Welcome to Society: The Advising.

This is a 6-player game about political opinions and agenda setting given a set of ideological building blocks.

There are two introductions to this game. So, the first thing to do is to separate into two groups, 1 of 5 and a single.

The solo player is called THE FARMBOY

The group of 5 are the Advisers:

Advisor of Government

Advisor of Family

Advisor of Education

Advisor of Economy

Advisor of Religion

For Advisors:

It happened in a flash of brilliant green light. You were there as the unexpected son of a woman your boss murdered exacted revenge. The gods, seeing victory, appear in front of the five of you.

“She was not worthy for this kingdom.  Her heart was shrouded in darkness and fear, misunderstanding. The boy before you will have to do until the chosen one appears. She will appear soon. It is clouded by the actions you and the boy will take. We cannot see  it. What we want you 5 to do is to advise this farmboy on the ways and means each of your responsibilities interacts.”

With that, they all disappeared. The advisers of Education, Economy, Government, Religion, and Family all stood staring at each other. How do we prepare the kingdom for its real and eventual ruler?

Your first action as an Advisor is to write down your name and position on a piece of paper and hand it to the farmboy. Next, each of you need to either make a copy of the table on the last page of this file or memorize it.

If you do not know, the basic definition of ideology is:

Ideas used to obscure the truth and to manipulate people through deception. These ideas are derived from some underlying issue: e.g. physiology, class, the struggle for power, and so on.

Advisor Name

Advisor Title

Years of Service

Past this information, character creation involves writing down 20 keywords that define your ideological stance on a myriad of issues. Once you have written these 20 items down, hand them to the advisor to your right, the advisor closest to the farmboy hands it across the table. Those advisers then strike 5 keywords from that list and hand them to the player on their right where the process is repeated. These keywords then represent the ideological stance through which you can act. Any disagreements agreed upon by the majority result in a negative number applied to the implementation of your legislature (henceforth referred to as items)To aid in your role, below you will find the basic definition and role of each of these aspects of the kingdom this farmboy just inherited.

For the Farmboy: 

You must write down your background in the following fashion:

Name:

Family’s occupation: Chart of occupations

Your Education level: 0-20

Parents Education Level: 0-20

Religiosity: See impact on income

Education Level: Given the rules above, certain legislative items your advisers suggest will float past your head in a cloudy, what just happened kind of way. There is a need for a mechanic to guide this process. To resolve this function, roll against your education level. These rolls are determined by a majority vote by the other advisers.

For example: If the farmboy is educated to 8th grade and an advisor is trying to press as issue that education level influences the lower classes and creates the possibility of civic unrest and suggests that redistribution of wealth from rich schools to poor schools would impact the unskilled labor pool, the farmboy might be a little in over his head. After a brief meeting, the advisers agree that in order to understand this item fully he or she needs to roll above a 15. Education level determines how difficult to set the bar for the other advisers, not for the farmboy.

Background for your situation: Each advisor represents a basic structure in any society. While social theory itself has changed over the past 200 years, these tenets are still useful to discuss in their interaction. What each one does, the others will change. Below are the basic functions of each adviser's structure:

Government (The State): There is a great deal of agreement among social scientists as to how the state should be defined. A composite definition would include three elements. First, a state is a set of institutions; these are manned by the state's own personnel. The state's most important institution is that of the means of violence and Coercion. Second, these institutions are at the centre of a geographically bounded territory, usually referred to as a Society. Crucially, the state looks inward to its national society and outwards to larger societies in which it must make its way; its behaviour in one area can often only be explained by its activities in the other. Third, the state monopolizes rule-making within its territory. This tends towards the creation of a common political Culture shared by all citizens.

Education: If one takes Socialization to refer to the sum of practices by which new individuals are made into members of existing societies, then ‘education’ is that subset of practices which have as their intended outcome particular kinds of more or less reflected-upon shaping. More narrowly still, ‘education’ is used as a synonym for schooling, specific institutional provision for the transmission of knowledge and skills, the development of competences and beliefs.

Economy: In its broadest sense Keynesian-ism is an approach to the political, social and economic affairs of advanced capitalism that validates the state taking a leading role in promoting material welfare and growth, and in regulating civil society. It also has a narrower meaning as a body of economic theory underlying macroeco-nomic policy. Both concepts of Keynesianism derive from the writings of the gods from which the policies they attempted to implement from within each kingdom as it was made. The fundamental idea of Keynesian thought is that capitalist economies systematically fail to generate stable growth or fully utilize human and physical resources; markets, which are civil society's main economic mechanisms of self-regulation and adjustment, cannot eliminate economic crises, unemployment, or, in later versions, inflation. However, the meaning of Keynesianism, in either its broad or narrow sense, is open to interpretation and is the subject of continuing controversy, as is its validity.

Religion: The term ‘religion’ refers to institutionalized dispositions and actions relative to the sacred – a dimension of life that is felt to be incommensurably more profound, powerful and significant than the everyday or mundane. Religion expresses concern with matters of ultimate significance such as the meaning of life, suffering, evil or death and the sense of hope for a better future including salvation, peace, life after death or rebirth. There is wide variation in the social forms through which religion articulates ideas about the sacred, and the sedimentation of these ideas in cultural, experiential and social forms over long periods of time has helped to establish religion as a powerful and enduring institution in virtually all known societies. The distinctive characteristics of each of the world's major religions represent particular ways of symbolizing the mutual relations between human beings and the sacred.

Family: For many years, people have believed that a universal definition of family was “a ‘social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults.” Numerous scholars have argued that the defining characteristic of the ‘modern’ family (with its roots in the privileged classes of the nineteenth century) are altogether different: at least in ideology, this family is formed on the basis of affection and love; it operates on the behalf of the personality to provide psychic security; and its spouses are companions and its parents (or at least mothers) are emotional and nurturing to their innocent children. Moreover, whereas the agrarian family was all but indistinguishable from the community, some scholars suggest that relations within the contemporary family have become more greedy and valued; both as consequence and cause, relations outside of it have become more remote, specialized, rational and tenuous. The gods have written: ‘Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that “family” and related “domestic” concepts as we know them are relatively recent developments. Many of the distinguishing features of contemporary family discourse – in particular the notions of privacy and sentiment – were either absent from or unimportant to the discourse of primary social relations prior to the last few centuries.’ Mittrauer and Sieder (1982) argue that as late as the end of the Middle Ages the German language had no word for the private groups of parents and children that many currently call family. Some well-respected scholars even suggest that it is only from around the fifteenth century that Europe sees the rise of a new concept: ‘The concept of the family’. The arrangement was present, Aries contended in his groundbreaking work, but ‘the family existed in silence; it did not awaken feelings strong enough to inspire poet or artist. We must recognize the importance of this silence: not much value was placed on the family’ (Aries, 1962, p. 364).

Mechinics

Setting up:

Table should be set up with the farmboy at the head and each advisor on the sides.

Each advisor needs to give their name and position to the farmboy as well as make a nametag for their place at the table.

The farmboy needs to write down each of the advisers names and positions. It is up to the farmboy who goes next though on every turn after the first, that adviser who just submitted an item may advise who is next. Each advisor must present twice. Two will present 3 times.

The Basics

Each item introduced by the advisers constitutes a month of real life time (lobbying, deliberation, signing). The chosen one will inherit the kingdom in 12 months. So, there are twelve months through which each advisor may introduce an item. Each advisor may go twice, two advisers go 3 times. The Farmboy may veto one item and that month will be lost. The goal of the game is to get the society the chosen one will inherit a stable society, or an unstable one.

How a Piece of Legislature Works

Presentation

The chosen advisor presents his or her piece.This piece is presented as a speech given as though the advisor is a lobbyist. It is the goal of the advisor to tell the farmboy the extent of their piece in as concise of terms as possible. The easiest and most basic format would be:

How does this piece impact current policy?

Whom does this piece most directly benefit?

Whom does this piece most directly effect negatively?

What are the intended consequences?

What are the unintended consequences of this piece?

After Presentation

When an item is passed, the other advisers, plus the farmboy set a number between 0-100. Majority Rules, the farmboy is a tie breaker or stalemate swinger. These items are then rolled by each advisor and the farmboy to ascertain how well that policy has been implemented and how well that policy is understood by the advisers presenting it.

Each round, the Farmboy chooses an advisor to present their case. The adviser then needs to describe their legislation (item) to the farmboy in a way he or she understands. Once the advisor is finished with their case, the farmboy describes that item as they understand it and will add how it will interact with each tenet. Once the farmboy is finished, each advisor offers up a number between 1-20. The average of these 5 numbers is the target number for the farmboy to understand.

If the item presented is of a higher education level than that of the farmboy and needed a roll to see if a deliberation would occur, -5 to the roll.

How Each System Influences the Whole

If the item presented is of a lower education level than that of the farmboy, +2 to the roll. This is determined

Each tenet begins at 0. The closer to 20, the more likely it is that this society is functioning as normal. Each item added to that tenet is averaged out.

Under 12, that structure has implications for other structures. How these are impacted are seen below:

The Game Ends When

The game ends after 12 rounds.

There are 120 total points, 10 points each for 12 total items. 0-80 points is an unstable society that will no doubt fail (finger pointing can then begin), 81+ is stable, 110+ is a society on the verge of a golden age. The chosen one then appears.