Expecting the Unexpected

Expecting the Unexpected

Looking into a person’s personality there are surprises around every corner. I have learned to expect the unexpected when working on this assignment. I asked five friends to take the personality test, along with taking it myself, and the results did not turn out the way that I had expected. My friends, who I thought had an okay view on the world, really don’t think that it treats them fairly and the people who I thought were more aggressive than the rest scored lower than those who I thought to be less aggressive people. I also found myself a little surprised with how my scores turned out. Just when you think you have yourself figured out you learn something new. Though no matter what a piece of paper with a bunch of numbers on it tells you, how someone really acts cannot be deflected on a piece of paper.

When setting up the game, it took a little bit of time to figure out how exactly to execute the game in a way that it would cover the vast verities of personalities that are spread among my group of friends. Sure, we have all played games together before, but not for the purpose of analyzing the way that my friends’ personalities fit into the way that they strategically play a game. So, I decided to take a normal card game, and add a twist to it. Phase 10 is a simple card game where the players go around in a circle and pick up and discard cards and the hope to complete the phase that is required before another player goes out. It is usually a game played with several individuals competing together, but instead, I broke my friends up into groups. Since there were 5 friends, one player had to play alone, leaving them at a disadvantage from the beginning. So I chose the friend who scored the highest in the assertive category, to test their true assertiveness. Each group received the same amount of cards as each other and played the game as usual. Though, the team who came in last had to choose another player to eliminate. If the single player was eliminated, the team who won would have to divide and play individually. Now, within the game there are skip cards, which allows a player to skip the next team, but what I allowed was the person who held the skip card could strategically skip which team they would like. This allows them to have some control of who has the ability to go out of cards first. I knew what I was going into this expecting, the assertive person would do what they needed to win, and the people who saw the world as unfair would surly rant and rave as they lose the game, the equalitarian would feel guilty causing another player to lose, and the person with the high introspective score would over analyze the game a little too much. I myself did not participate in the game. I did not want to skew the results, and boy am I glad that I did not play.

The game started out as I had expected, but quickly the tables had turned. I might as well have thrown