Cody Michael J. - Serious games: mechanisms and effects

In 1999 I got a phone call that changed my life. On the other end of the call was a foundation program manager that I would learn right away doesnt take no for an answer. Jesse Ausubel of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation chases big ideas. Aside from counting all the fish in the world with the Census of Marine Life project (http://www.coml.org), in 1999 Ausubel was working with former Stanford CFO William Massy and the game developer of Capitalism I and II Trevor Chan to develop a Sim-City styled simulation of universities which we would later title Virtual U.

Jesse told me that I would be on a plane the next day to visit the foundation and discuss how to finish the game, get it tested, and distributed to market. Despite my sense that getting a plane flight the next morning was sort of short notice, there I was on the plane flight from Portland, Maine to New York City that next morning wondering what I was about to get myself into. It was an eventful meeting and for the next 3 years Virtual U was a big part of my life. Given the part VU played in my life, it still is.

What Virtual U was to be was a method to explore a critical issue of management; namely, the effort to get people to manage complex systems more discretely as a sum of their most important parts and to infuse that systems culture throughout the organization thus breaking down the inevitable fiefdoms and blinders that inhibit how organizations function. The goal of course was to do this specifically for universities, which as organizations, are legendary for operating with a pervasive sense of parochial activity. Im sure for many of the academic readers of this book Im not providing you with breaking news. For the Sloan Foundation, to improve the management of the nations universities was a leveraged means of improving all aspects of a universitys output and it is an overall program that certainly has its roots in the foundations namesakes career. Ausubel spoke about this in the context of Virtual U at an event held at MIT where we looked back on its early history:

The story begins on a spring day in 1995 in Palo Alto. I was visiting Bill Massy, then a professor at Stanford. Bill was analyzing why graduate students took ever longer to obtain doctoral degrees. Managing the Sloan Foundations program on the university as a system, I was concerned not only about specific problems such as the 9 years doctoral students averaged to acquire degrees but also about how the many problems connected to one another. The university was a jangly torso, in which the hip bone connected loosely to the thigh bone, and on down to the big toe. But no one seemed to have a working model of cause and effect. Indeed, perspectives on the university seemed to show it as all muscular thighs, all deft fingers, or a thick skull. I wanted a crude look at the whole.

There are many ways to improve university management and leadership. Books, conferences, films, and other methods were past, present, and future methods that were well known and utilized by the foundation. This time, however, the goal was to try something new, something that might move beyond the typical approaches, notions of audience, and baseline capability of other media efforts. Both Massy and Ausubel were on a collision course with an interesting bit of serendipity.

So, after hearing Bills impressive analysis of the time required to reach a degree, I inquired, what would you really like to do? After a couple of tentative starts, Bills eyes lit, exclamations began, and he ran to a file cabinet and pulled out a memo he had written some months earlier proposing to build an interactive video game of the U.S. University. I said, yes, yes, and we shook hands. The idea for a game-based approach wasnt so automatic though. There was an unique link of inspiration and history that further catalyzed faith in projects birth and approach.
Back in the mid-1980s I had edited a book on Cities and Their Vital Systems. Shortly after the book appeared, a call came from California in a very youthful voice, asking, Hey, I am trying to build a game about building and managing a city. Would you mind if I draw on some of the ideas in your book? A few weeks later a beta version of SimCity arrived in the mail for testing. The voice was that of Will Wright, the genius of simulation games, and the rest is history.