A recently declassified U.S. war simulation conducted in 1999 by U.S. Central Command to explore post-occupation Iraq scenarios illustrates the use of war gaming within the U.S. government. The formerly secret simulation, called Desert Crossing, included 70 military, diplomatic and intelligence participants who role-played for the exercise. The simulation and seminar was essentially a change management workshop designed to minimize undesireable effects in a post-Saddam Iraq. The simulation relied on a series of descriptive worst-case and most-likely-case scenarios that were intended to be plausible, not predictive, and to present a range of ...

New Yorker reporter John Seabrook writes about Will Wright and his upcoming release of his new game, “Spore” by Electronic Arts. Seabrook provides a brief history of gaming, starting with Atari’s Pong, developed by Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn and advancing to “God games” in the late 80s. Seabrook writes: Computer animation is a brute-force project of converting graphic art into two-dimensional pixels, and, more recently, into three-dimensional polygons, the building blocks of digital pictures. But to create a truly absorbing simulation, one that offers some insight into the nature of real life, is a much more ...

In Oil God your goal is to drive up gas prices over five simulated years by altering the social, environmental, and political structures of citizens in your unhappy world. You control a world of nine countries, each with its own economy, politics, natural resources and geography. Some countries are net oil importers and others are exporters. As Oil God, you can start wars, introduce natural disasters, and disrupt economies. Your extensive toolkit includes war, civial war, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, and even alien invasions.

The Trade Ruler Game explores Nobel prize winner Bertil Ohlin’s theory of international trade and economic growth, called the Heckscher-Ohlin model, which is based on David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. In the game, the production of goods and services requires capital and workers. Some goods are capital intensive and others are labor intensive.

New Yorker author Malcolm Gladwell reviews the book "Live from New York" which analyzes the extraordinary creativity and talent emerging from the early days of the popular U.S. TV program "Saturday Night Live". Gladwell explains that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction—conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're onto something.