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

In other news...

[jaxdahl]

Maxis has announced its new MMORPG, 'SimCity Live!'. Rumors are that it was brought up from the ashes of the Sims multiplayer addon. Participants will be able to live out a day of the lives of their favorite politicans. Be the President of the USA and get a lollipop. Be the Mayor of New York City and be the hero of the day. Be the governor of Minnesota and body slam voters! Will says "This will bring the hard money into people's own homes!".

Seriously, public policy? games? No, I didn't think so.

Yea Right...

[mlknowle]

...The guy just wrote it because his boss caught him playing Quake!

New game for congress

[kir]

WOW! Now maybe someone will create a "learning" game that will teach congress that they can't take money from the MPAA/RIAA/etc. and give them whatever they want.

Soon to follow this game's release - a "learning" simulation for the Patent Office (just guess)!

Re:New game for congress

[NonSequor]

WOW! Now maybe someone will create a "learning" game that will teach congress that they can't take money from the MPAA/RIAA/etc. and give them whatever they want.

Will it make use of "force feedback?"

SimPublicPolicy

[MiTEG]

This reminds me of the good old says during Maxis' peak, when they released a Sim version of everything, from SimTrain to SimFarm to SimCity, etc. My favorites were SimTower and SimCity 2000, and I think both could be easily tweaked to become more related to public policy.

In SimTower, you were the owner of a high rise building, and your task was to build the biggest possible tower while still pleasing everyone (elevator congestion, pricing, etc). An important part of public policy. Also, in SimCity, you took on the role of a city manager, and if that doesn't relate to public policy, I don't know what does.

Re:SimPublicPolicy

[sharkey]

SinPorkbarrelling, perhaps? Or how about SimKickback? SimBribetaking?

Or, more in line with the racial profiling tactics being kicked around for airports: SimJimCrow.

It's What We've Always Known

[Spencerian]

We can foster world peace and greater understanding by using the virtual tools at our disposal:

A railgun, rocket launcher, attack shotgun, and lots of Quad Damage. Oh, and since we need to simulate reality as we want it: Lots and lots of hot, redhead girls with infinite anime-style hair--with body armor and a willingness for world unity through, oh--I don't know--sex and blowing things up.

And this time, when They say, "Impressive", you WILL be.

SimKickback

[FakePlasticDubya]

Hmm, perhaps a Sim that teaches government officials how to avoid corruption?

Sort of like what we tell the kids, you know, "Just say no!"

Re:SimKickback

[colmore]

How about "Winners Don't Take Soft Money" on the Congressional Mortal Kombat machine?

Riiiiiight.

[bobetov]

Not only is this a brilliant way to get funding for "research" that only a 13-year-old Sims fan could love, but it's clear that they have no idea what they're talking about. A good example:

"Not only is the game development community at the forefront of PC-based visualization, it is also a leading developer of applied artificial intelligence... blah blah"

Hahahaha. As a game developer myself, I can tell you exactly how leading edge game AI is. Let's all say it together now... Table Lookups!

Woohoo. Games are games. Simulations are simulations. Games are fun, simulations are not.

Bleh.

Re:Riiiiiight.

[Bodrius]

Although I was about to point to "Black & White" and some others, I guess they're about as representative of the state of AI in games as Infocom-adventures are of the importance of substance over flashy graphics.

Re:Riiiiiight.

[Rogerborg]

• As a game developer myself, I can tell you exactly how leading edge game AI is. Let's all say it together now... Table Lookups!

You lie! Sure, I also thought that I was coding opponent behaviour as a simple state machine, but my team leader, my development house project manager, the publishing house project manager, and the publisher's marketing people all insisted that our game had "Ground breaking neural net based adaptive AI!". Some of these people owned suits, for god's sake. What do people like you and I know about AI design and implementation compared to experts like that? ;-)

other good PC games

[I Want GNU!]

Civilizations 3 is another great learning game. It gave me valuable life experience for the next time I have a 6000 year life span and an empire to build. When this occurs, I would like to be the Persians, because their special unit the Immortals will help me conquer competing civilizations. I also have learned that when I conquer foreign cities and they are unhappy, if I simply make them entertainers and they starve for a few turns, the city size decreases and they become happy again.

Re:other good PC games

[Bodrius]

It also taught the developers that using computer cheats to increase the difficulty level is much easier than coding any AI, and reviewers will still praise you for substantially improving the AI of your computer game.

Re:other good PC games

[NonSequor]

They still have to code *some* AI. All of the cheating in the world won't help if the computer just does nothing every turn.

Um..

[The Evil Troll King]

Perhaps public policy makers should stay away from gaming technology. Look what it's done to us. Imagine the headline:

Orrin Hatch changes name to "DethGod", vows to "V3T0 J00R A$$3$"

On second thought, that might be kind of cool....

Steve

Re:Um..

[Have Blue]

It would certainly make watching C-SPAN a lot more interesting.

Great idea - game theory is very insightful

[Seth Finkelstein]

It's a great idea. It's long known that game theory such as The Prisoner's Dilemma can yield a lot of social insight. As that page details:

This classic problem of game theory sheds light on many of the problems that have plagued ethical and political philosophers throughout history. It addresses that class of situations in which there is a fundamental conflict between what is a rational choice for an individual member of a group and for the group as a whole. It helps us understand how such dilemmas can be resolved for the greater good.

Putting these ideas into computer games can make the topic less abstract, more immediate and clear.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

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.

Re:Great idea - game theory is very insightful

[Arrian]

Yeeeaaaahhhhh, sorta, but what I remember of the theory I from college, it doesn't apply to the flowing, loosely defined world of FPS's very well.

What I remember of game theory is that it is concerned with making decisions between set options to come to an acceptable outcome, and other people, their decisions, and their acceptable outcomes may or may not be taken into account. I know this is very vague and simplistic, but I don't have access to any books at the moment for a more concise and possibly accurate defination.

I see it more directly applicable to strategy games like chess. If I move my rook here, how likely is he to take it with his night allowing me to take his bishop with a pawn, and is it worth it at this point in the game. Brute force simulation may achieve the same or better effects against average Chess players on a PC, but more complicated strategy games (say an Axis and Allies implimentation) may have too many variables to simply simulate out all options to the Nth move and choose the best one.

In the fast paced flowing situation of an FPS, I doubt this type of calculation is feasable. Also, I don't know of anything on game theory that would suggest coming up with new ideas, it is about choosing between different options.

Where I do see an application for game theory is in the design of the AI: in giving it options and what the criteria to base the choices between those options are. As a monster, how important is it to me to, A: stay alive; B: Kill the player; C: prevent the player from accomplishing a certain goal; and D: how well do I work with other monsters? The developer them develops sets of tactics and determines how they relate to the monsters' motivations. For values of A between 0 and 50, group 1 tactics (j,k,l) are preferred, group 2 tactics (m,n,p) are neutral, and group 3 tactics (q,r,s) are right out. For values of A betrween 51 and 75, group 1 tactics are neutral, group 2 are preferred, and group 3 are neutral... etc. for all variables. Then, when an engagement is about to happen, the AI can say this monster has scores of A=52, B=37, C=89, and D=92, so tactics x,r, and j are preferred, and l,m,s and v are acceptable, but j,s, and v only apply underwater. Therefore we will give x and r each a 40% chance, and give l and m each a 10% chance, generate a random number and pick a winner. For the rest of the fight, we just follow the rules of the chosen tactic and get blown to hell by Gorden Freeman anyway. So yeah, game theory probably can be used in the context of an FPS, but in a stricter sense it is probably better applied in the design of the AI/bots in the game, and most likely, it is applied in the design of all the games we run into. More accurately maybe, it describes what the designer is doing when he designs his AI. Whether a better understanding of the theory would lead to better AI's, I really don't know.

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!

Re:Serious Simulation

[C. Mattix]

Actually, I believe they do factor in Black Market. It is just another set of agents, though ones that don't follow the same rules as the rest of the 'virtural society.'

It's already happening !

[Jesse Duke]

"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."

John the IRS director [playing SimCity]: There, if just raise the tax a little, I should get more money to build a road [5 seconds later] Of and fuck, it's not fast enough ! [cranking up the tax rate to 90%]... Now that's better !

Margaret the Secretary [knocking on the door]: Mr. Director, President Bush wants to know by how much you estimate he will be able to increase governmental spendings.

John : Err... well, I haven't really had time to ... [Glancing at the screen, smiling] Actually, tell him he can double it easy does it !

Margaret : Very well Mr. Director.

John [looking at the screen again]: Aah *CRAP*, not again, all my nice residential areas are turning into shanty towns again. wtf? This game really sucks ...

Note idea not exactly new - "Diplomacy"

[Seth Finkelstein]

But note, this idea regarding gaming is not exactly new.

The Game of Diplomacy has a history long pre-dating computer games.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The first thing that popped into my mind...

[BitwizeGHC]

... was a sort of MMORPG that simulated a legislative body of some kind, with players acting out the roles of legislators, and receiving feedback from the game on how their actions affect the "populace". Kind of like Boys' State but IN TEH CYB4RSPAECE.

Microsoft Age of Empires

[guttentag]

This is not news... Microsoft caught on to this years ago.

They released a "Fun" version to the public that is set in 10,000 AD and called it Age of Empires. Bill Gates has his own personal version set in the present day... it's called "Windows." Why do you think the government is so determined to get their hands on the source code? They want to play too.

Yes!

[Odinson]

I can finally put my Civilization conquests on my resume!

SimDictator

[KingJawa]

The Sim packages would be good for political insight -- if you believe that dictorial decisions make for the best political system. Could you imagine a mayor who unilaterally bulldozes industrial zones for a park? Or if the city would brown-out if the Mayor didn't like nuclear power? Or if, like me, you wanted a stadium near your house?

Robocode

[jsse]

It's good to see a larger deployment of games in educational ground.

I've been challenging my students to design a Java robot to beat the best robot in Robocode. Even though I failed get the ed board approving my idea of using game for teaching, the students really enjoyed learning Java thru gaming, regardless of the fact that no bonus mark would be giving to winners.

Now this paper can be a very strong support during next time I face the dinosaur ed board. :D

Simulations Not Always Helpful

[Logic Bomb]

As usual, the comic strip Doonesbury is way ahead of the curve. Check out a week's worth of strips starting on April 12, 1982 . Obviously, computer simulations of social phenomena can be more or less productive.

Re:Simulations Not Always Helpful

[sharkey]

Ahhh...War Games.

How about a nice game of chess?
No, let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

Hell, I'd piss on a sparkplug if I thought it'd help!

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.

People are always skeptical...

[AugstWest]

...especially when the easiest humor lies down the skeptical path.

But I've learned a lot about the way life works from SimCity, and I've learned quite a bit about business from Sim games in general, especially Monopoly Tycoon.

It won't teach you everything, but you could very easily teach Economics 101 with a computer sim, if comeone actually put the thought and effort into it.

Why bother with sims?

[BillShatner]

I propose they do away with the simulation ideas, build an army of robots and control them remotely through a modified Quake 3 interface, release it as a mod, and take over the world.

I will call it The Allan Parsons Project.

Libertarian Society (Training Wheels)?

[resistant]

This is actually the technological approach I've been studying carefully for setting up a virtual libertarian society in which instead of being a distant pipe dream, it's an "actual society" (simulated, but society is a state of mind anyway, and this would be a way to see the other state of mind as very possible and desirable).

It's a damned big job, though. I'm hestitant to even try for real without interest from other parties. There's just too many practical details. Everyone else seems to have been studying "variations on the status quo" (meaning massive corporatism, statism, etc.).

If you've been thinking about the same sort of effort, drop me a line at "engineer at-sign meme hyphen engineer dot com". :)

Just imagine!

[sharkey]

If our public officials used Leisure Suit Larry as a training tool? Or have the Kennedys already done so?

Perhaps the Ashcroft used 3D Monopoly to help in crafting the Microsoft-DOJ antitrust settlement.

Not a bad idea

[Galvatron]

As you probably know, game theory has long been a mainstay of econmics, the most simple and well known example being the Prisoner's Dilemma. Computers allow us to create and understand far more complicated games, so well crafted games can certainly further our understanding of how people act in certain situations, under certain constraints.

This actually reminds me of an article I read a while back, before SimCity 2000, about Maxis doing contract work for some oil company to create SimOilRefinery, to help the company plan out their refineries.

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.)

The military has been doing this for many years

[edhall]

A significant amount of the money that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the folks who paid for the ARPANET) spent on Artificial Intelligence in the '70's and '80's was to projects that purported to model military decision-making. Later in this period the Defense office of Net Assessment got into the act, funding some efforts to combine models of military forces with command-and-control models and rule-based decision systems. At least one of these efforts endeavored to create a system where humans and computer agents interacted in a wargame involving all these elements: the RAND Strategic Assessment System, developed in the mid 1980's. RAND was only one of many in using modeling and simulation for military policy analysis; MITRE and SAIC were among the others.

At the other end of the spectrum (and probably of more interest to gamers) was the SIMNET effort, a distributed battlefield simulation system started in the early 1990's which employed 3-D graphics, multichannel sound, and a large collection of (military) hardware models, often involving several geographically separated computational nodes and human players. This is actually of far less interest from a policy perspective (unless your idea of "policy" involves low-level military tactics) but is a lot closer to what most people think of as computer gaming.

(Yes, I worked on projects like these back oh so many years ago... I left that world about the time it was starting to focus on terrorism and "light-intensity conflict." Little did I know how prescient some of those scenarios were in light of recent events in Afghanistan.)

-Ed

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.

New Titles

[Perdo]

Sim Monopoly (Immediately bought and axed by Microsoft)
Sim Corporate Lapdog (Bush's favorite)
Sim Golf (never mind, they get enough of that.)
Sim Pedophile (For catholic priests)
Sim Vote Fixing (the Supremes played this one)
Sim Yes man (For aspiring corporate lapdogs)
Sim Republican (Sim soft money included)
Sim Democrat (Morals not included)
Sim IRS accountant (God mode: 100% tax rate)
Sim FCC (Sell stuff the public owns back to them)
Sim NSA (Record every conversation and admit nothing)
Sim FBI (Blunder everything except cover-ups)
Sim ATF (This is just a regular first person shooter)
Sim NASA (Go to moon for 15 billion then squander 15 billion a year not going to the moon.)
Sim DOD (Procure junk, Get hired by junk peddlers.)
Sim DOJ (Income1,000,000 !=goto jail, Try others arbitrarily.)
Sim Congress (See how little you can sell out the country for.)
Sim FTC (reinforce monopolies with weak penalties)
Sim Slashdot (Hire secretaries to mod comments you don't like)
Sim THE PEOPLE (we look like goatse after the poloticians are done)

Re:Then you have learned nothing

[NonSequor]

It would seem that you have been reading Machiavelli lately.

DOOM

[maxpublic]

Doom taught me everything I need to know about getting ahead in the modern work place. Accept the fact that your coworkers are zombies out to shoot you in the back the first chance they get, and that problems with your boss are best dealt with using a chainsaw, and life becomes much, much simpler....

Max

Woodrow Wilson? The father of WWII?

[SysKoll]

Are we talking about the Woodrow Wilson here? The guy was a walking disaster. He teamed with Frenchman Georges Clemenceau, another disastrous politician (seems that the French are producing bad pols on an industrial scale). To give you a small idea of the shortsightedness and sectarism of Clemenceau, consider this: He opposed Pasteur and his discoveries for years on the sound scientific basis that Pasteur was a Catholic and Clemenceau hated all Christians. Now that's an open mind.

So Wilson and Clemenceau, in cahoot with the Brits, managed to win WWI at a staggering cost in human lives, and then proceeded to wreck the Austro-Hungrian Empire -- the only thing that was preventing utter chaos in the Balkans -- and saddle Germany with impossibly high war damage tributes. This, as we know, cleared up the path for Uncle Adolph and his NSDAP, as well as the various Major Unpleasantness that followed up to this day.

Woodrow Wilson shares History's limelight as the Co-father of WWII and the Wrecker of the Balkans. Great job.

One should be worried about the works of a fundation that thinks Wilson was a great guy. Was are they going to simulate with this game? How to piss up as many dangerous people as possible and survive the ensuing nuclear winter?

-- SysKoll

Hmmm...

[Cruciform]

Funny this should be announced right after those ex-Dynamix guys released PornStar3D.

Maybe the government wants to invest in buying them a better engine :)