Behavioral Modeling and Simulation

The National Research Council recently came out with a rather lengthy book on modeling individual through group level behaviors and cultural variables. This is a very big topic in the Government right now. One of their chapters was on "Games" and how they could contribute as a tool for social and organizational modeling. Specifically, they were looking at MMOGs. While I don't recommend the entire book for the casually-interested (the book is geared primarely for the Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation community), the chapter on games was interesting. The council considered the application of games in three distinct roles:

1. Games as an Interaction Medium
2. Games as a Set of Engaging and Immersive Models
3. Games as an Interactive Laboratory

Overall, there were some good points and there were some sketchy points at best (not to mention a lot of what I would call "subjective claims" that did not have cited references...not a good sign coming from a National Research Council).

One interesting "prediction" was that...

The biggest change coming in the next few years will be in the underlying models of human and organizational behavior, particularly with respect to the modeling, display, and input of human emotion into the interactive game.

They go on to say that games will add communication modalities such as visual display, auditory display, haptic display, and two-way emotional communication and display. Not to burst a portion of that bubble, but there are already several game projects that include these more advanced interfaces. Many are still in university and Government labs, but even back in 2001, there was/is a game called "The Journey to Wild Divine" that incorporates biofeedback.