In the proposed workshop we will play and discuss games related to global politics and international relations. This discussion will be based on a decade of creating and employing games and simulations at the university level, and on scholarly engagement with the study of teaching and learning within political science. The games will include digital as well as analog games; all of them will have been employed in the classroom setting. These topics of the games and simulations presented will include issues such as: nuclear deterrence and brinkmanship, international conflict and cooperation, nuclear terrorism, democratization, and constitution-making in ethnically divided societies. In playing and discussing these games and simulations, we will explore several key questions related to the design of games and simulations for the study of world politics. These questions include:
- The benefits or disadvantages of abstraction (vs. detail) in simulating world politics, and the benefits or disadvantages of employing real-world and historical (vs. imagined) examples and situations.
- The capacity of games to promote empathy, as well as concerns regarding trivialization of serious issues and human experiences.
- The creation of player incentives that effectively promote meaningful decision-making and theoretical insight.
- The challenge of balancing playability and player engagement with a need for realism.
Through this workshop, participants will explore prominent issues in world politics (and political science theories on those issues) through interaction and competition, and will consider perspectives on general questions about the use of games for education on global political and social issues.
