Routledge released my new book, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History May 16th.  I’m very excited for its release as, to my knowledge, it is the only book of its kind anywhere: a practical guidebook taking history and social studies teachers through all the steps of designing and implementing lessons and units using simulation games: selecting games, planning lessons, managing classes, and designing activities and assessments. Although its core audience is high school history teachers, educators at the middle school and college level, will, I believe, find the book useful. Play the Past was kind enough to ask me to spread the word on their site, and so, I’ll take the space to explain how I got to Gaming the Past and why it’s important.
I began teaching high school history immediately after I finished my Ph.D. at Ohio State (2000). In those days I was teaching at a boarding school for boys who had not yet succeeded at academics. Simulations of the pen-and-paper variety quickly became part of my repertoire. Somehow there was a world of difference between asking students to list the features of Soviet propaganda in the early years and having them pretend to be Soviet propaganda ministers designing their own campaign. I was dabbling back then (I like to call it experimenting now), but I found that simulations gripped students in a way few other instructional strategies could. When I relocated to Cincinnati Country Day School in 2002, a new world opened for me. Country Day was the first independent school (probably the first school) to implement a 1-to-1 laptop program for its students, grades 5-12. Equally as important, it’s simply an amazing place built on a terrific student body and faculty. Over the next few years I explored the effective use of computers in the classroom as research and note-taking tools, learning from my colleagues and trying out my own ideas. I continued to play with tabletop simulations along the way and began to experiment with video games, first using Civilization III in the class, then Rome: Total War.

At the time there was very little available in the way of centralized comprehensive resources for teaching with simulation games in history. More to the point, too few of the resources were practical enough. By practical, I mean, providing specific and concrete ways that a teacher can use a tool in his/her class. This was even true for pen-and-paper simulations There were interesting and helpful articles from the 90s here and there about simulations teachers had designed, especially in the History Teacher, but the major works on classroom simulation had been written in the 70s, at the crest of the wave of simulation excitement that spread through some circles of education beginning in the late 60s. These tended to be completely outdated at worst and certainly not up-to-date from a pedagogical perspective Essentially, I was left to my own resources and those few terrific articles and books from the past. I did keep hoping to strike the mother lode, the book that would serve as a foundation and allow me to improvise.

Fortunately for me, Kurt Squire—now associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, home to an exceptional group of scholars investigating the power of games as learning tools in all facets of society—heard about my experiment. (check out his new book) He invited me to be part of a panel on the use of Civilization as a learning tool at the Education Arcade in LA 2005, a MIT/UWD initiative on games and learning. When I went I found that in a conference on games and education, I was one of very few high school teachers present (or middle and lower school teachers for that matter). I was very graciously received and learned two critical points that shaped the next six years of my work on historical simulation games.

1. Classroom teachers’ perspectives on games and learning were not well known or widely expressed at that point.
2. There was a terrific amount of theoretical and experimental work on the value of games in learning taking place, but too little of it was being translated into practical classroom guidelines for teachers.

I thought that I might best play a part in the growth of simulation games as teaching tools by bridging theory and practice, taking what I’d gleaned from the theory, and then communicating what I had tried in the classroom, why I did, and what I’d learned that could be useful to teachers.

Since then, I have worked on helping other teachers implement simulation-based lessons, even launching this resource website for teachers. Along the way I have met a number of teachers who also experiment with using games effectively in the classroom. It is still the case, however, that the teacher who wants to start from scratch and learn the practice of effective game use has very few places to turn. There are presentations here and there at conferences, but few make their way out of those conferences to a wider audience. The burgeoning academic field has produced many excellent writings on games and learning, but these do not tend to address specific classroom practices. Reports on classroom games and learning by various educational presses have tended to be so broad in coverage that they still leave readers with the basic response: “This is great; I’m ready to use simulation games! I still have no idea how to do it.” Despite this lack of resources, many teachers have pioneered their own way through the landscape of simulation-based lessons. Some even share their experiences on the Web and at conferences like the GLS. That’s terrific, but it is also a very hard way to spread what I believe should be such a critical part of 21st century history education. Teachers already have so much on their plates; having to craft entirely new pedagogies from a few scattered case studies and tips should not be among them (unless, of course, they happen to enjoy it). Not when the potential of historical simulations as learning tools is so great.

So that was the motivation for GTP, the hope that providing a first take on a teacher’s guidebook would empower more teachers to develop simulation-based lessons, and share their experiences. It is being marketed to education programs for pre-service social studies teachers, but it is my sincere hope that it will be equally as useful to practicing teachers who will do incredible things with simulation games if they have just a bit more practical guidance. Ideally, it will confirm and give more ideas to teachers who are already using simulation games in the class and inspire a number who aren’t to take the leap. If you do happen across it, please let me know what you think.

Of course the unexamined game can be well worth playing if the goal is simply to enjoy and recreate—though I’d wager that many players reflect actively on their experiences in games. Enjoyment should always be a primary purpose of games. When the focus shifts to simulation games and the formal study of the past, however, there is little point to the unexamined game.

Two not particularly difficult paradoxes that are interesting in their ramifications for simulation games and learning, set the stage for this post.

1. “Though it is not an entirely historical game overall, the game does convey a sense of the Court atmosphere at Versailles.  However,  Courtisans of Versailles is ultimately better suited for the purpose of entertainment than that of education.” (please note that writer accurately noted the game title–the game was translated from the French into English as the Courtisans of Versailles, complete with the misspelling and the association with prostitution). This was the thesis recently advanced by a student tasked with critiquing a simulation game in a senior elective on simulations and the French Revolution. The paper was masterfully written, praising the game for promoting rivalries and antagonistic behavior between players that reflected some of what the evidence about court life at turn of the 17^th century Versailles suggests. More space was devoted to taking the game to task for its simplifications involving how court influence was acquired, maintained, and quantified.  One might suppose that, as the teacher who assigned the simulation game, I would be troubled by the student’s indictment of the game. Quite the contrary.  Finding the student in the commons, I praised the paper and noted the irony that, in arguing so effectively that the game is “better suited for the purpose of entertainment than that of education,” the student simply proved that the game was perfectly suited to the purpose of education. The student smiled and nodded.

2. On a recent episode of the podcast, Three Moves Ahead, from the strategy games blog Flash of Steel, the question of the day was raised by a listener’s post: “Is there something inherently tasteless in wargames?” Host Troy Goodfellow broadened this into the more meaningful topic of discussion, “What are the ethics of wargames?” The discussion was a fascinating and substantive one that provides provocative thought for any interested in how games represent reality and the ethical issues of simplification ( link to the podcast). One of the major issues was whether the level of abstraction in large scale war-games, operational and strategic wargames ranging from the classic hex and counter games of Avalon Hill to Civilization and Defcon was inherently immoral insofar as these depictions, in their abstraction, do not offer any significant treatment of the human costs of war—death, destruction, misery, and suffering. So, for example, one can detonate a nuclear warhead in an enemy city in Civ without any real appreciation of the human consequences. Similarly one can occupy a city with a division in an operational wargame, but since the city is represented by a hex on the map and the division by a counter, there is no representation of the potential horrors that historically have arisen when enemy forces occupying a captured city. There were many valid points made and it is certainly a fascinating question that should be pursued: is there something inherently immoral or amoral about strategy games—first person shooters are a different matter and not the focus of the podcast—that focus on historical conflicts but do so at a high enough level of abstraction that the human costs of war are ignored. The conversants were all clearly interested in the issue, had an outstanding command of the topic, and were aware of the simplifications of the genre and the ethical problems that could pose. I was struck at one particular point toward the end of the podcast when the following point was raised during a long dissection of the authorial intention in Defcon (and I apologize for not knowing the names of the speakers): (52:01)

• Speaker 1: The great thing about any sort of creative work is that you can take away many meanings. I can be repelled by Defcon, and I am. I can also take a really dark unholy satisfaction in it … I can take the satisfaction of  watching that one nuke that the other guy isn’t in a position to block go arcing across the globe to wipe out like 25 million people in Moscow, and there’s nothing he can do about it and you hit it and you see 25 million people erased because you time [that nuclear strike] perfectly. You are, like, the nuke launcher king. Yes that’s repulsive …
• Speaker 2: (interrupts) Good God we’re all going to Hell [brief laughter from the panel]
• Speaker 1: But I’m also absolutely thrilled. And I don’t think those [feelings] have to be exclusive.

I am confident that the second speaker was not staking a metaphysical claim, but simply commenting on the apparent immorality of feeling the pride of a victorious gamer when the success is tied up in an act that, in the real world would be horrific beyond comprehension. But here’s the point that came to mind, so similar in its nature to my response to the student’s paper. The very fact that these people were concerned about the ethical ramifications of these games enough to think about them as they played, raise the question for the podcast, discuss the issues in detail, express some moral ambivalence, and note the great glossing over of human suffering means that for these players, playing wargames was not an immoral act.

Socrates, if Plato is to be believed, when convicted of corrupting youth and teaching that the gods were false asserted that he would, if exiled, simply go to another city and continue to engage in his dialectic with anyone who would pause long enough to engage. He could not remain silent for he claimed, “to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to humanity, and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Apology 38a; Fowler trans. Perseus Site http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Apol.+38a&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0169. I opted for “humanity” rather than “man”for ἀνθρώπῳ) What I assume he meant, or at least what his words have meant to me is that to be a lifelong learner/ educated human being/ seeker of truth/ philosopher (pick your preferred term) is predicated on the drive to explore and examine, to question and challenge all components of the human experience. To live life without doing so is certainly possible, but the hallmark of the critical approach to anything is to slow down, examine and question. When we do, we engage in meaningful intellectual activity that will, in the long run certainly and often enough in the short run, broaden our capacity to analyze, our ability to understand, in short our intellectual selves.

Using simulation games effectively for the pursuit of forming, challenging, and understanding interpretations of the past (and present for that matter), must follow the dictates set out by Socrates. Clearly this dictate was followed practiced by my student when he wrote and the hosts of Three Moves Ahead that day. Simulation games are models, and representations, of no particular value for deep learning unless they are reflected upon, dissected and analyzed. In a very real sense, this is the primary goal of teachers, to get their students to pause, analyze, use, and reflect what they would otherwise have happily scanned and passed by.  Teachers of English literature ask students to make margin notes, follow themes, have discussions about character and plot and write papers about the works they read. Science teachers encourage students to ask why some people lose their hearing and others do not, why objects thrown up in the air come down the way they do, etc. Film study classes explore the meaning in a director’s choice of set pieces.

What are the implications of this idea, that from the perspective of teaching and learning about the past, the unexamined simulation game is not worth playing? Three immediately come to mind:

1. The educator using simulation games must slow students down. The purpose of using simulation games, after all, should not be primarily to enjoy the game or somehow extract learning from the game independent of any formal reflective experience. My most avid game players would far rather play a game at home than for my class knowing that I will ask them to observe, note, predict, and critique based on what they experience in the game. But it is exactly those activities that make the simulation game a valid tool, just as they make works of popular fiction and cinema valid for use in learning.
2. If analysis and critique, problem solving and skill building, are the most important goals, it matters less whether teachers use simulation games that are more or less accurate, so long as they provide the necessary support, structure, access to evidence, and guidance to allow students to critique simulations. While it is certainly far from the case that all games are inherently valuable for the purposes of formally studying the past, it is also not the case that the current crop of commercial historical simulation games is categorically too flawed to be used in the class. There is little reason to suppose that formally trashing a flawed game model is inherently less valuable from an intellectual perspective than validating a plausible one. If we want our students to think and challenge, we cannot only present them with valid models. I suggested in my last post that a perfectly valid model of the past is not a useful concept anyway. Even if it were, if students know they will only receive valid models, won’t  that just reinforce the role of the teacher as sole figure of authority and knowledge and their own roles as the recipients of knowledge rather than active meaning makers?
3. This suggestion that education requires reflection and perhaps even social reflection simply reinforces the critical importance of the teacher as guide in any serious use of simulation games. Some have, mistakenly in my mind, suggested that games can teach effectively without teachers or with minimal teacher interaction. Perhaps they can teach some things, but even in Socrates’ day, the importance of a teacher willing to challenge, ask questions, demand evidence, guide lines of inquiry and promote examination was well known. The teacher need not—I suggest should not—be seen as the source of all knowledge, but they must be seen as a highly competent guide. After all, Socrates, again if Plato is to be believed, said he was wise only insofar as he knew he knew nothing. Yet somehow through the modeling of techniques of inquiry this knower of nothing helped spawn the foundations of modern logic and reasoning. A teacher skilled in the methods of inquiry and the rules of evidence for the discipline, as well as in the ways humans learn, will always be a critical asset to foundational learning with simulation games or without—the figure that can help learners pause to examine what would ordinarily have been left undisturbed.

– Jeremiah McCall

Since this is my first posting on Play the Past, however, it seems like a good idea to offer a few comments on my frame of reference, in particular my understanding of how commercial simulation games should be handled–at least by history teachers and student historians, perhaps even by professional historians. First, as I have argued at greater length in an article and a forthcoming book, simulation games are interpretations, not oracles. As such they will contain a number of historical inaccuracies, particularly when it comes to core details. Asking whether a historical simulation game is accurate as if that were an all-or-nothing quality seems to me to be missing the point—the accuracy of any historical interpretation is not something that can be determined with any certainty. One historian’s common sense convention is another’s faulty construct to be dismantled. One generation’s conventions are the next’s biased assumptions. What really matters in historical interpretations is the extent to which any particular one is constructed based on the strongest, most defensible readings of evidence and the best supported and culturally sensitive understandings of human behavior. So, a far better criterion than accuracy when critiquing a historical simulation game is whether its core gameplay offers defensible explanations of historical causes and systems. So for example, it is not a question of whether a civilization building game allows a player to develop nuclear fission in the 17^th century, but whether the game reasonably models the factors, including constraints, that lead to the development of such technologies. This focus on defensible models of causation is absolutely critical when one’s interests, like mine, center on using simulations as models to aid student (most often high school, but middle school and college as well) in understanding historical systems and learning to critique interpretations of the past. Let me be clear on the term interpretation here. We do not access the past directly nor do we present the past directly; we can only access and construct interpretations. This is true whether the interpretation comes from the Roman historian Livy, the modern historian McCall, or the game designers at Firefly. In this light, so long as a game’s core gameplay is historically defensible, any, even many inaccuracies serve as highly useful targets for getting students to launch evidence-based critiques. Evidence-based critiques is the operative term; simulation games should be critiqued using abundant references to the contents of valid sources of historical evidence.

Another point, made much more briefly, is that suggesting students and others can benefit from, critiquing historical simulation games as an intellectual exercise does not require or even warrant thinking the designers of these games intended to create models that would stand up to serious historical analysis. Sid Meier, designer of the Civilization series, has noted many times that his epic world history game was designed to be fun first and that the historical research was added only after the fact (most recently in his interview about Civ 5for Kotaku talk radio http://kotaku.com/5531995/an-hour-of-sid-meier-brilliance-including-his-surprise-guitar-hero-regret). Most game designers are focused on providing engaging, entertaining experiences, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Firefly has made two great games that I have enjoyed for years.

Now, on to the analysis. Today I want to focus on CivCity:Rome. I was going to go through both games but realized I might spend forever doing so—I’ll come back to Stronghold 2 in a future post. Just in case anyone is less familiar with the such games, the city-builder is a popular genre of PC strategy game where a player constructs a city from the ground up in real time and, in doing so, attempts to meet the growing needs and wants of the urban inhabitants. (check out http://www.2kgames.com/civcityrome/ for screenshots and more details). Construction takes place on a plot of land rendered in isometric 3-D. Players place buildings that fulfill a variety of functions for the community, ranging from economic, political, residential, and security functions, to entertainment functions. Many buildings, especially those with economic functions, must be linked together into systems commonly called daisy-chains. In these daisy chains each part of a task is fulfilled by a different building. So, wheat must be grown on a farm, processed in a mill, and made into bread at a bakery before being stored in a central granary. To take a second example, wood is harvested from trees by workers at wood camps then either stored in a central warehouse as surplus or crafted into various products like beds. Essentially then, CC:R revolves around constructing sufficient numbers and varieties of production and supply systems to meet the needs and demands of the populace.

There are many fascinating points of departure when considering how this game models the historical realities of urban Roman cities, but the one I want to explore here is the metric CC:R uses to measure the satisfaction of the populace: happiness. According to the manual, “City happiness is the single most important factor in running a successful city … When your city happiness is positive (shown green) people will come to the city, but when it is negative (shown red) they will start to leave” (p. 18). When one considers again that all city functions must be operated by citizens, it should be clear that the most important measure of success in the game is the happiness rating, for it determines whether the settlement grows or shrinks, directly through population, and by extension through employment in the various productive capacities represented by the buildings.

Time in-game passes in monthly increments. At the beginning of each month, the current happiness rating is modified by the sum of all the happiness modifiers, whether positive or negative. In CC:R these are: wages; rations; work time; civilization (the level of material cultural achievement in the city); city foundation (the initial level of excitement from belonging to a new city); unemployment; housed workers; wonders (whether any wonders of the world have been built, a concept taken from the game’s ostensible parent, Civilization); external events (good and bad news from the empire); and research (certain areas of knowledge, such as mysticism and codes of laws, bring a bonus to happiness, another concept from Civilization).

What should we make of these calculations? To what extent are they defensible representations of the attitudes and motivations of historical Roman city-dwellers? Is ascribing such importance to happiness a seriously anachronistic application of Enlightenment era sensibilities manifested in such documents as the U.S. Declaration of Independence? Did Roman cities function or cease to function primarily because of the happiness of their inhabitants? The answer is yes and no—depending on how one understands the term happiness. (A disclaimer here: I am not going to enter into a philosophical discussion of what true happiness is and its relationship to material goods). CC:R’s measures of happiness are material more often than not: wages, rations, housing, unemployment, even a civilization level, which tends to be measured in terms of buildings and entertainments. And this makes sense for a simulation game. Computers excel at manipulating the quantifiable, and things like rations and wages are easily quantified. Now, certainly Romans, (elite Romans who wrote at least), demonstrated a sensibility that access to material pleasures was helpful in bringing about a measure of what they might term happiness—the efforts of the Stoics to combat this equation notwithstanding. Paintings, sculptures, and exotic foods are all noted sources of pleasure. The graffiti on the walls of cities like Pompeii gives adequate reason to suppose Romans lower on the social ladder had a sense that material things and entertainments brought pleasure if not outright happiness. So the idea that happiness or, if one prefers, satisfying basic physical pleasures was sought after by Romans is reasonable. Going further, the itemization into factors that cause happiness seems to conform to the efforts that Roman emperors, governors, and municipal officials made to placate urban dwellers. The grain dole to feed the urban plebs in the late Republic and Empire, the holding of games, in short the demand of the people for “bread and circuses” that the Roman satirist Juvenal purported to regret bitterly (Satire 10.77–81), were all part of the business of running a city. As for wages and housing, these certainly must have been concerns high on the mind of the poor day laborers that made up the majority of Roman city dwellers, men, women, and children who had to struggle to make ends meet daily.

So to a certain extent it does make good historical sense to suppose that the happiness of the population of a Roman city, so long as we take that to mean satisfaction of basic material desires, was of some interest to a governor who hoped to rule a city effectively. There are some important objections, however, that can be raised to the model. The first is mildly semantic but important nonetheless. Beyond the fact that happiness in the game means largely physical satisfaction, the metric itself would probably be more accurately termed consent to be ruled or, perhaps, toleration of the powers that be. Neither of these is as concise, but they represent what was more likely at play in governing an ancient city. Broadly speaking, it is reasonable to suggest that governing in the ancient world required the active consent of at least some of the governed and the toleration of many more. (This is true today too, but in an age of weapons of mass destruction and the ability to communicate and travel at extremely high rates, one can conceive of a government ruling through far greater coercion). That consent was largely given by the elite members of society because they were able to participate to some extent in ruling, at least at the municipal level, and were able to share in the material benefits of empire including access to goods and luxuries from across the Mediterranean. But what of those from lower social strata, who could not participate as readily in holding the reins of empire? A good case can be made that these people, who made up the vast majority of individuals under Roman control, consented to be ruled by the existing regime so long as their conditions of life were tolerable. Or perhaps to put it another way, it was not so much that their lives had to be tolerable, as it was that they could not reasonably expect to improve their conditions through any radical change. Despite my progression on this track, however, one does not gain much from renaming happiness so long as there is the understanding that we are talking about practical matters involving the condition of life, rather than any spiritual value of happiness.

The second objection that might well be raised is the effects of low happiness on the population. The population simply decreases to represent people emigrating from the city. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that most denizens of Roman cities would flee the cities if there was insufficient access to amenities. Hazarding a guess, presumably fleeing from cities, as those involved in the study of late antiquity would know better, happened mostly through famine, raiders, and other forces that made city life simply untenable. Presumably short of these catastrophic factors, the majority of people would not have had the resources or inclination to travel elsewhere. Certainly they could not easily flee to the countryside, where the demands of subsistence agriculture required a far different skillset than the demands of day-laboring in the cities. To a different city? Perhaps; it is worth noting that the trade and travel networks across the Mediterranean certainly existed, if someone wished to relocate. So it was possible to pick a new city for a new life; that still leaves a big question whether a poor laborer would or could move because there were too few gladiatorial fights. As for the wealthier shopkeepers, artisans, etc. it would presumably be a pretty risky business to pack up wholesale and try to start a new financial effort and life in a distant city. This idea of wide scale travel and relocation by individuals is not characteristic of most people in the pre-industrial world, and I suspect it did not happen with any regularity. It seems like a pretty modern, cosmopolitan projection, especially on the scale modeled in the game where the population can halve or double in a year or two due to the happiness level in the city.

An alternative response to unhappiness that is missing from the game is the better documented riots that could erupt in ancient cities. Riots about shortages of bread, high prices of bread, excessive periods of war, the political and social brushfires of the moment, all of these could and did happen in Rome, and it is reasonable to suppose the same was true of other cities (Thomas Africa, “Urban Violence in Imperial Rome,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2(1971), 2-21, gives a nice survey of various riots that occurred in Rome over the centuries). Here though, we run into another issue in the game’s interpretation. Not only are historically documented riots eschewed in the game in favor of mass immigration and emigration, but the sources of riots, though they certainly could be about bread, could also be about far more sophisticated issues. One of the more notable of these was the protest that arose when a Roman was murdered by one of his slaves and senate made the decision to execute all the slaves in the household, even those innocent of the crime. This was a sentence that was in accordance with Roman law, but ran against the sense of justice of crowds in Rome, who attacked the senate building in protest.(Tacitus narrates this even in his Annals, 14.42-5)

Finally one could criticize the overarching control the player as governor has over the various causes of happiness. CC:R is a command economy the likes of which even Stalin might have envied. Wages, rations, and work time are set directly by the player through a slider. All the other factors are controlled through the buildings the player chooses to build and the research pursued. Here though common sense needs to prevail and mitigate the critique. It would be a very strange city-building game indeed if the player did not have control over these variables. Essentially every city builder to date from SimCity to Citylife has placed the player in ultimate control because, after all, that is the most enjoyable position from which to play in this genre, the position of grand architect and builder.

It is important to note that we have only examined one mechanic in the game and hardly the only major one. That said, what does the game suggest about Roman city-dwellers? Certainly the Roman populace is represented as a very materialistic lot to the exclusion of more lofty concerns. This is oversimplification, but the game does not overly engage in caricature; rather as it simplifies it notes that Roman citizens expected a food supply, baths, entertainment, basic educational facilities (for those who could afford them), and access to the gods, among other things. This is, on a basic model, a helpful illustration of the material culture of urban inhabitants. The use of migration rather than riots is a misrepresentation of how urban inhabitants expressed their discontent with conditions, and the lack of concern for things like justice and peace, is simplistic. On the other hand, the general representation that ruling an ancient city effectively required some form of reciprocity between governor and governed, some form of consent, and that consequently there were limits to the demands and burdens rulers could place on the ruled is a reasonable model to have students experience.

Where does all this leave us? With a simulation game that has defensible interpretations and a host of flaws, just like all simulation game interpretations, and many interpretations crafted in text and image. For my students the crucial next step would be to corroborate and challenge the models in the game using valid historical evidence, especially primary sources of evidence. For the reader who is not one of my students a reminder that, lest we forget after all this analysis, CivCity Rome is an exceedingly fun game.

– Jeremiah McCall

http://www.thecurfewgame.com/

• A white paper on the potential of teaching students to design historical simulations with Inform
• Some small additions to World History and U.S. History simulation games including some new online simulations
• A significantly larger collection of online simulation games about current events (“serious games”)
• Substantial comments and reflections on simultion games about global issues posted by students in a Serious Games and Global Issues Class (Check the Global Hunger and the Environment and Ecopolitics Sections)
• A updated bibliography section

Feedback and contributions are welcome.

The Report

A synopsis from THE