Agent-based modelling and the US troop surge in Afghanistan

The latest issue of the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation 9, 2 (April 2012) is now out. Most of it is devoted to technical discussions of “Resuability, Interoperability and Composability in Air Warfare Simulations,” but it does also feature an interesting and well-written piece by John Sokolowski, Catherine Banks, and Brent Morrow on “Using an agent-based [...]

Review: Sabin, Simulating War

Review of: Philip Sabin, Simulating War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games (London: Continuum, 2012). 363pp. USD$34.95 hc. Professor Philip Sabin is a highly regarded military historian, well-known for his MA course on conflict simulation at King’s College London. His 2009 book Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World was an innovative examination of warfare in [...]

simulations miscellany, 6 March 2012

Some recent gaming news that caught our eye here at PAXsims… * * * At Foreign Policy Magazine, Michael Peck offers five reasons why video games are lousy propaganda. His piece spins off from the ongoing saga of American ex-Marine/ex-game designer Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, whose espionage conviction (and death sentence) in Iran has now been sent [...]

The Afghan Provincial Reconstruction game

Today a group of volunteer students from my POLI 450 (Peacebuilding) course at McGill University helped me playtest the Afghan Provincial Reconstruction game produced by LEC Management. The game was designed by Roger Mason (LECMgt) and Joe Miranda, with input from Eric Patterson at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown [...]

Peacekeeping the Game

Peacekeeping the Game is  a relatively simple 3-4 player boardgame developed by Michael Goon (Yeshiva University) that explores the challenge of long-term peace building in fragile and conflict-affected countries: Political science students face the difficult challenge of understanding the obstacles to resolving intrastate conflict. Often, instructors will use negotiation-based role-playing simulations to model arduous discussions between [...]

Inside the Haiti Earthquake: student perspectives on a serious game

For the last two years I have used the interactive online game Inside the Haiti Earthquake as one of the “required readings” for my upper-level course on peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction at McGill University. The simulation challenges players to assume the role of an earthquake survivor, an aid worker, or a journalist, and in so [...]

Serious gaming the challenges of humanitarian preparedness

Pablo Suarez (associate director of programmes at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre) was kind enough to drop us a note highlighting some of the work that they have been doing over the past few years using serious games to highlight and address the humanitarian consequences of climate change and extreme weather events. Some of this work has been [...]

Holiday games for policy wonks

Over at his regular column at Foreign Policy magazine, Michael Peck plays Santa and recommends 7 Holiday Games for Wonks. But what about the wonks? What holiday treats await those who enjoy subtler games — those that illustrate the currents of history, illuminate the intricacies of politics, and explain why the world is and what it [...]

Gaming military coups

PAXsims is pleased to feature a contribution from game designer Brian Train on a political-military issue that has received relatively little attention to date from published boardgames: the military coup d’état. * * * When I was a boy, there were certain books on my father’s shelf that I found interesting, first for their covers [...]

Simulating the Green Revolution

Engineers without Borders (Canada) has put together a very thoughtful educational roleplaying game about the positive and negative effects of the “green revolution,” based on an earlier online version first developed by Ricardo Salvador at Iowa State University. Designed to be played by up to 30 participants over an hour, farming households must choose between varieties [...]

Playing at the Eurozone crisis

How could we have missed this? Last month the European Central Bank has recently launched an iPhone and iPad version of its monetary policy game €conomia. The actual game is flashy (with catchy music too), but at its core very simple indeed: you simply adjust interest rates to keep inflation under control. That’s it. You needn’t worry [...]

Gaming an Israeli strike against Iran

Over the past couple of years at PAXsims we’ve highlighted several crisis simulations that have explored a possible Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear facilities (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In recent weeks the world has seen renewed speculation about such an attack, in part because of press reports from [...]

Review: Rulers of Nations

There are a few global political simulations available to computer gamers—perhaps the most ambitious of them all is Rulers of Nations: Geopolitical Simulator 2, by the French simulation and serious games company EverSim. In it, players are presented with a truly overwhelming number of choices: c170 playable countries (plus their various regions), online or solo [...]

Michael Peck’s (simulated) Small War

We’ve discussed Urbansim—the US Army’s “serious game” intended to hone counterinsurgency skills of military officers—several times in the past on PAXsims (such as here and here). Now Michael Peck of the Training & Simulation Journal has had a chance to play it through a few times. He reports on his impressions at Foreign Policy Magazine: I’m no strategist. I [...]

Review: Fate of the World

Fate of the World. Red Redemption, 2011. $9.99. Available for MS Windows and Mac OS. * * * I  had been intending for some time to do a review of the environmental management computer game Fate of the World, which was released earlier this year by the serious game developers at Red Redemption. Red Redemption [...]