Ending With a Violent Game - Our Final Presentation

 As a recap, for our final presentation my group created a Darwinian game in which players were given a utensil and timed for thirty seconds while they tried to get as many coffee beans from a communal pile into their cups. We meant to eliminate the lowest coffee bean-grossing players over more rounds, but found ourselves strapped for time and did two rounds instead. 

On the utensils we had given the glass we had written quotes and titles of literary works, with the most memitic quotes being on the most effective tools for picking up the beans (the spoons), and the least memitic ones on the knives (the forks received middle-of-the-road-in-popularity books). And then we inserted randomness - "saving" some knives that had been randomly labeled with stars on their ends and breaking a spoon at random (thus eliminating it from the game). 

We anticipated that spoons would win the game, reflecting the fact that even with randomness, there is a gesture to a being more fit to a certain environment, but though this was true for 5 of our 6 "winners," it was not true for one - a knife that had somehow slipped through the rounds and competed against the more-dominant spoons. As a literary symbol, the knife's win represented an unlikely book finding wide readership and competing with more popular titles (and I ask, does this competition then turn this knife into a spoon?).

Even when we tried to control randomness (acting as the skyhooks for this game), randomness trumped our contrived agency. What a better way to reflect the randomness we've learned to accept over the course of this class but by having our plan of selection interrupted?