Overview

For this week, I decided to focus on exploring how people would perceive the main activity that I have in mind for my Capstone. The activity that I created was based on the Two Dollar Game from the MIT Negotiation and Conflict Management Course. It was also inspired by a game one of my classmates, Amina, used to do in her highschool, where one students was told a version of a story and the rest of the class was told another. The class’s objective was to convienve that 1 student that their perspective is correct.

Prototype

I got two volunteers and handed each one a random index card. Each index card contained a different version of a situation and they had to impersonate the character depicted in the index card. One player’s character loved apples and wants to make an apple pie for their birthday. They need an uineven amount of apples to bake the pie and the more they have, the better. The other player character is a parent whose kid loves apples. They want to bake their kid an apple pie for their birthday. The problem is, in the store this two characters are at there are only 3 apples, so they have to negotiate who keeps how many amount of apples.

I gave the players two minutes to read the card and 1 minute to get in character.

Results

When I did this activity, one of the players (Player 1) was very closed off and was determined to get all the apples available. However, the other (Player A) had a more gentle approach and tried to listen to the other’s necessities. After some time, Player 1 gave in to a more quid-pro-quo resolution. They decided to each get one apple and split the cost of the 3rd apple. They would each bake their own pie and whoever had the best pie would be the one that would keep the 3rd apple.

This was a very interesting resolution because it actually made the two players agree to have a competition to determine who would “make better use of the apple” (quoting PLayer A). It was very intersting to see that they were not willing to just split the last apple in half, but instead geared towards a competition. For them, performance seems to determine who is worthy of getting more.

On Wednesday I will perfom this activity again with more people (a group of about 18) and using different prompts, BUT still having two sides to every scenario.