Extra Credit

I went to the extra credit opportunity and played Raffa Raffa. I was the in the alpha group and I spent my time trying to trade and get all the different types of cards. I found that after a while I really came to like my culture. At first it took time to get used to, but once I had played a couple minutes I became better at it and I started of thinking of strategies of how I could improve and move up in my culture.
With coming in contact with the other culture, it helped to be able to talk to the group that previously saw them (I was in the second group to go). It wasn't completely foreign and I was able to use what they said to try to be able to jump in right away. However, something that I noticed was that in trying to understand thier culture, I automatically started comparing it with my culture. I tried to find out the purpose of the "game" and I assumed that they were trying to win. Even though our cultures weren't alike and they really weren't trying to win, I automatically returned to what I knew. I don't think that was the most effective way to go about learning about the beta culture. Now, I obviously didn't have a lot of time to observe, but because I tried to figure out how to "win" I missed a lot about them. Had I went into thier room and not try to quickly make sense of things by comparing it to my own culture, I think I would have done a better job understanding.
Something else I thought was interesting was the fact that afterward, the majority of the people preferred their own culture. Even though, technically, everyone was randomly put into thier culture (we were not divided into our cultures by our likes, dislikes, goals, etc. ) they still preferred thier initial way of life. It was something that we were used to and comfortable with and as a result we liked it more than the alternative.
Even though this was just a practice and it lasted a short amount of time, I think that we can still find a lot of truth in that activity of how to understand another culture, the importance of trying not to compare another culture to your culture, and not focusing on what you consider the "bad parts" of the other culture. Had we been able to come to a more complete understanding of other culture before coming together to talk, I think that our thoughts about which culture we prefer would be different.