StarPower (game)

StarPower
Players 12-35 (18-35 recommended)[1]
Setup time < 30 minutes
Playing time About two hours
Random chance some 1
Skill(s) required negotiation, basic math
1. In service to the educational goal of the game, chance and skill have a smaller impact on the game than players are initially led to believe.

StarPower is an educational game for 12 to 35 players, designed by R. Garry Shirts for Simulation Training Systems[2] in 1969.[1] [3] The game combines chance and skill at trading to establish a score. Players are assigned categories based upon their relative scores, with the highest scoring category being able to change the rules. The game is designed to illustrate the behavior of human beings in a system that naturally stratifies them economically or politically.

Play

Players randomly draw lots of colored chips. These chips have different number value based on their color. Players are given the opportunity to trade these chips to increase their point total. Players are told to not share information about their chips.[4] While players are told that the group assignment is based on "achievement" or "merit", the initial distribution dominates the resulting scores.[5][6]

Each round, players draw random colored chips and trade them for sets of points. At the end of each round players are assigned one of three groups and given an associated badge based on their score. The top scorers are red squares, the middle are blue circles, and the low scorers are green triangles. Starting on turn two (the first turn in which players are assigned to groups), the red squares players draw from a bag with higher scoring chips, which the green triangles draw from a bag with lower scoring chips. As a result, movement between groups becomes uncommon. Starting on the third round, the red squares are free to change the rules however they like. [7][8]

Key to the game's educational effectiveness is for those running the game to withhold details about the true nature and implementation.[9] That the red squares can change the rules is only revealed to players when the ability is added to the game.[8]

Starpower is by design a very unbalanced game. Game designer James Wallis has gone so far as to describe the game as "broken" "by all conventional standards of game design."[3] The unbalanced nature of the game reduces its replayability. Shirts views StarPower as more of a simulation than a game and as a result does not view replayability as an important goal.[10]

Typical results

One commentator writing for the Sustainability Institute claimed that square players typically rigged the game to benefit squares, circles strove to become squares at which point they began to act like squares, and that triangles became angry and then apathetic, only becoming interested at the possibility of cheating or revolution. At the end of the game, the squares seldom see the oppression they engaged in while the circles are viewed as sell-outs by the triangles and as incompetent by the squares.[7]

Another commentator notes similar results. The squares create oppressive rules that make it difficult for lower groups to advance.[11] Lower groups turn to cheating.[12] The commentator also noted the lower groups becoming apathetic.[13]

The official site for the game lists eight lessons that StarPower teaches, mostly focused on the results of inequal distribution of power. [1]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 "StarPower". Simulation Training Systems. Retrieved 2007-05-14.
  2. ↑ Fowler, Sandy (2001-10-26). "Tribute to R. Garry Shirts On the Occasion of Receiving the Ifill-Raynolds Award". Archived from the original on 7 February 2012. Retrieved 2007-05-14.
  3. 1 2 Wallis, James (2007-05-13). "Things to do in game design #1: cheat". COPE: James Wallis Levels With You. Retrieved 2007-05-14.
  4. ↑ "They were told not to tell the others about their cards...."(Feld 1997)
  5. ↑ "Although the original distribution of the chips largely determined the individual point totals and resulting group assignments, the participants were told that they were being placed in groups according to their levels of achievement." (Feld 1997)
  6. ↑ "Variations in wealth are ostensibly based on '“merit' [success at trading chips] but most members of each 'strata' [squares, triangles, circles] unknowingly receive different resources [trading chips] at the beginning of the game and at each subsequent 'trading session." (Mukhopadhyay 2004)
  7. 1 2 Meadows, Donella (1986-12-04). "Why Would Anyone Want to Play Starpower?". Retrieved 2007-05-14. (Date is date of first publication, not release to the web.)
  8. 1 2 (Mukhopadhyay 2004)
  9. ↑ "Much of the impact of the experience on players depends on the deliberate misinforming of participants as to the nature and outcomes of the game." Woods, Stewart (November 2004). "Loading the Dice: The Challenge of Serious Videogames". Game Studies. Retrieved 2007-05-14.
  10. ↑ Shirts, Garry; Bernie DeKoven (2006-10-20). "Guest Wisdom from Garry Shirts". Bernie DeKoven, funsmith. Retrieved 2007-05-14.
  11. ↑ "This particular play of the game was typical. After a very short time, the top group made increasingly oppressive rules, reducing or even eliminating any changes for the others to succeed and move up the hierarchy." (Feld 1997)
  12. ↑ "The members of the lower groups responded to the hopelessness of their fate in a variety of ways; some hid their cards or themselves; others ran away; still others directly refused to follow the rules, and some of them even seemed to dare the top group members to make them." (Feld 1997)
  13. ↑ "As participants came to feel that there was essentially nothing that they could do that would lead to 'acceptable' levels of rewards, they increasingly tended to withdraw and/or act in hostile ways." (Feld 1997)

References

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