Reflections on Taboo

Firstly, I loved seeing everyone's presentations on Thursday. It's fascinating to me just that everyone came up with so many different ways to reflect on the experience of this course!

As for my group and our Taboo game, I thought it went well. We were hoping to represent just how difficult it is to define and represent what we mean by these problematic, forever-in-air-quotes terms like "fact," "fiction," and "truth." We stumbled upon the idea of making a taboo game in talking about how as the semester had progressed. We realized then that we had turned some of these buzzword terms into taboos of sorts--and thus the light bulb of inspiration was lit :)

I found it particularly interesting that the nature of game necessitates that our version of truth is the only one deemed successful. The game represents the binary we discussed in class, as opposed to celebrating the spectrum of truths and definitions we discovered over time. I don't feel that this represents where we 'landed the plane' at the end of this class--I think it seemed like many of us were over the binary, and some (Anne, for sure) were even over the spectrum. That being said, the struggle with binary truths was something we encountered until the last day of class, and I was glad to represent that in our final performance.

We also discussed the role of skepticism in this game. For us at least, it was hard to accept that not only would we be the ones dictating the "truth" (eg, correct answers) and how to get there, but we were also expecting all of our classmates to not practice the skepticism so urged upon us by Sagan and others. At the end of the day and if nothing else, taboo ably illustrates the extremely constructed nature of truth, another "reality" (if you will) that we encountered in our own work this semester. In the end, I was pleased with the effects produced by the game, though I wish we had more time to play and discuss afterward.