At the high school where my wife teaches English, The Lord of the Flies is part of the 9th grade curriculum. In the interests of teaching 9th graders a few lessons about how societies are built–and how they can break down–my wife runs a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma of my own design. Here’s the basic run-down:
There are three students (or teams of students) on each ‘island’. There are three chores that have to be done for the wellbeing of the island. Each team is assigned two of the chores, sharing one chore with each of the other two teams. For each of 5 days, the teams will decide whether to do each of their chores, or whether to shirk on one or both of them.
Each team starts with 100 points. Scoring is as follow: If both teams share a chore, they each lose 3 points. If one team does a chore alone, they lose 8 points and the shirking team loses nothing. Finally, if both teams skip doing the chore, then ALL THREE TEAMS, even the team not involved in the chore, lose 10 points. The object is to have the most points at the end of the game; any team that dips below 0 points is dead (and if they die early enough, can’t participate in future rounds)
So far, the game has been a success. The kids have had fun, and we’ve seen islands where everyone had scores in the high 40’s and islands with only one survivor. They’ve also made some surprisingly insightful comments–even what the thing are jokes, like “We would have killed Jamie on the second day!”, helped the children understand how law enforcement and punishments help societies run.
After two years running of good times with this game, I thought I’d share it with the board. Feel free to steal it if you think it would work in your classes, and please offer any suggestions as we’re always looking to make the game better. Thanks!
Reye and Wife.
(Mods: this is discussing a game, so I put it in the Game Room. The game is for a literature class, however, so this thread could arguably be moved to Cafe Society; I’ll defer to your judgement.)
