On Friday, as a special "last class before test-prep" with my 8th graders, we played a game called Bohnanza. I had played this game before, but I had forgotten the rules. Fellow teacher Grace was kind enough to visit my class for 15 minutes, since she had some free time, and she explained the basic rules. Since I only have four students in the class, currently, I joined as a player, too.
The basic idea is to plant "bean cards" and after collecting a certain number, you can "harvest" them for coins. The winner has the most coins at the end. The main attraction to playing the game in an English class is that the game requires the players to aggressively negotiate the trading of beans. This can be fun if you place a requirement that they do this negotiating in English.
The game can last for a pretty long time, so it went on for a while. The kids were having fun with it, but they weren't really negotiating that much – they were just going with the luck of the draw on each of their turns. And I was winning. Maybe they had been a bit slow on "getting" the game.
So on each of my turns, I kept lowering the terms of offered trades, against my own interest, until I was just giving away bean cards to other players. One student asked me why I was doing that, and I said, well, I was winning anyway and they weren't negotiating much.
But then a strange thing happened. All of the students started just giving beans to each other, wherever they perceived a need. Soon everyone was maximizing their harvests. There was no negotiation going on, really, but there were a lot of cards being passed around: "Do you need this coffee bean? OK, here."
It was as if the capitalist model that serves as the game's fundamental presupposition had broken down, being replaced by some weird communitarian model.
I've seen this before with my Korean students, as when they start to keep their Alligator Bucks in a common pool where they make withdrawals based on need, but I'd never seen it quite so explicitly and in such contrast to the intended model as during this game.
It was quite interesting.
In the end, I still won, but I shared the victory with another (in a tie), and the other students had caught up.
[daily log: walking, 7km]