Games Students Play

Games as miniature models of conflict among men are as old as chess and as new as the "wars" fought by scholars in such think factories as the Rand Corp. Carried by a tide of curriculum reform, games are now moving into colleges and grade schools, mainly to help students get an inside feel of social and political conflict.

A pacesetter in scholarly gamesmanship is the San Diego public school system, where Project SIMILE of La Jolla's Western Behavioral Sciences Institute has enticed 2,000 junior and senior high school students to pit wits against one another in four types of games. In one, called "Napoli," they play the roles of legislators who are equipped with opinion polls showing how their constituents feel about such issues as medicare, tax reduction and subsidies for the poor. As bills on these issues move through the legislature, each player has to make choices between his principles and what he thinks the public wants. Winners get reelected. Other games cast the players as corporation executives vying for competitive advantage, statesmen seeking gains in trade and diplomacy.

Verdict by Computer. Head gamesman at Johns Hopkins University is Social Relations Professor James Coleman, who works with Baltimore public school students. In one contest, a community is struck by a natural disaster and players must weigh their personal welfare against their social duty to help the town to survive. In a "Life Career" game, teams of students are assigned a hypothetical individual with specific personal qualities and must make key decisions on education, job choices, even marriage, for him. The groups are scored by the statistical chances of success for each of these moves.

At the University of Southern California, 38 Los Angeles high school seniors recently played out key roles in a Viet Nam war game in which their military and political power was allocated among such persons as President Johnson, U.S. Senators, Premier of South Viet Nam, Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh in realistic ratios; to be 90% certain of winning a battle, for example, the allies had to commit five times as many military points to offset the natural advantages of guerrilla troops.

An Inept King. Grade school children in parts of New York's Westchester County play individual games against a computer. In one, called the "Sumerian game," a player-king is asked how he wants to use the natural resources of the ancient kingdom called Sumer. He must decide, for example, how many bushels of grain to store, how many to distribute to his people, how many to plant for the next crop. The computer informs him of the effects. It recently told one inept king: "Your population has decreased to zero. Call the teacher." Both in and out of class, a complex logic-stimulating game called "Wff 'n proof," played with cubes on a board, is becoming a campus fad.

The value of such gamesmanship, argues Johns Hopkins' Coleman, is that it allows a student to break out of the usual educational structure in which he is kept "in the role of a child, with grades dispensed in the way that gold stars are given to kindergartners, and an authority figure, the teacher, sitting in continual judgment." Project SIMILE Director Hall T. Sprague says these games are "to the soft sciences what a laboratory is to the hard sciences of physics, chemistry and biology." They give students, he says, "a gut-level understanding of the pressures that go with a position of power."

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