Simulation and gaming miscellany, 22 August 2023

PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) gaming that may be of interest to our readers.

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The winners for the Games for Change 2023 Awards were announced last month:

With over 400 entries received this year, our esteemed panel of jurors, comprised of industry experts spanning game design/development, technology, media, learning, and social impact, undertook a rigorous evaluation process and narrowed it down to the following 10 winners:

• Game of the Year, Most Significant Impact – Endling – Extinction is Forever (Herobeat Studios)
• Most Innovative – Terra Nil (Free Lives)
• Best Narrative – Gerda: A Flame In Winter (Bird Island [ex-PortaPlay])
• Best Student Game – (val)iant: or, val’s guide to having a broken vag (Cactus Studio)
• Best Learning Game – Go Nisha Go™ – My Life My Choice (Howard Delafield International, LLP)
• Best XR4C Experience – Body of Mine VR (Cameron Kostopoulos)
• Best Health Game – Luna’s Light (ImpactVR)
• Best Civics Game – Cat Park (Tilt)
• Best Gameplay – I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (Northway Games)
• Best Board or Tabletop Game for Impact – SHASN: AZADI (Abhishek Lamba and Zain Memon for Memesys Games)

In addition to the above games and immersive experiences, we also recognized The LEGO Groupas the Industry Leadership winner, Grace Collins as the 2023 Vanguard recipient, Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo as the Giving Award recipient, Destiny 2 and Bungie as the Accessibility Award winner, and Alan Gershenfeld as the inaugural G4C Hall of Change recipient! 

A recent International Science Reserve webinar discussed “Role-Playing Crisis: Serious Games Help Scientists and Policymakers Prepare for Real-Life Disasters.“

The Conflict Simulation Group of the University of Würzburg recently held a workshop on conflict simulation design at the the international Digital Humanities conference DH2023.

The overall aim of the workshop was to introduce participants to the use of conflict simulations as a didactical tool. After a brief introduction the participants were confronted with a specific historical problem and then tasked with turning this problem into a playable prototype. Participants had to decide how to model topography on a game board, which scale to use, which aspects to include and how – and if at all – to include probabilistic processes.

For that purpose, the workshop was divided up into six groups of two or three participants each, and each group was provided with a simple starter kit including a number of different dice, counters and tokens. Each group had several hours time to develop, play-test and fine-tune its design, and in the afternoon, each group presented its results in a roundtable session. While the main purpose of the workshop was to introduce participants to the general problem of how to model a complex problem by using simple techniques, the variety of solutions produced for one and the same historical problem was quite fascinating.

You can read more about it at their blog.

At the No Dice, No Glory blog, Caroline Gilmore discusses attending her very first Connections US conference earlier this summer.

According to Business Insider, the developers of the game Cities Skylines 2 “are trying to create ‘the most realistic city simulation ever’—one in which “one which involves homelessness, Gen Z going broke, and tragic car accidents.”

In-game households could plunge into homelessness if they are poor, are unable to find a new apartment, and lack funds to leave the city, the developers wrote in a blog post published Monday.

“In this case, they can live in the city parks until their living situation changes,” said the game’s development studio, Colossal Order.

But it’s not all doom and gloom — the game presents these issues as solvable — if the cities are well planned.

On the flip side, mismanaging this virtual city could lead to a cascade of economic woes — from families being unable to pay rent, to sweeping layoffs and company bankruptcies, according to footage from the game’s developers.

The game — which will be released on October 24 — allows players to build and simulate their own cities which “evolve and react” to player choices.

And player choices can make a city lean towards utopia or dystopia.

Cities Skylines 2’s simulation “reacts” to player decisions through traffic accidents if there is a failure to maintain the city’s roads well, trash piling up in city landfills, choking pollution from burning non-renewables, and sewage contaminating a city’s water supply if disposed of poorly.

The Japan Forum for Strategic Studies recently conducted a two day wargame, examining the challenges the Japanese government might face in response to a supposed invasion of Taiwan by China. According to Japan News, participants included “Liberal Democratic Party Diet members and former members of the Self-Defense Forces”. ” as well as “members from a research institution in Taiwan.”

The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE), the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence for terrorism prevention and counterterrorism research based at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, recently announced funding for a new series of research projects. One of those addresses the use of wargames to examine emerging terrorist threats.

Using Simulations and War Games for the Homeland Security Workforce

Research Team: David Schanzer, J.D. (Duke University), Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, J.D., Ph.D. (Valens Global), Jessica Sperling, Ph.D. (Duke University) 

Interest in games has grown among government, academic, and private sector stakeholders. Observers believe well-designed games better approximate the real-world experiences of practitioners and decision-makers than do other classroom experiences. However, training advantages remain understudied.

This project will contribute to filling this knowledge gap with innovative games to demonstrate principles of accelerationism in American towns today.

The 2023 Serious Play conference will be held at Toronto Metropolitan University on 11-13 October.

You have just one week left in which to complete the 2023 Great Wargaming Survey, by the publishers of Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy.