I really enjoyed playing Diplomatic Risk in class. As diplomat for one of the class periods, I had the chance to represent our team at the World Council and strategize for what the order of play should be, I talked with other diplomats about the courses of action we wanted to take, discussed certain deals and negotiations, and predicted what other teams were planning to do. During the game, and especially when I was diplomat, I found myself recalling Machiavelli’s assertions about world politics. I don’t think it’s this way in the real world, but in the fictional realm of world politics, it was impossible to trust anyone. Even the teams who we were on good terms with were sneaky on numerous occasions. There was no true “working together” because every team wanted to win, and only one team could do so. In the real world there aren’t as many black and whites as there were in the game. In Risk, everybody wanted to win and there were specific goals that we each had to reach in order to attain the status of victorious. In the real world success isn’t measured by a clear “win” or “loss” but in my opinion, is measured more by…how things are going…and what current relationships between states are. Also, in the game of Risk there was a definitive end, something entirely uncharacteristic of actual world politics, for the obvious reason that life seems to continuing every day, and this makes a difference because you know how much time you have to reach a certain point.
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