After an Easter hiatus, I’m back in the office, even if our students are still on break. One of my activities was attending the annual conference of the Political Studies Association, whose kind funding allowed me to travel to APSA L&T last year and meet my collaborators here on the ALPS blog. While waiting in the terminal at Belfast City airport for a delayed flight back home, I sketched out an idea I’ve been having for some time about building a resource for running simulations.
From the initial ruminating with colleagues and building up ideas, I’ve set up a website for this project, entitled “How to do Simulation Games” (not very clever, but at least clear). As you can see, there’s not much there right now, beyond the structure. My plan is to gradually build up material, as I have the time and inclination, so that there is something of practical use to colleagues, both in Politics and beyond.
The idea comes from an awareness that while there is a burgeoning literature on simulations, there’s still not much of the basic ‘how-to’ stuff that I find many people look for when coming to this pedagogy: it’s all well and good me writing a paper about immersion, but that’s no good to someone who doesn’t know what the basic building blocks of a simulation are (or might be).
As I say on the site, I welcome help since I know I don’t know nearly everything about the various aspects. That help can be something very small and specific (maybe a game to upload), or if you want to jump on as a co-author type, then I’m cool with that too. In the longer run, and depending on how this goes, there’s obviously potential for some more conventional publishing opportunity (again recognising everyone’s input), although that’s no more than a thought at this stage.
So if you like what you see, then drop me a line and let’s see where it goes.