Simutrans

I stumbled over this while googling "simulation game engines." It's called SimuTrans. It's a free transportation simulation game for Windows, Mac and Linux. It's like SimCity but instead of building a city you're trying to maximize your profits by building a transportation network.

It looks cool, but it's complex and the instructions are not clear.

Serious Game Engine Shootout

From Serious Games Source: this article covers game engines for serious games. These might be overkill for a policy simulation, but interesting to see what is out there.

Sustainability Game

Here is a sustainability game. I wasn't able to play it through because my connection froze.
From what I saw, the idea of the game is to make choices that create a sustainable lifestyle
for your character. In the upper left hand corner of the screen is a globe graphic image that tells you how many earths you would need to sustain this lifestyle if... (everyone were to live it?).

From a game design perspective I liked having an immediate, tangible metric available to tell
me how I was doing. Good player feedback is critical for engaging games. I also liked the fact that
the player had to create an onscreen player character. The character creation was amusing and easy. It could be skipped entirely in which case the default character would be the onscreen persona.

In comparison to the Chevron Energyville game I played last week this one was far more engaging. First, having the onscreen persona makes the game feel more personal. Psychologist and marketers have shown ad nauseum that faces make a difference to people. Messages that
include a face, drawn or photographed, are generally more effective than those without it.
In cybernations a simple face animation is used to represent the happiness of a nation's people.
It goes from frowning to smiling depending on how well the player is doing. It is surprisingly effective at keeping me attentive to the happiness attribute. Feedback images, in place of numbers, are a powerful tool for providing feedback to the player. Feedback images are their own reward or punishment. Players will work to manipulate the image and thus they are an effective tool for managing play, when used sparingly and appropriately.

I'll make some more comments on the sustainability game when I can get a good connection to it.

A Battery Variable for PHEV game

Lithium-ion batteries are not a stable technology yet. Batteries would be an important part of a PHEV game simulation. Producers need to get their price points down to attract customers but that means bringing the price of the battery packs down. Lower priced batteries require engineering breakthroughs which have, historically, made the batteries more vulnerable to fire.

...

Cost reduction isn’t the only driving force behind the evolutionary march of Li-ion batteries. The desire to extend battery life, achieve higher energy densities and faster charging times, and improve reliability has led to a constant tinkering of the technology. Energy densities are double what they were five years ago, for example, and new surface coatings are being applied to make the batteries more stable and reduce their reactivity rates.

Ever-Increasing Demands, More Trade-offs

The trade-offs inherent in these often mutually exclusive goals make for a diabolical design challenge: You can make a Li-ion battery that has high performance, for example, but the trade-off is a shorter life. And as every design engineer knows, making the right trade-offs and getting everything right takes time, experience, and a bit of finesse.

“A problem doesn’t necessarily pop up during the first generation of cells,” says Miller. “Things may look fine in the lab and then when you go to production you find that the technology behaves in a slightly different way, which means things can and do go wrong.”

...

- http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-problems/...

The battery will be a key component in a PHEV simulation game.

Cybernations Experience

I have registered a nation at cybernations.net to see how it works. My nations is called HFCVland. We are committed to alternative fuel research and free love. We started out Jewish, by ethnicity and religion, but the people of my nation wanted to journey "the eightfold path" so I converted the national religion to Buddhism. I don't know how these things work into the simulation other than that if you listen to your people their happiness rating goes up.

The interaction with other players seems to be where the excitement is. I've received many private messages asking me to join various alliances and offering me substantial amounts of game money to do so. The alliances have their own off-site forums where members plot and plan. I haven't joined one yet. Some of them require oaths and initiation processes. One of them even has a code of honor.

The players have built their own world on top of the game. The game itself seems a bit tedious at this point, collect taxes once a turn (day), buy some soldiers, land, or infrastructure and read your messages. I've invested less than an hour into the game soI'm sure I don't understand it fully but I my suspicion is that the players stay with the game because it provides a context for interesting interactions.

Cybernation.net is not a "serious game," which is what we will be doing. However, it is a popular example of computer simulation gaming. Since I'm reading up on game design theory it is helpful to get to know games that have commonalities with our expected project.

Military Simulations

The Pentagon's Sentient World Simulation (SWS) will simulate the entire earth for the purpose of testing psychological operations. The simulation goes down to the level of individual persons, represented by billions of nodes.

...
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
...
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/

My technical concern with this project would be the complexity. Errors accumulate within assumptions for models. A small error at a sensitive point in a model can seriously impact the outcome of a model run. Serious errors that generate ridiculous outcomes actually aren't so bad; the model is off and it appears to be off. What's worse is a not so serious error, one that leads to a plausible outcome from the model. In that case the model is off but it appears to be on. At high degrees of complexity the object interactions are so numerous that it is almost impossible to know if all of them went as the system designer intended.

Other links:

http://www.purdue.edu/acsl/abstract/march10_06.html

https://www.dmso.mil/public/dmsc_presentations/Cerri_JFCOM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Environment_for_Analysis_and_Simulations


Here is an older (2001), general information article on the use of simulation games in training military personnel at all levels. The article mentioned a book about the history of video games called Joystick Nation that sounds like it may be worth a look.

Introduction

I'm here to post information on computer based simulation gaming. My primary interest is in simulations designed to aid in decision making, although simulations designed purely for entertainment such as The Sims may also be covered at times.