The Carbon Trading Game found its way to Alibaba Group, one of the world’s leading international e-commerce companies, in an afternoon session on December 17th as part of their staff training program. Being a China-based company, we were very lucky to have a good mix of participants from both Hong Kong and mainland China. As a result, the game has also made its first debut in Putonghua.
With representatives from such a prominent trading company, the game was bound to progress quickly. Indeed, “quickly” proved to be an underestimation of their ability in getting the world moving. Once the representatives from each country understood the rules, trading and coalition was already up and going within minutes in every corner of our simulated world. Of course, it did start off with some trial and error as seen from U.S.A.’s grave mistake in “selling” their ONLY set of valuable tools to Ghana (generosity we hope so dearly would happen more often in the real world). However it didn’t take long before the other countries learnt the trick as tools were being “rented” instead of “sold” to each other in thousands of dollars by the minute!
The game approached the end in a very close running between all the countries. U.K. surprised everyone as the dark horse of the day by overtaking India as the winner through the last minute reclamation of all their debt from Brazil, who was definitely not thrilled about the idea. It was however a very impressive game overall as the professionals demonstrated the mastery in trading tactics, as seen in the multiple alliance and profit-sharing formation across the room.
Many thanks to George for putting his trust on me as the Putonghua moderator, as well as Trudi Charlesworth, Bruce Stephens, Ellie Ng and Agnes Wong for their help. Many thanks to Elsa of Alibaba Group also, in making all this happen.
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