Gaming with Consequences

"The International Water executives who were actually doing the work in the city were engineers, not marketers, and, being from abroad, they were not attuned to the problems and passions of the Bolivian public [which led to widespread urban rioting]. The consortium had also agreed to finish a stalled dam project, which would pipe water through the mountains. This aspect of the deal seemed to make little sense – the World Bank had commissioned studies that pronounced [the project] uneconomic. But the dam less to do with how privatization works in theory than with the reality of how multinational corporations must come to terms with local politics."
extract from "Leasing the Rain", The New Yorker Magazine, April 8, 2002

In recent years, there has arisen a critical mass of interesting in engineering ethics education. The concern about ethics in the context of Third World development, environmentalism and economic/technological globalization are particularly important areas of concern, as the controversies of the role of advanced economy governments, multinationals, international institutions have risen to the top of the global public agenda at the beginning of the 21st century.

There is now a mandatory requirement for the teaching of both professional ethics and globalization/cross-cultural issues in the IEEE's new Criteria 2000 standard for 21st century university engineering courses.

At the same time, surveys of engineering students and faculty indicate a widespread cynicism, wariness, or nonchalant attitude to the teaching of engineering ethics. But the same surveys also indicate that engineering students, like students in general, are interested in social issues, and cross-cultural relations in a globalized world. This situation strongly suggests that there is a great opportunity and demand for developing and marketing an engineering ethics educational game that provides immersive and authentic access to real-world global/societal concerns and cross-cultural communications.

A non-computer based simulation which is a precedent for Daedalus' End is the commercially marketed live action globalization roleplay simulation, Global Simulation, which has been hired by corporations such as IBM, General Motors, and Motorola, and by university institutions such as the Yale School of Management and the Wharton Business School.URL: www.worldgame.org/mba/menu.shtml
Premise / Overview: negotiation-centered turn-based MMORPG where students roleplay consulting engineers trying to find technical solutions in the complicated web of economic tradeoffs, social unrest, ecological pressures, and realpolitik compromise in the world of Third World development.

Copyright 2002, MIT.