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

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.)