Ruo Xuan: Today, I’m here with the leaders of the Global Values Pillar - Yewon and Lee Xin. Recently, the Global Values Pillar hosted The World In Crisis event throughout international week. I would just like to ask a few questions about what TWIC is like from the perspective of an organiser. Firstly, could you briefly explain how The World In Crisis works?
Yewon: It is a crisis-solving game where students are assigned to represent a country and they need to solve a crisis from our scenarios by aiding and trading resources needed to resolve the problem.
Ruo Xuan: Sounds challenging! I think students definitely had a lot to gain from this event. As TWIC was hosted during international week, how do the aims of TWIC link to raising global awareness amongst students?
Lee Xin: The TWIC event has always aimed to bring awareness to the 17 UN sustainable development goals - while this year the focus has strayed away from this core, the event still brings perspective towards the different struggles our countries face. It shifts our students' eyes from the individualist personal experiences of their lives to the wider picture and scope of a population in a country.
Ruo Xuan: It’s always great to broaden the horizons and perspectives of students to encourage critical thinking and international-mindedness! Could you also talk to me about the planning behind this event? How did you come up with the scenarios?
Yewon: I believe that TWIC is one of the games that involves a lot of logistics behind the scenes. Not only creating our own scenarios and country matrix, but we also had to deal with everything from creating sign-up forms and promotion to moderating the events. Mainly for the game to run, we focused on writing scenarios and distributing resources to the allocated countries. When doing this, we tried to make it as realistic as possible by doing small research on these countries’ status in terms of the types of resources we have (victuals, healthcare, ...)
Ruo Xuan: Were there any challenges to host this event successfully? How did you overcome them?
Lee Xin: We definitely had a smaller team this time as well as a much shorter time to execute the entire event due to our exams which led to some changes in the entire concept of the event; though we still tried to preserve the fundamentals of the game within the event with what little time we had.
Ruo Xuan: I remember how much Tenby enjoyed TWIC last year! Are there any changes that you’ve made to TWIC this year?
Yewon: Although our game this year was mostly referenced by last year’s game made by our seniors Nicholas and Alysha, we tried to change or improve the things we could have done better last time. Last year, students posted individual teams messages whenever they wanted to take an action, but this year we have changed it to replying to the main message to avoid confusion and disorganisation. Also, since we can meet up physically in school, instead of having a teams call, some students and moderators have gathered together physically in school to play the game!
Ruo Xuan: Last but not least, if you host TWIC again next year, what would you like to change in terms of how you plan and run the event?
Lee Xin: If we were to run TWIC again, I'd definitely try to bring the focus back to the UN sustainable development goals and possibly try out different platforms which would make moderating and playing the game much more smooth and give it a much more "digitized" feel.
Ruo Xuan: Thank you so much for both of your time and I’m looking forward to the announcement of the winners for The World In Crisis!
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