by Helen Hintjens

…it is imaginative capacity that transports readers, moviegoers and indeed learners, across time, space and the actual, into settings that are not really present to the eyes but to the mind and heart (Linser & Ip, 2005: 3).

In Global Cyberspace: Introduction

In October 2002, and again in 2004, the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) at the University of Wales Swansea, ran a 2-week web-based role play simulation on Venezuela designed and moderated by Fablusi. There were 37 and 34 students respectively in these two exercises. In April-May 2006 a similar exercise is planned as part of a new Masters in Human Rights, Development and Social Justice at the Institute of Social Studies. This will again be a role play on Venezuela, this time to explore the themes of human rights and social justice issues (http://www.fablusi.com/roleselection/default.asp?simId=rps2_51ttu-1vyw). In this paper, we reflect on the lessons of this experience using the medium of what is perhaps the best known novel of the Spanish-speaking world, and certainly the favourite book of Hugo Chavez, elected leader of Venezuela since 1998, Don Quixote of Cervantes.

The question in this paper is whether web-based Role Play Simulations (RPS) like those that were conducted in Swansea can really provide the kind of experiential learning that is claimed. Can they teach students about human agency, about social justice or civil society in a way that differs significantly from what they might learn from lectures, reading books, writing essays, sitting exams, being involved in workshops or having discussions in class (Linser & Naidu, 1999)?

Why Don Quixote?

Why use Don Quixote? There are several coincidental reasons which make it creative and revealing to do so. The first is the novel’s symbolic importance, including for the leader of Venezuela himself. To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Spanish original, the Venezuelan government had one million copies printed and distributed for free (BBC News, 18.4.2005). The printing followed on from an earlier decision to print one million sets of popular books through the Cuban printing presses, and to distribute these to family libraries throughout Venezuela. The family libraries scheme, in turn, backed up an earlier mass literacy campaign known as Mission Robinson (Guevara, 2005: 50; Gott, 2005: 256-59). As he handed out copies of the classic novel, Chavez called on fellow Venezuelans to “feed ourselves once again with the spirit of a fighter who went out to undo injustices and fix the world” (BBC News, 18.4.2005). One player in 2002 commented after the Simulation was over: “The lesson I learned related to democracy in the Venezuelan context: democracy was about choosing a way to develop the country, but to become a reality, it was necessary for everyone to practice that democracy in their real life” (2002 Simulation Report).

Chavez likes to imagine himself as quixotic in his own bold drive for electoral power in the late 1990s (Guevara, 2005: 12). Reflecting this spirit, one of the comments after the second Venezuela simulation run at Swansea, was that it formed a “nicer and smoother way to start our academic adventure in Swansea” (2004 Simulation). If only more students felt this eager an anticipation of setting out to make their way through their programs of study!

Don Quixote’s story has proven useful for this short paper because as an imagined knight-errant, playing his self-allotted role in a partially simulated environment, his learning from experience has much in common with that of the participants in the on-line Venezuela Simulations. Don Quixote too engages in bold, imagined, but truly felt and experienced, adventures. He seeks to right wrongs and thus earn his place in history. On the same basis, participants in on-line Role Play Simulations (RPS) are like this imaginary hero, and explore a world where they make moral choices with little knowledge of the consequences for themselves and others.

Parallels with the exaggerations of Don Quixote are also apparent. Sometimes the RPS leads to close identification: “At one point in this simulation, I started to feel as if I was a real reporter, trying to keep people involved” (2004 Simulation Report). Finally, realizing that information can be a double-edged, one player commented that the media “is a very important, but at the same time very risky, instrument of power”. On the other hand, the sense of replicating the real can be illusory and lead to over-cautious playing, as when it was commented by one woman that “we were too ‘real Chavez dependent’….our Chavez was too careful, diplomatic and impersonal, whereas he should have been acting like a dictator, and he should have been more ‘animated’- for instance he could have sent a love letter to Carmen Zambrano or fired the manager of the PDSA” (2004 Simulation Report). Love and courtship featured in the simulation, reflecting reality in a way that is rare outside classes of English literature. Sometimes it took students a while to gain the quixotic spirit of adventure, and stray from their dogged efforts to replicate reality: “Only around the end (did) we realize that we could be very imaginative with the stories we made up and the letters we wrote” (2004 Simulation Report). This too is the quixotic effect!

The players in the Venezuela Simulation were involved in a setting which, like that of Don Quixote, was based on reality, yet full of lurking unknown dangers as well as imagined wonders. Both were almost, but not quite, a part of lived experience. But as one player commented of the first Venezuela simulation “Everybody in this world is acting as a actor or an actress”. The designers of the Venezuela Simulation want participants to “acquire more information, reflect and then adjust their further actions in order to reach their goals, or indeed perhaps even alter or abandon them and set new ones” (Ip, Linser & Jasinski, 2002: 2). They want them to live adventurously, or quixotically, in the game and to be prepared to bravely change their minds after taking in new situations and new information.

It seems just about any kind of reality can be projected onto Don Quixote. So too can any situation be projected into the online RPS configuration, which provides “an empty space for participants to try out their suspicions, biases, hopes and fears” (Ip, Linser & Jasinski, 2002: 1). As well as being the favourite work of fiction of the Hispanic world, and of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Don Quixote has also been quoted by Fidel Castro and cited as an influence by sub-commandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, among others (Marcos, 2001). This may be because as an early work of ‘magical realism’, the book opens up possibilities of interpretation of its central characters rather than closing them down. Just so did the Venezuela online RPS open up various interpretations of reality to the students who became the players making up the roles.

The Object of the Game: Knowledge from Experience

The starting point in both the simulation exercises was to explore the relationship between structure and agency in the relations between civil society and the state in Venezuela under Chavez. The simulation time-frame was a week or so ahead of real-time. I have used the post-simulation reflections of our students in this web-based Simulation as condensed into their comments on their roles and on the simulation as a whole. The way we learn is as if by stealth, and is as messy as the way we innovate. We use trial and error, make mistakes, tell ourselves stories, explore analogies, follow clues. During the first Simulation in 2002, the server had problems which led to its being down for several days. This caused some distress in a 2-week exercise that was necessarily limited. However it also changed the nature of power relations, and at least one participant noticed this. There is also a considerable element of play and bricolage involved. Humour was pervasive: “I don’t think the simulated Carmona and the real-life Carmona would recognize each other, unless the real life Carmona had smoked a lot of pot while in exile in Colombia after the April coup attempt” (2002 Simulation Report). The kind of experience that we are talking about in the Simulation is the experience of play rather than work: the fuzziness of the Role Play experience is best encapsulated in Theodor Adorno’s view, that:

…knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience (Adorno, 1974: 80).

What knowledge comes from the Venezuela Role Play Simulation, for example, is not like knowledge from books, lectures or more conventional pedagogic methods. Rather, this academic knowledge closely comes to resemble what in Don Quixote is described as the dry, abstract and distant quality of the courtiers, as described in the following passage from the book:

…all knights cannot be courtiers, neither can, or ought, all courtiers to be knights-errant…the courtiers, without stirring out of their apartments…traverse the whole globe on a map, without a farthing expense, and without suffering heat or cold, hunger or thirst (Cervantes, 1907: 47).

The courtiers are more akin to the international institutions, to the World Bank and other actors such as the US Ambassador in the Simulation, whose concerns with Venezuela are largely the result of plans drawn up in offices and ‘apartments’ rather than actions implemented in a hands-on way. One player commented of these institutions that they would not leave Venezuela alone, and sought to “encroach” and “reach out” to Venezuela, which would prefer to be left to its own devices. “Was it John Dunne who said that ‘no man’s an island”?…President Chavez will agree with me if I say John Dunne should not have written that statement”, comments one critic of the US/World Bank interventionism (2002 Simulation Report).

So, if we are distinguishing between courtiers and knights-errant, are the players in the simulation more like these knights-errant, perhaps, who, in the same passage of Cervantes’ classic:

…measure the whole earth with our own feet, exposed to sun and cold, to the air and the imclemencies of the sky, by night and by day, on foot and on horseback (Cervantes, 1907:47).

“It reflects reality” commented one of the 2002 participants, and she added “It was also useful because it gave us a good idea of the methods used in real life to achieve goals, no matter if the methods used are good or bad, as well as the indirect ways of using power….The difference though with the real world is the game out there is even harder”, she concludes (2002 Simulation Report).

The whole point of the web-based Venezuela RPS is precisely to go beyond this distinction between theory and practice, between the thinkers and planners and the doers or implementers. Don Quixote is instructive in this respect, since it is apparent that neither the theoreticians nor the practitioner live in the ‘real world’. The abstract, timeless understanding of the world by the courtier is virtually untouched by hard or joyful experience. On the other hand, the vulgar empiricism of the intrepid explorer, who ventures, or stumbles, forth without a map, leads to no understanding either, as not knowing what he or she will find, the adventurer may well start imagining things that simply are not there:

…your true knight-errant, though he should espy ten giants, whose heads not only touch, but also overtop the clouds…must he in no wise be affrighted, but, on the contrary…assail, and, if possible, ovecome and rout them in an instant of time, though they should come armed with the shell of a certain fish (ibid: 48).

A sense of unreality took over when players found themselves in a completely unknown situation, where their mental maps no longer worked to predict what actions they would take. When Chavez appeared to resign in the first 2002 Role Play Simulation, all hell broke loose: “…somebody published the wrong information that Chavez had stepped down. The structure had weakened if not dissolved by action from groups and even individuals. It takes a lot of energy….and it seems to need a certain “I can’t bear it any longer, anything else is better than this” attitude!” Neither logical abstraction, nor a fantastical sense of adventure and imagination, can apprehend reality on their own. Adventures without a map are less effective. The experience of the courtier and the knight-errant are in reality two equally unreal worlds, each just about as remote from a conscious engagement with reality as the other.1 Cervantes has Don Quixote’s niece say as much. Both the courtier, holed up with his maps and plans in his apartment, and the knight-errant are “all invention and lies” according to her (ibid). But the reality is not graspable; it is the product of what Linser and Ip call a “complex illusion of cognitive presence”, which motivates students in a RPS to “use the ability of games to engage, capture their wayward attention and help them learn in rich and dynamic ways” (Linser & Ip, 2005: 1).

Chaos and Creativity in the RPS

What I found most interesting was the sheer chaotic creativity, energy and subtlety that seemed to be unleashed by the RPS exercise; and the resulting depth to which people seemed willing to go in playing their roles and pursuing their interests, collectively and in confrontation with other roles. In the first RPS in October 2002, journalists spoke of having to “read between the lines”; one media role announced Chavez’ resignation in a way that uncannily resembled the mediatised coup of the following April 2003. The CNN role said: “We thought that since the President had left his computer unattended, it would be interesting to see how everyone would react to the resignation of the president”. They came to be put in prison eventually! In 2002, the Venezuela RPS was seen by the players as a competition. As one person put it “Chavez role has actually won the simulation”, as if it was a race.

The crucial role of the media was apparent on both occasions the simulation was run. The irresponsibility of the media, and the way in which it ends up inventing news, was noted by several players: “The role of the media was the most interesting because, not only did all the different media agencies do a very good job at making up exciting and totally controversial stories, we realized that things would often work that way in reality – small stories would get blown up by the media” (2004 Simulation). “Media played a big role in emotionalizing issues…They could be sparks near a barrel of kerosene” (2002 Simulation Report). Or as one person commented “Frightening actually” (2002 Simulation Report).

Sometimes, as with Don Quixote, the assumed identity helped free up the players. Just as Carnival unleashes dissent, creativity and protest against rigid rules and ways of behaving (de Goede, 2005: 378-90). Here again when I looked at the Simulation feedback from students, there were many echoes of Don Quixote, of his quest for the truth in the midst of a world built on felt, but imagined experience. One normally rather shy and quiet person seemed to express something like a ‘Don Quixote effect’, to coin a phrase, when he said this: “Simulation is great [sic]. You can just go and be crazy, wild and no one will question your motives. But in reality we are cautious as to how our actions will be read, which is somehow limiting. I miss it because it had become part of me” (2004 Simulation Report).

The illusory world, this “indescribable simulated world (Ip, Linser, Jasinski, 2002: 10) sometimes seems to impart its lessons more clearly than the world of every day, what is often called the real world. The world of the web and internet and the world of Don Quixote are both as unrelated to the “space of places” as it is possible to be. Both transcend: “the locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of territorial contiguity” (Castells, 2005: 365).

The space of the RPS is divided by truth and lies, by appearances and hidden agendas from the word go. This is built into the design of the Venezuela simulation, where all players had public and private agendas. Sometimes all kinds of foul means were used to achieve political purposes and promote private values: “Our approach was to misinform the press, spreading propaganda, and also questioning the Chavez supporters to try and weaken the president’s position by pitting his supporters against one another” (2004 Simulation Report). A more explicit statement of Machiavellian political methods would be hard to find. Some felt unable to exercise their ability to distort to its maximum effect, being inhibited by notions of fair play, perhaps: “I think my news was too moderate…I was not confident enough to create more negative news of Chavez” (2002 Simulation Report). “If I could have introduced some corruption, the game could have been more interesting”, commented one player (2004 Simulation Report). In the earlier simulation, one player noted that “To use a democratic process may not be the solution for some people when they want to make major changes. The idea is far from what I am used to, but a very interesting lesson learned” (2002 Simulation Report).

The choice of a real country, real characters and institutions, with a difference between real time and simulation time made some people confident in the exercise, and disturbed others. One person commented: “We had a real country, a real government and we were portraying real characters. We all made a conscious effort to play the characters as we imagined them to be in real life” (2004 Simulation Report). “The simulation helped us to imagine, embody and envision the problems, invent possible solutions and to find ways of intervening. But this is an ‘invented’ reality”, an interesting turn of phrase. But the reality is not graspable; it is the produce of what Linser and Ip call a “complex illusion of cognitive presence”, which motivates students in a RPS to “use the ability of games to engage, capture their wayward attention and help them learn in rich and dynamic ways” (Linser & Ip, 2005: 1).

Again and again, players expressed surprise that powerful characters that they had chosen seemed not to have as much power as they expected. The ridiculousness of those in power became apparent to them through playing the role; rather as the absurdity of Don Quixote is apparent from the time he sets out to be a knight-errant and earn his reputation as a great man. One person said of playing the millionaire Cisneros, “I learned from this that structures and class roles are very powerful and do not leave as much room for manoeuvre as I had expected for such a rich and powerful man” (2002 Simulation Report). One woman playing Miguel Enrique Otera, said “…it was strange because when I was playing the role…I did not feel that power” that she had expected (2002 Simulation Report). Playing Chavez proved a similar point: “One of the thoughts that had never occurred to me before was that even the president can be very vulnerable if ‘the rules of the game are not fair’, as they never know what is going to happen tomorrow. Political intrigues are relentless…the role play reminded me that Power is a dangerous weapon…” (2004 Simulation Report).
Simulation time needs to be tied in with real time, or players can get as disoriented as two people trying to meet in different stations: “The simulation time and Australian time was quite confusing, so we end up not being able to chat and connive together” (2004 Simulation Report). This is an example of why technical glitches need ironed out at the very start (Ip, Linser & Jasinski, 2002). Technical hitches could affect the evolution of events and the role of characters.

Sometimes the closeness of the real character and the parallel experience of the player could prove worrying: “The idea that Mr Otera was meanwhile having a life and taking some actions, maybe very different from mine, was disturbing” (2004 Simulation Report). Real partners too could cause problems, when they pulled out of the role: “Sometimes my partner disappeared unexpectedly. It made me feel alone and I did not want to work” (2004 Simulation Report). This comment just shows how important cooperative working is to players feel in role. “There were cases where Chavez had to be in two different chat rooms meeting different people at the same time, and it was great to know that there were two Chavezes who could easily handle the situation. The most amazing thing was that even in such cases we were managing to agree our actions and keep each other informed” (2004 Simulation Report).

At other times, playing a character that was familiar worked in mysterious ways: “As a Nigerian with similar background of oil politics and crises like Venezuela, I hated all the “Pedro Carmonas” and the so-called economists/capitalists of Nigeria…Interestingly, playing the devil’s advocate turned out well for me. It gave 7
me an insight into the flipside, a broader view on governance and oil politics, but most interestingly the power of the media in our society…I am also not sure that all the Pedro Carmonas and economists are bad, I actually think they have a good side that is more realistic” (2004 Simulation Report). From hating her role, she came to understand its ambiguity.

Conclusion: Achieving something?

The purpose of the simulation is not to recreate reality in virtual form; rather it is to try and mesh the quiet contemplation of the philosopher, together with its formless knowledge abstracted from experience, with the wellington-boot-clad experience of adventurers out ‘in the field’, cutting and groping their way through empirical undergrowth without any real clue about what their adventures might bring, or even where they are. An empiricist with moral purpose, however, Don Quixote has a map, at least a mental one. The task he envisaged was:

…putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame (Online Literature, Volume 1 , Chapter 1)

The challenge of globalization is that good and bad, wrongs and rights are less easily distinguishable than in the world of Don Quixote. As one player put it: “Globalization is a curse and a liberation at the same time, excluding marginalized groups even more because they cannot participate in the free exchange and economic market”, which the rest of the population can enjoyed all the more (2004 Simulation). It is no wonder, on reflection, that Don Quixote has long been a favourite with all manner of political leaders in Latin America, and especially those on the Left, broadly speaking. One reason may be that harking back to a Golden Age is an attractive option in a period when “sloth triumphs over diligence, idleness over labour, vice over virtue, arrogance over bravery, and the theory over the practice of arms” (Cervantes, 1907, Vol. 2, p. 48).” One of the key ideas of Chavez whole political and economic project, after all, has been to implement in the new millennium, the insights of Bolivar, the military and strategic leader of the independence movement in several Latin American countries, including Venezuela (Gott, 2005). For one player, the Venezuela RBS led him to conclude that Chavez should beware of over-estimating his own virtue, like Don Quixote. “I think he distrusts the elite in his country and is in no mood to give them a chance to have a say in the development of Venezuela. I think this is his Waterloo. No-one, I have been told by my philosophy teacher, has the monopoly of loving” (2004 Simulation Report). It is good to hear someone remembering what their lecturer told them in the past!

As one participant puts it: “In real life, every group or individual has a hidden agenda, whether positive or negative….Most organizational structures are built on values…one stands to fight and protect what one holds dear. In some cases, people’s values and priorities change” (2004 Simulation Report). Changing people’s priorities has been one of the purposes of most belief systems during whatever era. Perhaps RPS exercises like this one can help, in some marginal way, to help students and their teachers, question the value of entrenched beliefs, fixed positions, inflexible forms of politics and dogmas about economic life. If so, they have done their job well.

Bibliography

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