A General Process for Developing Business Simulations Games

Nowadays people, groups and organizations are increasingly confronted with problems and situations that show an increasing level of complexity. However, human abilities to deal with complex dynamic systems and processes, while behaving in a sustainable way, have not improved to the required extent. One way to deal with complex situation is the simulation approach: build a simplified model of this reality, learn from this simplified model, and, finally, translate the findings or knowledge back to reality. Simulation games are based on this idea. Nevertheless, if we want to make inferences about reality based on experiences and knowledge acquired in a simulation game, we have to be sure that the underlying conceptual model is a good, or valid, representation of the real situation. Based on knowledge gather from the simulation development process and Agent-based Modelling, this paper proposes a general process for developing business simulation games.

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