Abstract for:Stratagem Remastered

The computer-aided board game Stratagem was originally developed in 1983 by Dennis Meadows in order to promote systems dynamics concepts from his famous book Limits to Growth and his WORLD3 model in a more understandable way (Meadows, 2000). Permission has been granted to our team from Dr. Meadows to recreate the game using modern applications such as Vensim and with support from Forio, which provides web-based hosting for the game and technical support for the development of the user interface. In the game, players are “ministers” of a developing nation and are responsible for allocating resources to grow their economy in an environmentally sustainable manner. Players gauge the repercussions of their decisions over 10 rounds and gain a general familiarity with feedback and nonlinearity. The structure of the game’s system is analyzed at the end against the decisions made by the players to learn about the capacity for human decision making and to improve it.