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.
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