JOURNAL REFLEKI - game (in english)

 JOURNAL REFLEKI

(in english)

My experience with the GAME (Agen Rahasia)

When Kak Shanty and Kak Ira said that we’d be playing a game for our first meeting, I thought it’d be a fun icebreaker to get to know the new kids joining us. Alas, I was disappointed. It took a solid 30 minutes spent slowly explaining the game, and the game itself was, unfortunately, lackluster, but not through any fault of its own, it simply didn’t have enough time to stretch its legs, so to speak.

Game Time

Game time arrived, and this was the moment I was waiting for, trying to contact as many agents as possible was rather fun, seeing the number go up makes my brain happy, however, on my third contact I just so happened to call someone whose number was 0. 

This brought my number to 0, and as the scoring system was multiplicative not additive, I was stuck at score 0 in a game where the highest number wins.

I had lost the game out of no fault of my own, what do I do now? I can’t increase my number, though I still called people in a futile effort to do so inadvertently spreading the 0 to others, but could you blame me? I wanted to play the game, I had waited 30 minutes to play and lost in my 3rd round a few minutes in.

More than a few of the people I called had been afflicted by the Zero, one calling it a “virus”, I chuckled to myself. Yeah, they were probably gonna make a point about the coronavirus. Something about statistics probably.

The Lesson

After the game, Kak and Shanty and Kak Ira showed us charts, taught us how to read it; You follow the trend, upward trend, downward trend, up and down, down and up, then they asked a few questions. How many rounds did you get? How high was your number? And, If you did, when did you get hit by The Zero?

They then asked us for our predictions on what trend the amount of people afflicted by The Zero would be, most argued that it’d be an upward trend, as the amount of people infected could only have exponential growth, some argued it’d be up and down as the more people get infected there’d be less chance of spreading to uninfected people.

As it turns out, the latter is true. As Kak Shanty and Kak Ira said, statistics can help facilitate discussion, as interpretations and predictions assist in discourse. A useful lesson, all in all.

All in All

Kak Shanty and Kak Ira had used the game to run a social experiment on us, then made a point about predicting and reading statistics, a great lesson, but I feel that it would have been better if there was more time for more games, one with a zero and one without to really hammer home the point, one obviously will exponential growth with the other more ambiguous.