InformatistBusinessSimulationGame

The Sims took the world by storm when they came out in the late 1990’s.  Now business simulation technology is taking The Sims to the next step—learning real-world business lessons from massive online business simulation gaming.

For those who don’t know about the Sims, this was a game which simulated the complicated lives of individuals living in a small town.  As in real life, there were the roustabouts, the ne’er-do-wells, and the punks of the community.  There were also the straight-laced family people, kids, dogs and school marms.  Once the Sim community was set up, they would start to interact with one another. 

Originally, the Sims was an offline-only simulation.  You could choose your own persona to live in the virtual community, but the rest was generated by chance and the computer program.  Although clever, there was an air of two-dimensionality about the Sims which didn’t mirror real life.  Real people, after all, react to their environment in flexible and changing ways. 

One only had to try dating on the Sims in order to find the limits of the game.  None of the fun, the persiflage of real dating found its way to the computer game.  Responses were formulaic, not original or inspiring.

The advent of broadband internet access changed the Sims, and allowed people to interact online with one another.  People added an air of unpredictability—of humanity—to the Sims in a way that wasn’t possible in the offline simulation.

Business simulation is similar to the Sims—it requires a real interaction between people in order to feel real.  Real business is about interaction with people, just as it is in the online version of the Sims.  A new online business simulation, called the Informatist (www.informatist.net) brings hundreds and thousands of high school and college students online to try their hands and building and running businesses.  As in real life, they have competitors, suppliers, enemies and friends.  It’s this human element of the Informatist’s online simulation that makes the difference—just as it did when the Sims went online.

As with the Sims, players are invited to choose a persona and create a life for it.  Unlike the Sims, however, the businesses resemble real life.  One can choose to be a property owner, a pharmacist, an undertaker or even a ditch digger.  Once one makes his choice, one is faced with a number of decisions which can expand one’s wealth or make it contract.  Students learn from these simulations how life can be affected by the decisions they make—great preparation for real business life afterwards.

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