Risk - at the end

Three teams winning the game of Risk that had gone on so long was not something I was expecting. The mutual win was unexpectedly satisfying. In games, the high point is usually when you wipe out another player, but this time, the hoops we had to jump through and the difficulty of designing a perfect solution to all three of our problems (combined with the pleasure of rubbing the Green team off the map) made the three-way win feel like just as big an accomplishment. After all, we got all of our goals, so why not go for a win-win-win scenario? It seemed that in this game, Liberalism definitely won out. Working together to achieve individual goals and mutual benefit worked, while not collaborating or considering the other teams’ concerns enough, like red and green, did not turn out quite as well.

Briefly, before deciding to join forces, the blue team briefly considered turning on the yellow team for gain, only to realize that the better, safer, and shorter strategy was to collaborate. Likewise, when yellow, blue, and black all decided to gang up on green in response to their unhelpfully realist actions, they were easily surrounded by troops of three different teams, all of whom were mutually committed to their destruction, and therefore eliminated them very quickly and easily. And everyone was glad for the earlier defeat of team Red as well, giving the game the same satisfaction of victory while still keeping the, well, risk of the game low by cooperating. By the end of the night, the teams trusted each other so much that, for the sake of troop movement logistics, blue had no concerns over letting black temporarily declare war on them, trusting that they would not be attacked.

The game showed that when individual goals could be attained without threatening each other, there is little reason not to work together. Too much suspicion raises the risk of attack, makes people less likely to act boldly, and more likely to disregard the concerns of other teams, losing an important bargaining chip in the process. However, out of everything that this class has done throughout the entire course of this game, the thing that I would say way most true to what I would imagine real International Relations to be like came in the form of a throwaway remark at 11:30, near the end of the game: “everyone wants to go to bed.” In real life, states want to achieve their goals and come to a solution as soon as possible, and whether it’s a game being dragged on a full class and a late-night meeting past the deadline, or a war lasting a year and a half longer that expected, the more the parties want to just get it over with, the more sure they are that the other parties share their goals, and the more risks they are willing to take to secure a solution.