The Magic Circle Principles Of Gaming Simulation

The purpose of this unique book is to outline the core of game science by presenting principles underlying the design and use of games and simulations. Game science covers three levels of discourse: the philosophy of science level, the science level, and the application or practical level. The framework presented will help to grasp the interplay between forms of knowledge and knowledge content, interplay that evolves through the action of the players.

Why do we play games and why do we play them on computers? The contributors of »Games and Rules« take a closer look at the core of each game and the motivational system that is the game mechanics. Games are control circuits that organize the game world with their (joint) players and establish motivations in a dedicated space, a »Magic Circle«, whereas game mechanics are constructs of rules designed for interactions that provide gameplay. Those rules form the base for all the excitement and frustration we experience in games. This anthology contains individual essays by experts and authors with backgrounds in Game Design and Game Studies, who lead the discourse to get to the bottom of game mechanics in video games and the real world - among them Miguel Sicart and Carlo Fabricatore.

The authors' 1975 classic Gaming-Simulation has been revised and abridged for this edition. Three new chapters have been written: one on evaluation of games, one on their application in policy making, and the third on microcomputers in game design. It is a comprehensive, up-to-date guide on the multiple uses of gaming and simulation in the social sciences.

Youth care multi-disciplinary networks need flexible, interactive and attractive tools and methods for knowledge exchange in view of timely, effective and durable help in complex parenting problem situations. Social media, virtuality, simulation and gaming gain an increasing significance in the way people share information, learn and organize themselves. This leads to the question whether youth care practice is ready to adopt some online practicalities for network exchange. This design study describes model development and model appreciation of online role-play simulation gaming as a time, pace and place independent way to share expertise, information and knowledge among the actors in youth care practice. The results show that youth care professionals think that simulation gaming is relevant and convenient to unravel difficult issues, to elaborate network strategies, and to jointly reflect on intervention. The research is unique in domains of youth care intervention and in game theory. The singularity of contexts and actors is taken as starting point in a cross-over of game design and behavioral science. Online role-play simulation gaming leads to a better understanding of complexity in youth care situations and to a greater awareness of network capacities and capabilities and helps to establish accountability of choices of intervention.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 44th International Simulation and Gaming Association Conference, ISAGA 2013, and the IFIP WG 5.7 Workshop on Experimental Interactive Learning in Industrial Management, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 2013 The 30 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on frontiers in gaming simulation for education; frontiers in gaming simulation for design and experimentation; frontiers in gaming simulation for transportation and logistics; and professionalism and business in gaming simulation.

This volume analyses, from a computational point of view, how culture may arise, develop and evolve through time. The four sections in this book examine and analyse the modelling of culture, group and organisation culture, culture simulation, and culture-sensitive technology design. Different research disciplines have different perspectives on culture, making it difficult to compare and integrate different concepts and models of culture. By taking a computational perspective this book nevertheless enables the integration of concepts that play a role in culture, even though they might originate from different disciplines. Culture is usually regarded as something vague and qualitative and thus difficult to deal with in a computational and formal setting. Taking a computational approach to culture thus encompasses a twofold risk: taking a too simplistic approach to cultural influence on behaviour; or trying to capture too much, hence not leading to useful computational tools. However, the approaches and insights in this collection show how different perspectives by leading researchers described in thirteen chapters still can form a coherent picture. The book thus illustrates the potential of using computing systems to better understand culture. By describing methods, theories and concrete application results about the integration of cultural aspects into computer systems, this book provides inspiration to researchers of all disciplines alike and presents the start of an interdisciplinary dialogue on culture.

This book provides the state of the art in the simulation and gaming study field by systematically collecting excellent papers presented at the 46th International Simulation and Gaming Association annual conference held in Kyoto 17–25 July 2015. Simulation and gaming has been used in a wide variety of areas ranging from early childhood education and school-age children, universities, and professional education, to policy exploration and social problem solving. Moreover, it now been drastically changing its features in the Internet Of Things (IOT) society while taking over a wide variety of aliases, such as serious games and gamification. Most of the papers on which this book’s chapters are based were written by academic researchers, both up-and-coming and well known. In addition, simulation and gaming is a translational system science going from theory to clinical cross-disciplinary topics. With this book, therefore, graduate students and higher-level researchers, educators, and practitioners can become familiar with the state-of-the-art academic research on simulation and gaming in the network society of the twenty-first century.