Bafa-Bafa at Tesau

WE LOVE THIS GAME: ANOTHER BAFA-BAFA SESSION AT TELAVI UNIVERSITY Text prepared by Tamara and Tinatin Zurabishvili, Local Faculty Fellows, Telavi State University, Georgia Posted: February 26, 2003

On December 6, 2002 Sociology students at Telavi State University (TeSaU) played the BaFa-BaFa game. The game is built on the confrontation of two imaginary cultures, arbitrarily named Alpha and Beta. The players are not supposed to know the characteristics of any of these cultures before the game. During the game the two groups of players become acquainted with the features of the culture they are part of, while the second culture remains unknown for them until the end of the game. The game gives the players a chance to get in touch with people from another culture and to try to work out the rules governing it.

The two cultures are very different. Although the players may know each other well before the game starts (as was the case with Telavi students), this fact doesn’t actually help them to get to know the culture of their friends. During the course of the game, the students become so attached to the culture they had been part of only for some 1,5 hours that even very close friends who belong to different cultures refuse to change place and join the other culture.

Although at the beginning the participants thought the game was rather confusing, at the end they found it involving and very interesting. “At the beginning I didn’t really like the game, because I didn’t understand it quite well, but as soon as I realized its rules, I got very interested”, noted Nino Djokharidze, 1st year Sociology student.

Tolerant attitudes towards different cultures and traditions are to be learned by our students – that is what we had to conclude after this game. Although everybody did realize that they were playing a game, the final discussion looked more like a serious argument between the representatives of two cultures. They didn’t easily believe our comments that if they were assigned to the second culture, they would become its “fans” - so strongly did they believe in priority of “their” culture. Moreover, quite surprisingly, both sides stressed that the “other” culture was aggressive, primitive and worse than their own. Their interest in the other culture was very high, they were proud to be able to go and visit it as observers, but in fact they did not try to understand, but rather to evaluate it in a critical way. Probably, not all the students realized this equally well, but some of them did. “This wasn’t just a game for me, - Levan Iakobishvili mentioned in his evaluation, - it gave me new understanding”.

BaFa-BaFa is a kind of game one can’t play twice. However, at TeSaU we had 2nd and 3rd year Sociology students who took part in this game last year, but nevertheless they didn’t want to miss it this year. Their enthusiasm was more than welcome – they played and also explained the rules of their culture to the 1st year students, helping them to understand and to get familiar with the rules and ways of applying them.

As some of the participants mentioned, the 1st year students not only thought the game interesting and useful, but also appreciated very much the fact that they were playing it together with their older colleagues, and hence had the possibility to get to know them better. In their evaluations they asked to have other such games during their studies, adding that they hoped to play these games together with older Sociology students.