Statecraft: A Simulation for International Relations

I’ve been meaning to write about Statecraft for some time. I was an alpha tester for the simulation last year and thus am very familiar with the team at Digital World Construction, the sim, and the development process.

Statecraft is “an immersive simulation that allows students to experience the challenges, opportunities, and complexities of international relations in a very vivid, intense, and personal way.”  Its based on a long standing pen-and-paper sim run by Dr. Jonathan Keller of James Madison University.

If you haven’t heard about it, check out the link above.  Basically students will play as teams representing fictional countries on a set map.  They have to manage their resources and wealth as well as various political factions in their countries, international organizations, military and diplomatic incursions from other countries, and natural disasters.  Its great fun for the students, and active learning at its best.  There’s a grading system incorporated into the sim, so the burden on the instructor is minimal (beyond, of course, providing the context via the concepts and theories of IR).  There is a fee of $25/student/course for the game, but if you consider the game as a ‘text’, that’s actually quite cheap compared to mainstream textbooks and readers. The sim can be used for classes as small as 7 or as large as needed.

If you’ve been thinking about using a sim in your class and don’t know how to go about creating one of your own, this would be a great choice.  My students loved it when they played, and that was before the onslaught of new changes which have really streamlined the gameplay and made the entire game more user-friendly.  If you are teaching intro IR in the spring, consider adding this to your syllabus.