War, Peace, and Betrayal (Basking Ridge Week 8)

Most classes at International Ivy are like workshops: campers learn a skill-set from their teachers and put it to use via their own individual creative projects. Others are more like team sports, where students cooperate to complete one big project or to play together in virtual worlds. But there is one course that is almost completely camper-driven, a complex simulation of global politics involving crises, intrigue, alliances, and betrayals. Welcome to War and Peace Games.

At the beginning of the week — after learning a bit about incentives, strategic thinking, and other staples of game theory — campers are divided into four fictional nations, each with their own resources, goals, and histories. Here at Basking Ridge, each team made their own unique flag to represent themselves and jumped immediately into tense negotiations. Alliances were formed, treaties signed, and trades initiated under the watchful eye of our facilitator who wrote it all down (while throwing a few random events in to boot!)

The excitement was so palpable among the players that strategy spilled out into break time, inspiring students from other classes to eventually join in on the fun. Soon the class was packed with politickers jockeying for the top position on the world stage. After a couple of wars and a few sweeping revolutions (resetting the state of the board and shuffling the teams), the students began to grasp the struggles of nationhood firsthand.

To guide them in their strategizing, our site director would periodically appear to break down core concepts of game theory. Students tried out the prisoner’s dilemma using cards and Monopoly money as payoff, mastered a deceptively simple math game using their knowledge of the rollback equilibrium, and even put their strategic thinking to the test in a bluffing card game (another simulation that quickly took on a life of its own outside of class!)

While the outcome of the world still remains to be seen, there seems to be hope on the horizon: campers have recently banded together and signed a global armistice in order to turn their attention to climate issues that are ravaging their fictional world through the facilitator’s events. Time will tell, of course, if this is indeed an optimal strategy…