The Mayday Experiment: How Shady Are You?

So a few weeks ago in Mr. Lindsey's AP English class, we participated in another social experiment disguised as a game. One game of many that I'm sure that Mr. Lindsey laughs at maniacally yet fondly over after the fact. I know his end game. In class we have been reading and studying Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaids Tale. Set in a fundamentalist Christian dystopian dictatorship, the narrative follows a fertility concubine named Offred's internal struggle with the newly enforced oppression of women. As she conditioned to forget the life she once knew, Offred slowly begins to question the memories and morals that connect her to her past. The game didn’t have too much to do with these themes, but its good to know. The game we played followed the format of the classic parlor game mafia. Three roles were distributed anonymously: eyes, rebels, and handmaids. The rebel’s goal was to liberate the handmaids, and the eye’s to find and kill the rebels with the handmaids in the midst. The gameplay was divided into two phases, night and day. During the day all the players would mingle under the guise of innocence to discuss the events of the previous evening and catch up on each other’s lives. At night was when all the action went down. The lights would go out and everyone would put their head down on the table. During this time, the rebels, then the eyes would be prompted to liberate or execute someone, respectively. If either picked someone not their intended target, they and potentially their target would be sent out the game. The last feature was the particicution. Once a game, during the day, a vote was made on someone to be killed and thereby kicked out. This gave the helpless a chance at power.

            I was an eye. My job was to sniff out the rebels without killing of the precious womb carriers in the process. It is a dangerous job, to hunt down the iconoclasts without being particicutued.  To start off I had two partners in justice, who sadly were not meant to be covert agents for very long. Our strategy was to play it safe. So, after losing a game of rock, paper, scissors, and waiting the maximum time between assassinations, our first colleague selected a person we had all deemed sketchy from our daytime interactions. She was a handmaid. Turns out that the higher ups didn’t appreciate the wasted ovaries and that was the last we saw of either of them. My other partner, apparently convinced of the ineffectiveness of caution, started using a ballsier approach. She attempted to bull through anyone’s suspicions with bald-faced honesty. She wasn’t that great at it though and was the sole victim of particicution with some unfortunately timed help from myself. Now, as the sole eye, I was able enact the strategy I had tried to use from the beginning; a cautious predatory stalking. Initially, I waited the maximum amount of turns before striking with guarded observation during the daytime. As the ratio of rebels to handmaids rose, I became more brazen, going 4/4 in the last four rounds of the game. However by that point my strategy double-edge became apparent as it allowed all the handmaids to be liberated ending the game with a rebel victory.

            All in all it was a fun game of deceit and treachery where I got to see people’s good and bad acting and was able to sneak around like a spy. It was fun to be the bad guy and get so many people out, with sole control over my own fate, so I’ll chalk it up to a victory anyway.

Serpent Angel, Lion Lamb: It Turns Out People Are Kind of Complicated After All

Several weeks ago in our AP English class we participated in an activity that had to do with us gauging our own personalities on a chart. Initially I was quite skeptical regarding its effectiveness. It seemed to me that our own judgment on the matter would be quite flawed. Human beings are clouded mirrors. They seldom see themselves for what they truly are. Beyond the subconscious editing that goes on, social pressure does a lot to suppress honesty that we were striving for. In a situation where the opinions of others came into the equation, posturing would surely follow, I thought. And the facades people create seldom reflect their true intentions. But I was intrigued none the less because regardless some interesting traits would come to light, and often times the realist truths are found between the lines and in the negative space. First we answered questions on our own personal limits and the boundary lines of our morality, having to do with where our own lines in the sand were on deception, murder, and the worst thing we could do to another human being. It was a good first step towards introspection, but also fairly hypothetical. Afterwards we were told to place ourselves somewhere on an X Y chart. Each axis represented a gradient of a trait; serpent to angel was the level at which someone engaged in deception or honesty and lion to lamb based on their capacity for violence. Which quadrant you placed yourself in would signify your proclivity towards two of those traits.  And this is where the conflict started.

                Initially I placed myself in the angel-lion quadrant, leaning fairly heavily towards a capacity for violence and a thirst for the truth. But here is where the real thinking set in. My ability for violence was firmly rooted in experience and of that I was sure, however of my honesty I was not so sure. I chose angel because of my intellectual desire for knowledge and the exposition of truth. In a conscious sense I always strive for reality, equality, and openness on a meaningful scale. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that even if you are internally guided by the truth, you don’t necessarily practice it. Even the best intentions can be darkened by the shadows. I came to grip with that in my day to day life, more often than not I practice some form of deception. Not in a malicious manner, but in the sense that I understand situations in a way that allows me to gently pilot them to my own goals, or the easiest resolution possible. Being an introvert, there is a secret pleasure from keeping your cards to your chest and watching from sheltered safety as the iridescent threads you tugged guide situations to a close in the manner you were hoping for. And that’s just my personality. I don’t exploit it for vitriolic reasons, but that’s just the way I am. And in making this revelation I came to a second one. I was able to honestly acknowledge my darker manipulative side and understand it within the context of my personality as a whole. Maybe that honesty means something too. All in all I probably cannot place myself in a honest or dishonest bracket, but I did learn some stuff from this experiment and I definitely think it was worthwhile. But it turns out people are kinda complicated after all.