More serious games (or playful tools): "futures-related wargaming specialists" Alidade Incorporated will hold a three-day "wargame" this June, based on the work of Thomas Barnett

This three-day executive-level wargame will "pit business leaders, military strategists and government policy makers against each other in a realistic, role-playing competition designed to provide players with an intimate understanding of how the near future may unfold"

If you want to play The New Map Game, too, and you have a bunch of dough, you can sign up here.

But I'm getting more and more interested in what open source, citizen-developed versions of these games might look like. What would a worldchanging game look like? At very least, I'm thinking that a serious games tournament/ design competition might be fun and useful. Any ideas?

Well suprise, suprise: War and peace is now a computer game for those with money instead of a real-life game for those with money.

Hopefully this means they can leave the other 90% of society out of their disputes.

Posted by: Paul on April 21, 2005 5:46 AM

I think Bruce Sterling did an excellent job in Islands in the Net of describing how this could work.

I've collected some resources and sketched out the idea here:

http://breakset.com/wiki.phtml?title=WorldRun

If someone wanted to pick this up and run with it I'd be glad to contribute feedback and provide testing and design guidelines.

Enjoy!

Posted by: Jason Michael Smithson on April 21, 2005 7:25 AM

Jason: very interesting, thanks.

Alex, I think the difference between citizen-developed games and "executives-only" ones, is that in the first case the same people who develop the game (not only the technical part, but also the strategy, etc), are also the players.

Therefore, having deeper knowledge of the system, they can always contribute in improving the games themselves.

(this goes in my to-do list...)

Posted by: Gillo Cutrupi on April 22, 2005 2:07 PM