Our longstanding interest in Serious Games extended during the past year to the Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition organized by Josh Fouts and Doug Thomas at USC sponsored by the Lounsbery Foundation. First place went to PeaceMaker, a cross-cultural political video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which can be used to promote a peaceful resolution among Israelis, Palestinians and young adults worldwide. Congratulations to Asi Burak and PeaceMaker team members at Carnegie-Mellon.
A little history of our involvement with gaming: Swedish economist Ingolf Stahl first involved Jesse in interactive gaming in 1980-1981, when Ingolf, Jesse, Jennifer Robinson, and John Lathorp built a board game and two computer games about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming (described in Jennifer Robinson and Jesse H. Ausubel, A Game Framework for Scenario Generation for the CO2 Issue, Simulation and Games 14(3):317-344). The 1981 paper, Ingolf Stahl and Jesse H. Ausubel, Estimating the Future Input of Fossil Fuel CO2 into the Atmosphere by Simulation Gaming (IIASA Working Paper-81-107, published in Beyond the Energy Crisis-Opportunity and Challenge, Rocco.A. Fazzolare and Craig B. Smith, eds., Oxford, Pergamon, 1981) was the first paper to introduce the idea of greenhouse gas emission trading. Jesse’s 1988 book with Robert Herman, Cities and their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future, found its way to the brilliant young Will Wright, and Will made terrific use of it in his first 1989 release of SimCity, for which Jesse had the great opportunity to be a beta tester. Jesse wonders whether he still somewhere has the diskettes of the beta version. Will opened Jesse’s eyes to modern simulation and helpfully advised Jesse and Bill Massey on the creation of the university simulator, Virtual U . (For the game history: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/jesse/vupenn.pdf). Virtual U provided the kernel around which the enterprising Ben Sawyer (https://www.dmill.com) and Dave Rejeski nucleated the Serious Games initiative. Jesse still hopes to find a programmer who would take the 1981 Greenhouse Effect board game and turn it into an on-line game.