Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Tasteless Sudan Joke Inside!
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Sepoy shows his students the truth about colonial administration - with a role-playing game! "Several came up to me afterwards and said that British rule in India came alive as the behemoth bureaucracy I had been describing all semester (SO MANY TAXES!, she said)."
The game-aversion of years dating a gamer is beginning to fade. Just the other night, during a Nathaniel/Shweta work party, I played and enjoyed Apples To Apples and Once Upon A Time (which I keep calling "Once Upon a Story"). During one round, I added a bit of color by referring to an "Upstairs/Downstairs" dichotomy inherent in all hierarchies, which of course let someone else interrupt my turn by playing the "Stairs" card. Also, after one horrifying plot development in which the women on an island killed off all the men, I nicknamed the genocidal females "the Gyneweed."
