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

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)!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.)

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.