Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58061
"The lessons students learn are ten times more efficient, more lasting, and more powerful than what they can learn from a lecture." —Dennis Meadows, management simulation designer "A decade ago, we could create applications to bring players together across time and space, but it was clumsy. The bandwidth wasn't there," says Smith. "In recent years, bandwidth has gotten broad enough to enable students to collaborate more easily from a distance." Real-World Applications In fact, the technological capacity and power of today's computers can be almost too tempting for game designers. There is some concern that business simulations could turn into "virtual realities" that players inhabit like a video game. But such technological complexity often takes too much time for a professor to implement and distracts from the business problem the game is designed to present, says Meadows. "I can design a game today ten times more quickly than I could 30 years ago; but do people learn more from today's computer-driven games than they did from those 30 years ago? I don't think so," says Meadows. "Computer technology can take over the game and make it so complex that it diverts learning." Global Play In October, four teams of students at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park went head-to-head with student teams at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, CERAM in France, Nankai University of Technology in China, and the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. From their home campuses, teams competed in the simulated Supply Chain Game to create the most efficient and profitable supply chain in real time. School officials billed the game as the "first real-time simulation that pits players against each other in an online environment." In February, the school sponsored an even larger competition, involving teams from 14 business schools around the world, including the five schools that had participated in October. The business logistics of the game were designed by San- dor Boyson, Thomas Corsi, and William DeWitt, professors at the Smith School. The technical development of the game was handled by Alexander Verbraeck and Stijn-Pieter van Houten, professors at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. The game was designed to account for stu- dents' decisions as they are made. Its designers also had the secondary goal of creating a game that was technologically 40 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2007 Smith agrees that the best games are based on tools that organizations actually use to conduct business. "Students aren't going to play a video game at the office," he says. "In a simulation, we want students to use the same tools that they're going to use in a real-world office: Excel, the Inter- net, e-mail, videoconferencing. It's central to simulation design that we don't rely heavily on graphics." While many of today's most popular games focus on data- based areas such as supply chain management and market- ing, "fuzzier" issues such as ethics, change, and corporate social responsibility can also be captured in a real-time simu- lation. However, the success of the outcomes may be more difficult to quantify, explains James Chisholm, co-founder of ExperiencePoint, a simulation design company based in Mountain View, California. Alexander Verbraeck, a professor at Delft University of Technology and a designer of the Supply Chain Game, oversees the October competition at the Smith School of Business. capable of facilitating the play of globally distributed teams that logged in through a Web portal. "We spent a lot of time with our colleagues at Delft Univer- sity to plan the underlying technological architecture," explains Boyson. "With that in place, we can now bring to fruition other scenario-based games. We're investigating a next-generation scenario that will be in a different industry and involve different sets of competitive dynamics." The game itself was supported by a variety of community- building technologies, such as audio conferencing and the voice-over-Internet phone service Skype. Facilitators even post- ed digital photos of the different teams in action to the portal,