The premise of the film follows a philosophy class in Jakarta. It is their last class before the students leave to go off to university etc. The professor gives them one last assignment to do in class. He presents them with a scenario in which each student is given a job, picked at random from a box, and the students in the class must state who should go into a nuclear fallout bunker and who should not. There is only enough room for half of the class. The scenario is then played out in the film as if it was real, with the characters breaking down the fourth wall of the scenario to explain their motives and decisions and also act out other possible scenarios. I found the film interesting because I teach in a similar setting and so I found the exercise to be interesting. The film however is not that good, with the acting being rather terrible (a shame with some familiar faces), a love story that practically ruins much of the film and the students reactions to certain parts of the scenario that I found hard for anyone to come to such conclusions.
The thing for me was that I thought this to be a good activity for me to use in one of my classes. One of the classes that I teach is business English to adults. Most of the class speaks English to a very high standard and so I wrote a scenario for them to do. Each week I come up with a new activity for them to do besides their book work in order to get them using their spoken English.
So I took the roles from the movie, wrote them down and tried it. In the film, they run through the scenario twice, with the second time each individual gets more interesting info about their persona that will either boost their chances of being selected or hinder it. In this scenario some of the people have "what if's". In the film it seemed all ok for them to simply run through the "what if's" but I decided to get all of these together and assign dice rolls to them. I realise that can seem a bit geeky, but I wanted there to be not only an element of chance, but also a definite end to each scenario that I ran. There was a few holes in the logic of the teacher and students in the film so I plugged those as well and tried to think of every eventuality of the game.
Since creating the game, I only have the one class with a high enough English level to run through it. So after I improved on my flaws I gave it to another teacher to run through. He has run it twice and told me that it works really well.
Here is a link to my word file of the game: The Apocalypse Game
In the file you will find step by step rules on what you will need to play the game (the file itself, two identical envelopes and a dice). You will get the cards that the players can pick at random for their roles. You get a sheet that contains additional info about each character to be used for the second play through, or a surprise reveal in the first. There is also an end game sheet with different ends depending on certain conditions, and a surprise sheet for the teacher to use about certain choices the students can make.
Download the file and have a go with your students or anyone else that might want to give such a game a go.
Good luck surviving.
End of line.
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