The Athens Game was both engaging and very, very, frustrating. It served as an affective teaching tool, but I wince at the voluminous background information required for one to really manipulate the game’s logistics to a singularly advantageous outcome.
The competition, to me, hit high and low points intermittently. The first session was filled with circular arguments and much squabbling between factions. It seemed ironical to me that it was over the “Reconciliation Agreement,” as little to nothing was ever reconciled and even less agreed upon. The game was at its best to me whenever the student’s modern mind finally met in a confluence with the mind and personality of his or her historical role. Much fun in the game was derived from how each student decoded their role from the information given them in the packet. While the game did convey a sense of verisimilitude, I would have liked to see a little more complexity in the motivations of these historical “characters.”
I was fortunate to be given a more complex (or, in the least, more shapeable) set of directives. I chose to play my role in a way that subdued aspects of the character that would surely have resulted with my name being written on the ostrakon in a single session. A diplomatic and divertive approach to the character, one who despises political discourse and virtually everyone in the game, seemed the only appropriate move I could make without being arrested or murdered. That I died after defending the city against those effeminate, fluting Thebans was a tragedy in itself. My motives were not so pure, however, and had the dice rolled differently there would have been enough double-crossing to shadow the entire polis with a khīazein.
Over all, I found the intrigue that went on outside of class to be hilariously riveting. The game is set up so that no one character should really trust another, yet due to the nature of having diametrically opposed goals between factions, the floor split into a virtual two-dimensional partisan argument. The Socratics and the Indeterminates were the “wild cards,” so to speak, but there weren’t enough players in general to make the game unpredictable. I sided with the Democratic factions because they had a more unified voting effort than the Oligarchs and Socratics, and because they were willing to acknowledge my prominence in the Athenian society. The Oligarchs were historically more aligned with my character, and I’m surprised that I wasn’t approached by them earlier with a strategy for identifying and accomplishing mutual objectives.
I would like to note that the one flaw in the game was that the Socratics were disarmed from the beginning. I thought many of their speeches were very good, especially considering the vast nature of Plato’s argument in The Republic, but it was with only a perfunctory regard that my character heard them. I would say this inability to acknowledge good ideas not aligned with a player’s own personal agenda was probably a problem for everyone (except the Middling Farmer!).
My greatest peeve in the game was that most speeches sounded like they were obligatory and mechanical regurgitations of the objective packets—I would have like to see more scheming, betrayal, or discord within factions. That said, this was a most interesting and interactive history lesson. It makes you want to show off your knowledge at the next Assembly meeting, or catch a player off guard by revealing an otherwise trivial piece of history that could change the game. I am really looking forward to the China Game (not the movie, but that was good too).