Abstract
This issue concludes the first year with Timothy Clapper, Willy Kriz, and myself as the co-editors of Simulation & Gaming. It in many ways exemplifies the long history of our journal. Alongside three normal issues have been one double-issue on an affiliated conference and one symposium issue on a topic of special interest to the simulation and gaming community. Many classic veins of Simulation & Gaming continue to be present: business, management, and education, as well as engagement, debriefing, and simulation fidelity.
At the same time, we have also implemented significant changes. First and foremost, by adopting the use of ScholarOne, our electronic manuscript submission system, we have been able to shorten the time most articles spend in review. Secondly, the concept of Games Ready To Use (GRTU) submissions has been altered: from this point forward, such game articles will also contain an academic part, which not only describes results from the use of that particular simulation/game, but also provides theoretical background for its design and application. We believe that this requirement will increase both the use and the usability of GRTU submissions, which have for a long time been a popular section of Simulation & Gaming, but only rarely enjoyed solid long-term impact beyond their creators’ immediate networks. Feedback from earlier contributions in a similar vein (e.g., Eckert & Luppino, 2016) strongly points toward this direction.
Ours is a field of growing interest, also outside the study of simulations and games proper. Alongside the many high quality journals that focus on recreational gaming, such as Games and Culture and Game Studies, Simulation & Gaming is one of the few that focuses on educational and instrumental uses of simulations and games. This is especially reflected in the recent influx of new types of submissions to the journal, which have seen for example a significant rise in articles discussing medical and health-related simulation. Likewise, the journal’s roots in business and management simulation are re-surfacing, as those fields are gaining a fresh interest in games as both tools and as subjects of study, and thus enter into new, fruitful dialogue with simulation and game studies (e.g., Hamari et al., 2016; Kohler et al., 2011; Vesa, Hamari, Harviainen, & Warmelink, 2016). Therefore, it is important to make sure that the contributions presented in Simulation & Gaming over its almost 50 years of existence are properly seen and used by scholars from those other communities.
Contents of This Issue
The articles in this issue well represent the current diversity of the journal. It starts with our co-editor Timothy C. Clapper’s (2016) “Proposing a new debrief checklist for TeamSTEPPS® to improve documentation and clinical debriefing”, a text on how to improve the debriefing and documentation of the highly popular efficiency and patient safety tool TeamSTEPPS® through a new kind of checklist. Then, in “Subjective temporalities at play” Enrico Gandolfi (2016) uses three popular digital recreational games to discuss time-related power to take meaningful actions, a topic that has been long of interest to also educational and especially business gaming (see e.g., Lainema, 2010).
Together with 14 co-authors, Yu-Hao Lee et al. (2016) deals with another central facet of simulation/gaming, that of teaching decision-making. “Training anchoring and representativeness bias mitigation through a digital game” focuses especially on the impact of the game on two well-known biases that cause deviation in supposedly rational decision situations. Of interest to many may be their finding that the method was most effective when it was paired with a more traditional tool, a slide show on the topic, which points to the importance of context in getting sufficient benefits from the deployment of a game for educational purposes. Likewise, COMMUTER BRIDGE by Ugo Merlone and Angelo Romano (2016) describes a Braess paradox simulation as well as results from its use. As a simple looking-game on social dilemmas, it too emphasizes that games may be used to show and allay decision-making fallacies.
Other topics that have a long history in Simulation & Gaming also include Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning games and simulations about international and intercultural negotiations. Angela Piu, Cesare Fregola, and Barbara Barbieri (2016), in “Geometry classrooms with simulation/games” the authors share their research results and future developments. Their application of a geometry game, CARTOLANDIA, led to a much higher content retention rate among the Italian young adult students who used it. In addition, in a very unique fashion, Tina Kempin Reuter (2016) with “Simulating peace negotiations: A case study of the Arab-Israeli conflict” not only seeks to teach conflict solving with a game, but also identified several challenges arising from the use of a topic in which every factor may be highly contested, both politically and historically.
The two GRTUs published in this issue in turn exemplify the borderline mentioned above. Raj K. Shankar’s (2016) UDAN efficiently present the entrepreneurial simulation game it describes in a succinct take-and-use format. Alternatively, RECONFIGURE by Nicolay Worren, Tido Eger and Thorvald Hærem (2016) is already accompanied by preliminary data and earlier design theory in addition to the instructions.
On behalf of the entire editorial team, I hope you will find the contents of the issue enlightening, engaging and, especially, inspiring.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
J. Tuomas Harviainen (MTh, PhD, MBA) is one of the three editors of Simulation & Gaming. He works as a Development Manager for the city of Vantaa, Finland, and as an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics. His research most typically deals with games as information systems, but often branches into e.g., public sector management, sexology, service design, or organizational learning.