PC Games To Help Public Policy Initiatives

Ben Sawyer writes: "The Woodrow Wilson Center's Foresight and Governance Project has published Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based Learning and Simulation, a whitepaper. The paper illustrates how government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can utilize game-based techniques, technologies, and approaches to produce innovative simulations, models, and game-based learning products that enhance public policy decisions. The Woodrow Wilson Center is distributing the paper on-line to a variety of agencies, organizations, and game developers to help foster greater discussion and cooperation between key public policy makers and game developers. Interested readers can find the homepage for the paper here."

Comments

abandonware

[I Want GNU!]

Does anybody else find it funny that on the case study links page, they give a link to download SimHealth. It leads to a defunct abandonware site but I think it makes a statement that a group like this considers abandonware ok to use. Just a bit of SimFood for thought...

Serious Simulation

[C. Mattix]

This company is across the hall from mine. They do serious simulations. It is actually pretty cool stuff.

From their webpage:

Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS) is a business and an economic war-gaming environment developed at Purdue University in close association with the Department of Defense. SEAS, LLC replicates the "real world" in its most crucial dimensions including competition, regulation, decision variables, and interaction dynamics. It consists of inter-linked goods, stocks, bonds, labor, and currency markets. In these markets two types of agents interact: Live: People acting as buyers, sellers, regulators, and intermediaries.

Virtual: Artificially intelligent software agents mimicking human consumers in a narrow domain.
These agents allow the environment to achieve both depth, through human agents, and breadth, through virtual agents, in representation of the economy.

They are at: http://www.seasllc.com

Re:Serious Simulation

[Gorak]

It consists of inter-linked goods, stocks, bonds, labor, and currency markets. In these markets two types of agents interact: Live: People acting as buyers, sellers, regulators, and intermediaries.

Well, they seem to be either slashdotted or not responding, but either way ... I bet they don't take black market factors into account. Look at the War on Some Drugs -- $65 billion dollars per year, and that's only in the US domestic market. Factor that in, and then see what happens when you eliminate the spending on the war, and the prices come a-tumbling down!

Interesting possibilities...Becoming "official"...

[RyanFenton]

At least according to most of the CSPAN I've ever watched or listened to while programming/gaming, as far as sources of technical information, there isn't much emphasis put on actually being *qualified* for someone trusted to give information to polititians, so much as someone who can seem "official".

Currently, most "official" information on computer-related matters getting to polititians comes from interested parties with lobbyists and the like. Occasionally, resourceful polititians will contact professors and others when a debating point is in question - but for the most part, it is convenient to just talk to the same people who are there and seem qualified and eager to speak right away.

Regardless of campaign finance, this will always be the situation*. Now, if game designers and other people closer to the programming angle of things get to show the effects of laws - they gain credibility in the eyes of polititians, right or wrong. Their simulations could possibly show them simplified answers to questions quicker than even the paid lobbyist can explain.

Ethically, one would need to show every point in the logic of any given simulation where the results could be flawed, or have margins for error, or where complications are ignored - much unlike what a random lobbyist would likely show. While most polititians don't like to be called "technocrats", they also seem to like feeling they have depth to the information they are presenting.

If more programmers could spend some time helping polititians, perhaps there wouldn't be so much a distance between the groups as there are now.

:^)

Ryan Fenton

* Though I am fervently in favor of campaign finance reform

We already play games.

[Zapdos]

Or didnt you know that Enron had a code of ethics Manual.

SimHealth, real research, goofy name...

[tcyun]

Markle is a philanthropic organization that did some work with Maxis quite a few years ago to develope SimHealth. The purpose of the project (as I recall) was to show policymakers the complexity of the environment in which their decisions would be executed. From their website (towards the bottom of the page):

Markle worked with Maxis and Thinking Tools in 1993 to produce SimHealth, a computer-based simulation of health care policy in the United States.

I agree that the individual games and the specific examples might seem strange... but think of how strange the concept of a flight simulator (for a real pilot, not for your PC) seemed 25 years ago. Researchers have been spending a great deal of energy attempting to simulate the interactions of a complex world, with a great deal of success. It will only be a matter of time before we have believable (and probabalistically accurate) simulations of some real life situations. (Note that believable is different than predictive, I am attempting to separate the possible outcomes in a simulation separate from what actually happens.)

Re:Great idea - game theory is very insightful

[sheetsda]

Game theory is a really interesting and helpful at analyzong real world problems, but has little or nothing to do with games as we know them.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the AI in most present day games could benefit greatly by adding a bit of game theory. Take the Prisoners Dilemma, give an AI a worst possible alternative of dying (or whatever is appropriate for the game), and have it try to minimize that possibility (provided its primary motive is survival). I think you'd see some great improvements in simulating the way humans play games. Most of the games I've played recently have monsters that are somewhere between fearless and stupid, which doesn't make for a very interesting game. It tends to be: alert monster(s) to presence to make them move, lure monster into trap; they all fall for the same tactic. Now show me a monster who throws down some fire to make me take cover when he sees that BFG9000 in my hand then runs to get the pack of bigger monsters, who then try to set up an ambush, or run even further to alert still other monsters, and I'll be interested. Half-Life had some stuff like this in its human enemies, taken to its extreme I think you could simulate real humans and other inteligence very well.

Maxis actually did this in '93

[colmore]

A number of people have posted that this reminds them about Maxis' computer games (Simlife was the best, btw, they need to make a sequel)

Maxis actually *did* a Sim for the government. SimHealth was developed for the government, and later issued as a (very unsucessful) public game.

There was also a Wired article about the military using Doom and Quake for VR training a long while back.