREs, product managers, operators, safety officers, comms staff) see the same incident unfold from different angles.
• Improved communication: Practicing structured handoffs, briefings, and status updates in a low‑stakes environment builds habits that carry over to real incidents.
• Accessibility: People who wouldn’t sign up for a 3‑hour TTX may happily join a 15‑minute station.
• Cultural signaling: Making incident‑response training visible shows that reliability and safety are everyone’s concern, not just the on‑call team’s.

Public simulations decrease the mystery around outages. Instead of “the SREs disappear into a war room,” everyone gets a sense of what coordinated response looks like and why it’s hard.

Conclusion: Build Your Own Reliability Arcade

The Paper Reliability Arcade Line is more than a quirky idea—it’s a way to:

• Bring ICS‑style tabletop rigor into an accessible, analog, traveling format
• Let participants take charge of a fictional system and see how their architectural and process choices play out under stress
• Practice core incident competencies—command, detection, triage, surge, recovery—through short, focused stations
• Use structured injects to simulate the unfolding nature of real incidents
• Anchor everything in established simulation frameworks so learning is deliberate and measurable

If you’re responsible for reliability, SRE education, or ICS incident preparedness, consider building your own paper arcade:

1. Define a fictional but realistic system.
2. Choose a handful of key competencies.
3. Design station‑based TTX around them.
4. Script injects that evolve over time.
5. Take it on the road—inside your organization, to conferences, or to partner sites.

Done well, you’ll turn incident practice from an occasional obligation into a shared, repeatable, and surprisingly fun public ritual—one that leaves your teams more prepared for the next real outage.