Imagine you’re a police officer and know that a bomb hidden by a captured terrorist is set to go off in a few hours. Despite intense interrogation, he doesn’t want to tell you where. You know he loves his 10-year-old son above all else. What would you do? Would you allow thousands of innocent people to be killed in a bomb attack? Or would you break an equally innocent 10-year-old’s fingers – one by one, of course, because you’re no monster – to make his father talk?
Ninth-grade students of a junior high school in Ludwigsburg, Germany, struggle at first to make a decision – but then the high-risk solution proves to be too much and they choose to torture the innocent boy. Students from a high school in Stuttgart, Germany, also discuss back and forth for a while, until at last one of the classmates breaks the deadlock when he exclaims “Hey, it’s just a finger!”
Anyone with a firm belief in the rule of law would surely be shocked by such decisions, but for the students, they are obvious, if not necessary. The scenario is designed to manipulate. It allows for just two possible solutions: murder thousands of people or torture a child. It’s just black or white, with no shades of gray – only radical solutions and nothing in between.
And that’s not all. Unknowingly manipulated by one of their classmates and the game master (an adult authority wearing a white coat), they’re told that, as decision makers, where they would be responsible for the victims of the bomb attack, the father alone would be responsible for torturing the child. Anyone who so much as thinks aloud about other solutions is punished, with point deductions for the whole group. No one makes that mistake twice. The students believe that the winning group will win 300 euros, and there are still more tasks to come. All tasks are ethically challenging, like this one: Would you push a person in front of a train to rescue construction workers who haven’t noticed it’s racing toward them? Players who initially say “No” reconsider when they learn that that person is a “wanted child molester.” Usually, no one bothers to ask whether the term “child molester” is a basis for a factual decision, and whether the person is in fact convicted, just a suspect or even innocent. Soon both junior and senior high school students make the unanimous decision to push the person onto the tracks.
This is XGames – short for “extremism games” – an educational game program for young people, developed by the organization Inside Out, aimed at the prevention of extremism and radicalism. The idea is to imperceptibly confront adolescents with the arguments and ways of thinking of extremist groups, and to deliberately move them to take morally questionable actions. The game consists of five stations that each have to be tackled by four or five groups (each consisting of four to six people).
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Push first, ask later
Forty-six-year-old actor Alexej Boris, from Inside Out club, is a leader of the XGames, and one of the “adult authorities.” Without the white coat, the bald giant with a dark voice and Russian accent would probably instill more fear than respect in the students. What’s less obvious is that Boris is Jewish. He’s familiar with the usual prejudices against (in his case) two minorities – from personal experience. But it is their own prejudices – both positive and negative – that the students should learn to question during the games, or in the reflective discussion afterwards.
Success varies, as Boris explains: “During the first XGames at this school, we had a class that really worked hard, but then the last time, we had one where hardly anyone dared to say anything at all.”
Some students are shocked or angry when they learn all the ways in which they were manipulated: that the 300 euros cannot in fact be won but is there to eliminate their scruples. That the game starts with the donning of white coats, designed to demonstrate competence and inspire respect, but in truth are of no relevance whatsoever. That the arbitrarily formed teams, rebuilt several times by the game leaders for no apparent reason, are infiltrated by “agents” who secretly urge the group to make radical decisions. And that with each task they were less and less inhibited, moving from just risking a man’s life (he’s threatening to murder his wife) by stunning him to committing an actual murder.
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Shocking obedience
In the final scenario, students have to make a decision that’s inhumane no matter which way you look at it: Their group is taken hostage. Forced by their kidnappers from the other group, they must choose to either allow the whole group to be killed or to murder a friend themselves in order to free themselves and everyone else in the group. It seems that drama and pathos draw the students in.
It’s not hard, though, when your own life is just symbolized by a balloon and your death by bursting it. This is where the game concept reveals a weakness: The tasks do not always seem to successfully generate the necessary feelings, such as fear and compassion in this case.
In general, it’s striking to see how easily XGames game masters suppress critical questioning on the part of the children, gradually moving them to let go of their inhibitions. Boris said participants dropped out only twice in about 100 XGames – and they were adults. One girl, however, left the room upset during the reflection round in the classroom of the Stuttgart high school. As it later turned out, she was shaken by what she considered the careless attitude of her classmates.
Translation from German via Translators Without Borders. Courtesy of Trott-war / INSP.ngo
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