Anyway, the venue was an upstairs room at The Dog and Fox – well, StarPower is much more fun with a few beers, we were told – and the game was introduced to us as a combination of skill and chance where contestants trade chips, with the most successful traders getting the best rewards. Not just that, but, after each round of trading, the very best got to pick their trading chips from a special bag of high-value tokens for the subsequent round. All the more important, therefore, that players try really hard in the first round because the scores from it will determine their initial place within one of three strata.
Granted, I didn't take that first round too seriously. This was largely because the negotiations leading to trading could only take place while you held another contestant's hand. Naturally, I saw this as a better opportunity to chat up Liz Carrick than to further my trading skills. At the end of the round I had the bonus of having held Liz's hand for 10 minutes, but was left with neither a date nor any more tokens than the number with which I had started. So I was assigned to a lowly group that did not get to pick from the high-octane pot.
And on it went. Each round was the same. I looked to trade – I even took it seriously – but I never could. No matter how hard I tried to persuade fellow students to swap their tokens for mine – or even give me theirs and, honest, I'd see them all right – it was no dice. For me, that upstairs room was a trade-free zone.
Yet a few contestants were doing okay. My flatmate, Steve Roberts, was getting loaded. True, by now he was picking from the fabulous pot, but, even so, some of his success must have been down to his trading skills. He – and his fellow token zillionaires – must have trading skills I didn't. There could be no other explanation.
Then the penny dropped. I was not trading, but I wasn't alone. No one was trading. In that room, not a single solitary soul was trading. Not one trade had been done all evening. The zillionaires were getting richer because they were already rich. The rest were either forlornly and stupidly still trying to compete or, if they were slightly brighter, had got cynical and given up. The truth was, the game had been rigged.
Many of the folk camping out at Liberty Park in downtown Manhattan, outside St Paul's in the City or even among the indignados in Madrid will feel as I did when the penny dropped. The game is rigged.
And why shouldn't they? Their reasons for doing so fill the airwaves every day, but let's take just one little instance. By one of those beautiful ironies, on the day last week that the staff of St Paul's announced that their besieged church would reopen despite all those smelly people camping outside, a pay-research service announced that total earnings for the average director of a FTSE 100-listed company had risen by 49 per cent to £2.7m in 2010-11. By contrast, in the year to September, average total pay for an employee in the UK has risen by 3 per cent to £24,000. If that's not prima facie evidence that the whole thing is fixed, then what is?
However, the real point of StarPower is not to learn that the game is fixed. It gets darker. Back at that evening at The Dog and Fox, the effect of a few pints plus some good work by a couple of agents provocateurs among the innocent contestants – a vital part of StarPower – and the mood soon resembled Lord of the Flies, with Steve Roberts playing the role of Piggy. Indeed, 40 years on and Steve still goes white and babbles uncontrollably when I mention the evening. "It wasn't my fault. I didn't know. No one told me the game was rigged." Yes, Steve, but you were happy to play by the rules. And I didn't see you wanting to change them when you had the chance.
And that's what StarPower is all about – not just to make us grasp that society's rules are rigged, but to see how we respond when we realise that the game is fixed. Sometimes the response isn't pretty.
Right now StarPower's allegorical lesson has never looked so powerful because increasingly capitalism seems like a rigged system. As Martin Wolf, the Financial Times's chief economics commentator, wrote last week: "We have promoted an insider form of capitalism which exploits and indeed creates subsidies and tax loopholes on which the insiders prosper." Where once we had Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the social democratic model, now we have one size that fits all – insiders' capitalism. True, it's nothing like as depressing as Russia's oligarchic capitalism, which behaves like StarPower on triple caffeine. Even so, currently it's hard to be proud of.
As to the solutions, happily I'm out of space, but we could begin by making every MBA student play StarPower.
