PAXsims reaches a quarter-million page views

Today PAXsims reached a total of 250,000 page views since it was first established in January 2009. During that time we’ve featured some 791 articles and postings by some forty contributors.

Where do our visitors come from? WordPress doesn’t provide tracking data that stretches back to the beginning, but a review of visitors over the past year reveals the following distribution:

Country	Views
United States	45.1%
Canada	11.0%
UK	7.9%
Germany	2.9%
Australia	2.5%
France	2.4%
Nertherlands	2.2%
Spain	2.0%
Italy	1.7%
India	1.4%
Sweden	1.2%
Brazil	1.0%
Phillipines	0.9%
Belgium	0.9%
Poland	0.9%
Japan	0.9%
Turkey	0.7%
Russia	0.7%
Czech Republic	0.6%
others	13.4%

Thus, around two-thirds of our readers are coming from the US, Canada, and the UK. The remaining one-third, however, have come from 182 countries and territories around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia. Other than Cape Verde, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo, Papua New-Guinea, Turkmenistan, and a few small island republics in the Pacific, that’s pretty much everywhere.

Currently, we’re receiving about 5,000 page views per month. We’ve had 831 comments posted by readers, with our most prolific commentator being Brian Train (aka “The Great Designer“).

Our most popular posts have asked whether video games “precision weapons in the Pentagon’s propaganda wars”, announced the then-forthcoming (and now much-lauded) COIN game A Distant Plain, and reviewed the videogame Rulers of Nations. More recently, almost two thousand people have read our overview of gaming the crisis in the Ukraine. We’ve published 49 book and game reviews to date, and generally the number of PAXsims visitors spikes a little when we publish game and book reviews. However, we have trouble keeping up with the number of new titles being published. If you are well-qualified in peace and conflict simulation and might be interested in reviewing relevant material, let us know. We’re also interested in other possible contributions.

We look forward to the next quarter million visitors with an interest in conflict simulation and serious games. And if you know anyone in Cape Verde, send them a link!