The Beaver Coat board game: Be A Wolff!!

Our project is a board game about the Wolff family, and how they go about their everyday lives "somewhere in Berlin”. They supplement their existence with stolen goods from various people in their small village, and seem to be totally connected and in sync with each other as they commit their crimes. They will go to great lengths to protect their small enterprises.

The players assume the roles of members of the Wolff family in a game similar to Monopoly. Our game has two cards piles that different spaces will prompt players to draw from - the Stolen Goods pile and the Hustle-n-Bustle pile. Hustle-n-Bustle activities are pretty straightforward; they are a random assortment of things the Wolff family members do during their day. For example, activities might be stealing logs, which earns money; alternatively, one might get caught out drunk late at night and need to pay a bribe to avoid being caught. The Stolen Goods pile is more interesting and ultimately more important to the outcome of the game. The objective is to gather the pieces of the Beaver Coat, which will be in this pile. In addition, this pile contains “commodities” - high value cards that can be traded in for their price at the end of the game. When a player lands on a Stolen Goods space, they can either draw from the pile or steal someone else’s goods; drawing from the pile, however, can have serious consequences in the form of going to court. When one player acquires all pieces of the coat, the game ends and each player counts their total money, including cash received for commodities. Each time a player is sent to court, they are penalized a certain amount at the end when the values are being tallied.

Our game displays the primary themes of The Beaver Coat. The players, much like the Wolffs, steal from those around them in the hopes of not getting caught. Justice is repeatedly subverted in the play; if justice occurs in our game, then the players are penalized. The various things that could happen when drawing from the Stolen Goods or Hustle-n-Bustle pile represent the element of chance in both criminal activities and justice itself. A benefit of playing this game could help familiarize players with basic economics-the more players work (steal), the more benefit gained in the end. People sometimes have difficulty managing finances, and this board game could also help them learn important lessons about spending and saving. Fraud happens in everyday life to non-suspecting victims, and people need to be concerned about protecting themselves. The game also promotes a very healthy environment for competition.

Carol Abney
Matthew Brissette

Lysistrata- Debunking the Presence of a Feminist Agenda

          As some have by now surely pointed out, Lysistrata might appear to the modern audience to have a somewhat feminist/pro-matriarchal agenda, as admittedly was also my initial impression. However, it surely cannot be so, and I would argue that the purpose of the play was surely more satire than feminist-agenda. There are two details in the play that, when they are compared with what I would consider the typical feminist agenda, reveal inconsistencies in the plot that don't allow for the presence of such an agenda. Let me clarify: these particular inconsistencies are not criticisms of the plot itself; on the contrary, I thought it was amusing. However, if one is looking at the play through the lens of the feminist agenda, the faults become increasingly evident as the play proceeds.

           In the ancient world, nearly all societies were considered patriarchal, which means that things were both run and done in a very masculine regard. Wars were a source of revenue, men were the only ones given the privilege of serving in the military, and in almost all cases, were the exclusive subjects of artwork, literature, and history. (There were a few exceptions, granted, such as in the case of Hypatia, the mistress of Pericles, but they were so few in number in comparison that little is left to doubt as to the presence of strong record-favorability.) The Greeks regarded the female forms as “defective males,” possibly even going so far as to suggest the birth of a woman the result of improper heating of the growing child in the womb of the mother. (Coincidentally, they could have attributed womankind’s seemingly eternal state of “It’s freezing in here” to this idea.) They even had a term for the perfection and idealization of the male existence, called Arȇte. It should be noted, however, that in Greek society, women had more rights than they had ever had before in almost the entirety of human history, but it still wasn't anywhere close to the level of modern-day gender-equality that we experience. The point to be made is this: even at this time in history, Greek playwrights certainly weren’t going to write for women. At the same time, they probably wouldn't seriously suggest, and to a largely male audience at that, that women could run the government better than the men; that suggestion wouldn’t fall in line with the opinions of the age, and certainly wouldn't have garnered much of an audience.

If that didn't convince you, let's take a look at the whole point of the feminine agenda. Most would argue that in a work designed to promote the favorability of women over men in the making of ancient-world political decisions, it would be unwise to give the audience any reason to believe that the smart, strong-willed women protagonists had any kind of defining trait, or motivation, that they shared with their baboon-like, sexually-driven male counterparts. However, in the play, the reasoning behind the beginning of the coup-de-etat spawned from what seemed to be a very masculine issue: sexual starvation. Now, don’t get me wrong, both men and women obviously have basic, biological desires for certain kinds of… relief… but the idea of sexual starvation is one that most people commonly associate with men, simply because men have a higher sex-drive, on average, than women do. (Don’t believe me? Comedians joke about this subject all the time, there are segments of the Bible that discuss the issue of wives denying their husbands, and so on and so forth.) In my opinion, to give the women this very masculine motivation for their scheme in the first place would seem to undermine their femininity, and by extension, also the potential for a feminist agenda.

           My opinion as to the purpose of this play is possibly a little more sarcastic than it would appear in the modern world. I think the play served as a method by which the author wanted to show that things in the Greek government were getting so bad regarding war that a bunch of women could do things better. It would be like saying “A bunch of five-year-olds could run this university better…” In this case, the women merely serve as the placeholder for anything “less than” a Greek man and his Athenian government. The sexual motives in the play? Merely a vessel (and one that certainly everyone in the audience can easily understand) by which the point can be delivered to the audience: we want these stupid wars to end.

(Disclaimer: I happen to love women, and approach feminism the same way I approach masculism: they're both ridiculous and backward. Men and women were intended to exist in harmony. My pastor said once that "Women are better than men... at being women. And men are better than women... at being men." )