The Road Game​

The Road Game

The Road Game is about competition and cooperation, teamwork and chaos, perception and misperception, communication and conflict resolution. It is a game about the many ways that people interact when they are members of teams and when they have a job to do. It is about learning how to stand back far enough to see ‘the big picture’ of human communications and interactions.

In The Road Game, four groups interact by drawing ‘roads’ from one area of a map to another. The groups are asked to choose leaders who will lead negotiations to build roads and resolve conflicts, first through bargaining or direct action and later through a judicial procedure. The game has analogies to the behavior of nations, and it can also illuminate group and individual functioning in a community.

Depending on how long you allow for the initial interactions The Road Game can take 60 to 90 minutes to play. The time allowed is divided more or less equally into

briefing – setting the scene and learning focus
the action – including a)initial road building and b) judicial review [if used],
debriefing and discussion. There is a strong contrast between the sometimes chaotic road-building negotiations and an orderly judicial process. The interactions throughout provide rich data for the debriefing which must close out the learning experience.

The Road Game is designed to be open ended and amenable to many interpretations, depending upon particular interests and needs. The emphasis and depth of analysis of the experience differs with participant maturity and staff confidence, but young children often achieve the same kinds of insights into the process as is made by university students and adult learners. The emotional impacts are also often similar.

People interested in international affairs see how the simulation generates important principles of intergroup behavior, in relation to war and peace or diplomacy. People interested in concepts of perception or projection of meaning observe relevant behaviours emerging. The question of whether humanity is competitive or cooperative can also be a key issue. In fact, all these elements are present in this simulation.

Games are ‘behavioral metaphors’ ( Duke 1974) because the meanings arrived at through action are conveyed indirectly, much like meanings carried by myths, rituals, and art. Analysis – conducted during the debriefing – of behaviours observed in the action phase helps understand the experience, but the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Being ‘in it together’ is an aspect of the greater whole. So it is vital to take the experience apart after the game, by conducting a careful debriefing to help everyone find out what the experience meant and brought to mind. Not every single point will be raised during a debriefing, do what you can and trust that time helps everyone explore other points.

People learn more when they are emotionally involved and enjoying themselves, so take notice of your own feelings, but keep them out of the students’ experience. This may be a new and different way for you to think about teaching and learning, and it may be difficult to switch to an approach that means you are not in charge for at least one third of the time. Your hesitation may be because many of your own experiences have been via traditional education focused on content This time, you aren’t responsible for content. Your job is to help the students put it into their own heads and understand the connections they are making between past and present experiences and expectations.

Participants

This game has been played with all ages. Participants are divided into in 4 teams of 6-8. In larger classes it may be better to have two sets of 4 teams, and have some volunteer observers.

Objectives

Participants will learn about such things as how to:

Analyze their own behavior in a group – in terms of cooperation and competition
Compare interactions among groups with interactions among nations in the world today
Discuss how to resolve conflict/encourage cooperation, in the simulation and the world
Consider how big challenges emerge can from within apparently simple issues.

Setting

A large open space: e.g. – a classroom with the desks pushed back

Materials Needed

Four large pieces of heavy construction paper. A single very large sheet divided into four equal sections will do (include an indication of which section is which colour)
Masking tape to tape the squares of paper together, and ensure the “map” stays put
Four large Texta pens – each of a different colour
Extra paper to attach to the edges of the ‘map (game board) all around the edges; to keep the pens from marking the desks.

Layout of the Materials

Put the pens ready just beyond the edge of the game board. Match the colour of the pen to the colour on the quarter of the sheet.

Be sure there is open space around the game board, so that everyone can move around

Do NOT hand out the markers until you are ready to begin

Time Required – at least 60 minutes

The Road Game is most effective if played and debriefed in the one session. For our purposes a schedule is included below to ensure all tutorials have about the same time to engage in the process

5 minutes – introduction and overview [draft text in Appendix 1]
1. arrange the class into two groups – if class is more than 32 students – and then ask each group to divide themselves into four fairly equal teams.
5-7 minutes – Briefing [moving into the action] see below for how to do this and what to say
25 minutes maximum – Action – once you have begun the action stand back. Do not get involved. All judgments about what are/are not roads happen after the action.
5 minutes – judgment about what are/are not roads. NB – as this is largely an irrelevant issue once the true nature of the game in revealed, do not spend any more time than necessary on this.
20 minutes at least – Debriefing – see Appendix 3 for how to frame this and what questions you might want/like to ask.

Briefing

Tell participants that this is a game about ‘territory’. Explain that the main business in this game is building roads from each team’s own territory, through other territories, to the perimeter of the map. Each team will decide where they want to build their roads and how to negotiate with the diplomats or leaders from the other sovereign “countries” for permission to cross their land.

Now carefully announce the following instructions – you may allow time for each step to be completed, but tell them to be quick.

Tell the students hey have ONE MINUTE to divide into four teams [or two groups and then four teams if there are more than 32 participants in your room].
Tell all four teams to choose a leader or a diplomat who will be their spokesman in all negotiations with other teams. Again, give them ONE MINUTE for this.
Tell the teams to choose their first road builder/painter/engineer. This person can be selected by the leader, chosen by vote, or by any other method. Have them plan on taking turns. Again, give them ONE MINUTE for this.
After this, decide which team gets which color.
Have the players gather round the edge of their territory.
Now read the following official rules aloud ONCE (and only once) at this time.
After you’ve read the rules aloud for the first time, tell the players you’ll accept ONE QUESTION from each team.
Answer each question as succinctly as possible [see Appendix 2 for ways to avoid giving anything away]. NO MORE than one question per team!
Then, reread the rules just once more. That’s all!

Official Rules of The Road Game

The object of this game is to build as many roads as possible to the perimeter of the map. Your road engineer will paint the roads in your color from your territory to the edge of the rest of the map.
Each road must begin at a point on your own territory and arrive at the outside edge of the game board ON THE PROPERTY OF OTHER TEAMS in order to count.
Roads completely on your own property will not count as roads at the end of the game.
You can speak freely within your own group, but you cannot communicate with other teams. Only your leader can talk with their leaders.
Your leader must negotiate for permission from the other leader and his or her team before you can enter their territory to build a road. Your leader must also get permission each time you wish to cross another group’s road, even in your own territory.
Permission to cross can be obtained only through a group’s leader. The leader, however, must have unanimous approval from his or her team before giving permission. All negotiations are subject to the unanimous consent of the leader’s team before any deal can be made. If one member of a group does not wish to give permission, the leader may not give it.
The teacher will be a judge during the game. You’ll have to settle your own arguments among yourselves.
Leaders do NOT paint roads. Only road builders do that. Be sure you take turns doing that.
Teams do NOT take turns painting roads. All teams begin at the same time and keep going. As soon as your leader makes a deal for you to cross another team’s property, your road builder can begin painting.
The only people allowed to work on the map are the four leaders and the four road painters

Be sure you read the rules the second time, answer the four questions, pass out the paint brushes to the leaders, and then start the game off at a full gallop. Announce loudly “OK, BEGIN!” or the equivalent, so that in the scramble, no more discussion can take place.

Action

During the action you must stand back and observe. Do not interfere but make notes of things that might help you guide the discussion along lines that are relevant ot the theme of ‘grand challenges.’

You can move the excitement if you announce at the beginning “you have 25 minutes to achieve the goal” [do not mention roads or numbers of roads at all] . If you do this you can then pretend a dramatic final countdown: “Two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, STOP!” This is useful to get to closure, and when time is running out. It works very well, and helps people move to a feeling of ending or completion.

The next step in the Action is –

The Hearing

When the game is finished, ask everyone to sit around their game board. Have each team count the number of roads to the perimeter of the map that it claims, and put that number on the board. Tell them that this is the unofficial count and that there may also be an official count later.

The hearing is literally that. Each group may voice any complaints it has concerning the actions of another group during the game.

Begin by asking if any team has any complaints to lodge against another team. Insist that the complaint must be about one or more specific roads. Make sure they are heard and then allow the accused team to present a defense. Any member of a team may speak for their team during this period.

Insist that the complaints and the defense be brief and specific. (They may not be brief, anyway – so cut them short.) if there are impassioned attacks and defenses these can be discussed during the debriefing. Why are they so steamed up about a “game?”

As soon as the defense is completed, call for a vote by the two groups NOT involved in the dispute to decide whether a challenged road is to be counted or not. In case of a tie, you could cast the deciding vote or not, as you prefer. (If it’s a tie, it could remain a tie. You really don’t have to settle the vote!) You might tell the students at this point that we are not so much interested in the “truth” as in the majority decision. This should supply a note of political realism to the hearing.

Some interesting political logrolling may result, especially if you stay out of the role of tie-breaker. You may find that as soon as one group wins a vote on some road, it will move to consolidate its position as part of the majority that has formed on that particular item. Suddenly, the losing team may find itself a minority on other questions. The wheeling and dealing can become most interesting at times-especially if you happen to have some neophyte politicians in your class. If this happens, or if anything happens, it becomes grist for the discussion mill.

Do not permit a group to voice complaints or challenge roads after you have moved on to another group’s complaints. Groups may wish to do this to punish those who vote against them. Be firm, and even cruel if necessary.

Be sure you stay out of it and don’t get trapped into being a judge now unless you mean to prove something by it. Be prepared for flack if you do serve as judge. The main idea is to know why you are doing whatever it is you are doing with the rules. The results become something worth discussing-no matter what. It’s another bit of human behavior for study.

When all the groups have had an opportunity to challenge the questionable behavior of the other groups, the official road count is determined. The group with the greatest number of roads to the perimeter may not necessarily have the most after the hearing. This hearing can lead to a great deal of discussion about alliances and treaties, coalitions, “under the table” agreements between groups, and the whole question of power.

If you did not originally make an issue of the competitive or aggressive element, you may find that some impassioned city planners or determined cooperative types will express outrage and grief at your “deceit” in now looking for the “winner.” This is possible. The strange thing is that it rarely happens! Even if you do not expressly promote aggression, almost all teams who play the game will move into competition anyway, and counting “who wins” becomes the logical next step. The territorial imperative does seem to assert itself in all groups to varying degrees. This again can become an item for discussion later. “Why did you do it this way?”

Debriefing

The hearing provided some opportunity for players to explore “who did what to whom?” Now that that final part of the action is over, announce that the game is over.

Say clearly that the next task is to discuss what happened and how it relates to real world events and behaviours. It is now time for everyone to analyze their behavior in order to move on to broader issues. The observers’ notes are useful here. The discussion gives students some important lessons in human relations as they explore their own reactions to competition, authority, leadership, moral law, political power, and conflict-or lack of it-and the whole problem of communication and perception.

However, it is important that such a discussion does not hurt any particular individual. This is not a serious problem and seldom occurs, if ever. However, if the conversation seems to be going beyond friendly rivalry, just ask a question about something else, or ask the students why they are so excited over a silly game. If certain people have acted especially aggressively, you can point out that this happens with most groups who play The Road Game, and then you can go on to ask what it was about the structure of the game-or people in general-that makes them behave that way.

The point is that you have helped your students generate some behavior – their own-that can lead to some very fruitful discussion and insights about the nature of man. Instead of using pigeons, they have used themselves-and have a wealth of material to draw upon. You needn’t dwell upon negative points. What about the people who helped each other!

The discussion can cover a number of disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, government, international relations, law, and ecology, as well as ethics. One way to start, which cuts across several disciplines and gets to the heart of what The Road Game teaches, is to approach the game from the perspective of conflict.

Before you go any further, try asking them: Now that you have been competing so strenuously, find a way to cooperate! You’ll probably find a lot of blank stares.

Press them, if you like, to go back into their teams and figure out, with the other teams, some way of resolving the conflict.

What would you cooperate about?
How would you do it?
What for?
Would you change something? How?

You will probably get a lot of “cheap” answers at first. After that, if you’re lucky, you might hear versions of two ideas:

Some kind of plan to build something together (A city? A new nation? The UN?)

Some version of the external threat which requires concerted effort in mutual defense against that threat (Men from Mars are coming? Gas shortage? The atomic bomb?)

Whatever you get, keep asking questions until the students have exhausted their ideas, or actually go ahead and try cooperation. If they do try it, keeping notes on how the solution goes could be most instructive. They often slide back into competition again.

There are other questions or subject areas that you can use for the discussion that follows. You’ll never have time to use them all, so choose the ones you want to emphasize, and work from them. Keep your ears open for what seems to be the overriding interest of the group. Follow up any leads by asking:

Why? How come? What makes you think so? How do you know? How does that relate to_____ ? Well,

if so, then how about_____ ? and so on.

And then, when you are all quite tired of the whole problem, remember that mankind hasn’t solved the puzzle of man’s behavior yet. Why should you be the first? Man’s Journey to Himself is taking a long, long time.

Questions Dealing with Individual Responses

1. How did you feel playing the game-happy, angry, involved, proud, lonely, annoyed? What did you want to accomplish? Did you accomplish it? Who or what got in the way?

2. Did the hearing change your mind about any of the other players or what they had done in the road-building? How did you feel about the teacher’s role? Was he or she helpful, or was it better without him/her in the first part of the game?

3. Did you feel members of your group listened to you and understood you? Did you go along with what your group was doing, or did you not want to get involved? Did you feel a conflict inside yourself about what was happening in the game?

4. Were you surprised at your behavior or other players’ behavior? In what way? Looking back on it, do you wish you had acted differently? How? Did you know that behavior was in you?

5. Did you want to beat the other groups and build the most roads, or cooperate with them so that everyone could share the roads? How do you feel about being a “winner”? Do people need to be “number one”?

Questions Dealing with Group Interaction

1. How did you form your groups in the beginning? Were there some of you who didn’t really feel a part of your group? Why not?

2. How did you choose your leader? Was your leader challenged by your group? Did your leader consult regularly with you and keep you fully informed of decisions? Would things have been better with no leader?

3. Did the members of your group become more close-knit and unified, or did you divide into cliques with different views on what should be done? Why?

4. Was your group trying to get other groups to cooperate in building roads, or did you assume that the object was for your group to get the most roads and you therefore became competitive? What made you think so? What did the other groups do?

5. How many of the disputes in the game were the result of misunderstandings? What do you think caused the misunderstandings? Poor communication? Too little time? Personality differences between leaders? How could you have changed this?

6. Did some people cheat? Why? What is “cheating” anyway? Is territory really that important or basic to people? How did you feel about those roads you were building?

7. Is The Road Game like real life? Are there always conflicts between groups; will there always be? Is this good or bad? Could we have a world without conflict? How?

8. Is man aggressive by nature? Can we do anything about that? Are competitiveness and aggression “good” at times? How? When? Is passivity the same thing as cooperation? If not, why not?

Questions for International Emphasis

1. Imagine the four groups are four nations. Which nation was the most powerful? Why? Did it use its powers wisely? What did the less powerful nations do to survive? Could it have worked out that all four nations would be equally powerful? How? Would the same nation have been on top forever? What might have changed the situation?

2. Is communication among real nations difficult? In what way? What similarities are there between communication patterns in this game and among nations in real life? What about during a crisis?

What effect would it have if each group spoke a different language? What if you belonged to different races or religions?

3. Who had authority to resolve disputes during the first part of the game? During the hearing? What situation in the real world is like the first part of The Road Game? Like the hearing? What are some major differences in each case?

4. In this game the objective was to build as many roads as possible. Should this always be the objective of a nation? What benefits do roads bring? What are the disadvantages? Can a nation have too many roads? Who should decide if a proposed road should be built or not?

5. When conflicts came up in the game, did you try to resolve them, or did you ignore them? What methods did you use to resolve them? What other methods could you have tried? Why didn’t you? Compare your nation’s actions with an example from history or current events.

6. What effect would a judicial hearing have on international disputes? What prevents the world from having such a system? What could one nation that wanted such a system do on its own to encourage other nations to join in establishing it?

APPENDIX ONE

Some Notes about the Rules

Note that you have not said anything directly about competition at all. You have commented about which roads count, and so on, but you haven’t openly urged frantic competition to win. Whether competition develops, or not, will depend upon the group’s perception of what you said. Omission of any reference to a ‘total number’ Is intentional.

The rules may seem very involved. They were deliberately designed to be that way. There is bound to be confusion and varying interpretations of the rules, creating problems the students will have to resolve during the game. The communication channels are deliberately limited and confused. We do have a confusing world of mixed-up signals, with little chance to get through easily to each other. We are beset by all kinds of gremlins and faceless, but demanding, bureaucracies. Meanwhile, we as individuals have to learn to live-and live with others. Why not study how it all works?

The only really important sentence in regard other goal is the first one

“The object of this game is to build as many roads as possible to the perimeter of the map.”

Everything else is crafted to create tension and inattention. So do not read the rules more than twice [once at the beginning and then after the questions].

Use of Observers

It may be valuable to have a record of the comments and behavior of the students as they play the game.

These can be useful during the discussion later. Since you can hardly do everything at once, and since it might be enlightening for participants to have a hand in it anyway, ask one or two participants to observe each team. Tell them to record their findings (see separate observer sheet).

Bibliography

Adapted from the work of Barbara Ellis Long, Robert E. Freeman and Patricia A. Nyhan. Intercom #107, Simulations for a Global Perspective. Global Perspectives in Education, New York, NY, 1985. American Forum http://www.globaled.org/curriculum/roadgm.html

Duke, R. (1974). Gaming: the Futures Language. New York, Sage Publications.

OBSERVER SHEET

Use this to record you observations of the activity.

To what extent is there an effort to gain consensus before building roads?
Which participants [if any] talk about competition and which ones [if any] talk about cooperation?
Does everyone participate in decision making?
Does a leader emerge?
If so – how does the leader function? Is there a lot of of listening or more talking than listening?
How do particular individuals respond to conflicts?
It conflict begins to emerge, what are the signs of it? Is there anger? frustration?
What facial expressions gestures, loud talk, outspoken behavior? Very silent and withdrawn behavior?
Who is “in” and who is “out” of the process?

Share this: