The Game
I played a game in my ninth grade geography class that I still think about sometimes to this day.
When we walked into our seventy-five-minute class, Ms. M told us pair up for an activity. There were between twenty and thirty of us in this class, and so we formed around a dozen groups. Each of the groups was given an envelope, and we were told that within the next half-hour, we had to follow the very simple instructions in the envelope, and each successful pair would obtain a one-percent grade bump to their final grade.
It was a very competitive and academically oriented class. We were only in the ninth grade, but we felt that our grades mattered a lot for some reason, so Ms. M knew she had our attention. There were no further instructions given. We waited until the wall clock struck the next five-minute mark, and we were off to the races.
Inside the envelope, there was a single sheet of paper with instructions printed on them. I don’t remember precisely what they read, but the below is an approximation:
“Please create the below with construction paper in the colours and dimensions as indicated”
· You and your partner’s names written in permanent marker on:
· A strip of yellow with a width of a centimeter and a side length of twenty centimeters, with one end glued on:
· A red circle with a radius of seven centimeters, circumscribed within:
· A blue square with a side length of ten centimeters
“Please find enclosed in the envelope your materials. You are only to use materials that are found within the provided envelopes, and feel free to help others. Good luck”
When my partner and I examined the contents of our envelope however, we found that it only contained a compass, a pencil, a gluestick, and two sheets of blue construction paper. Before we could tell Ms. M that there had been a mistake, we looked around and found a class full of similarly confused faces. Then the point of the exercise dawned on us. Not one team was given all the materials necessary to finish the little art project, and we were expected to trade with other groups.
It took a few more minutes for the other shoe to drop: there were at best enough sheets of construction paper for four to five groups to complete the project as instructed. The remainder of the half hour was pandemonium as everyone rushed around, trying to leverage the materials they had to obtain materials they didn’t. No one was naive enough to give away their materials for free however, and in the end, the only group that had finished the craft took resources from their friends who had given up.
When the exercise ended, Ms. M explained that the objective of the exercise was to introduce our new unit on the environment, and demonstrate the difference between renewable resources (scissors, ruler, compass, gluestick, marker) and non-renewable resources (construction paper). I was lost in my own head when she started the lesson. Ms. M didn’t read too much into what our failure to efficiently use the resources meant, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
If a classroom of friends couldn’t figure out what the best way to divide arts and craft supplies, what chance did the world have? I wasn’t traumatized by the exercise, but it was around this time that I started becoming cynical about politics. It definitely didn’t help that I started reading Ayn Rand the next year either. The strongest country should be able to have access to the resources as they willed, I decided: might was right.
Granted, this exercise was presented as a zero-sum game, and conflict was inevitable. If the whole class was asked to produce five pieces of collated construction paper, it would likely be done in less than ten minutes. But if the rewards cannot be evenly distributed among the collective, or at least benefit everyone, then this was bound to be the conclusion.
After that class, I’ve replicated the exercise a few times as a camp counselor, with similar results: groups would only ever be successful if another had given up. Sometimes I find myself thinking if the results would be different across age groups or across cultures, but I haven’t had the chance to experiment. If there was more at stake, there was more time, and there was a more fungible prize, participants might have decided to change tack, trading out of game resources for in-game ones, or agreed to share the prize.
Most things in the real world are structured this way. Everything is a tradeoff, nothing exists in a vacuum or bound by arbitrary rules. If two countries are skirmishing over territorial waters, one country could simply pay the other an agreeable some for multiyear rights. If two political parties are in a deadlock about an issue, a simple tit-for-tat exchange for another issue would resolve the impasse.
But there are seventeen wars happening in the world right now, according to Wikipedia, and many more minor disputes. Everyone thinks they’re ahead, and refuses to concede anything in negotiations. Plus, for them it could be the only thing that matters: when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. I’m not sure they take prisoners in nuclear wars.
I remember when I was younger, the idea of ‘world peace’ was very pervasive. I’m not that old, so this was very much past the anti-war, give peace a chance zeitgeist, but I remember people, whether real, fictional, or animated, asking and wishing for peace. Where did that go? I can’t remember the last time ‘world peace’ was discussed as a concept, much less an attainable goal. Along with the postponement of the end of history, the Western world has perhaps realized the naivety of their ideals and discovered problems in their own backyard.
So we return to to the zero-sum, winner take all game, a model for the real world. Am I too jaded now, or was I too innocent before? Surely, there is some degree of humanity and compassion in all decision making; I hope more stands in the way of America nuking the Middle East than Russia.
Regardless of how the world manages to avoid full-blown global war, the exercise I participated in during ninth grade returns to me. There only seem to be win-win solutions for these problems, but the reality is almost always winner take all. Whenever a conflict seems to be silly or an outrageous abuse of power, I always recall the simplicity and the stakes of the game Ms. M made us play. If a zero sum game resulted in no productive solution when the variables were construction paper and the prize was bonus marks, what hope does the world have?
