Neighbourhood Game

Introduction:

This game has two aims:

o To get students to understand issues related to international relations (generally) and the EU's Neighbourhood Policy (more specifically);

o To develop students’ negotiating skills in an online environment

Timetable:

The game assumes at least 8 rounds of game play, with each round taking a week. This can be accelerated and/or lengthened to your situation, but multiple rounds are needed, to allow players to see consequences to their actions.

The game at least one player per role, but would be better with more than this: in such cases, think about making group members have to use online media to do their work, to further strengthen their understanding of the online environment.

Exercise:

Each student should be given a copy of the attached sheet. Access is provided to an online forum.

Feedback Points

Some aspects to discuss:

• How did people work in their teams?
• How did they deal with each new development?
• How much did they try to take control of what was happening?
• How did they cope with some groups being very passive/silent?
• Why did they chose to do what they did, and not something else?

Variations

• Lots of options for changes here, including adding more countries, changing their profiles/interests, adding/limiting possible actions, throwing in curveballs as the game progresses.
• Some thoughts my my own running of the game can be found here.