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ICONS Project HistoryIn the field of international relations, the group of kindred activities referred to as "political gaming," "simulation games", "crisis games", "computer simulations" and the like, has been around in one form or another for several decades. It has its roots in such intellectual traditions as military strategy, diplomatic analysis, international relations scholarship, organizational sociology, operations research, economics, and computer science. One way of distinguishing these various types of simulation activities from one another is to categorize them by the role played by the "machine" or computer. The simulation exercises used in the ICONS Project grow out of a type of simulation that in its original form was not closely associated with computers. Sometimes referred to as "all-man" simulations, they originated with policy-oriented people more interested in understanding particular situations than in the discovery of scientific generalizations. Their aim was to capture more of the complexity and subtlety of international political issues through the use of fairly detailed scenarios, which focused on real or plausible policy problems. These simulation games were played for periods of varying length; but an entire game seldom represented more than a few weeks of actual calendar time, during which most of the variables at the systems level of analysis were assumed to be relatively unchanged. Unlike "man-machine" simulations, which cast the computer in a central role, these simulations were "free-form", with country-teams often staffed by foreign policy experts and area specialists, whose decisions were constrained not by the rigid input requirements of a computer model, but rather by judgmental considerations of plausibility. The ICONS simulation exercises can be traced back to a hybrid form, closer in spirit to the free-form games of the all-man paradigm, but relying for their success on interactive computing, which enable human participants at distant locations to negotiate with each other through the assistance of a computer-based communications network. The earliest trials of this type of simulation exercise were performed by Professor Robert C. Noel of the University of California at Santa Barbara. His aim was to see whether the game would retain its essential elements if the participants were physically removed from one another. The first "distributed" games used a scenario based on a nuclear proliferation theme and set in the Middle East circa 1973. The participating country-teams in the POLIS simulations were students in undergraduate courses in international relations at various universities in California. Despite their primitive nature, these early trials removed any doubt about the basic feasibility of distributed gaming exercises. While the dynamics of the interactions were altered, they were not distorted by the new medium. The addition of inter-location competition clearly represented a new dimension for the exercises. Since then, the enormous expansion of international computing networks and declining hardware and communication costs have brought the exercises within the means of most institutions. ICONS was based upon Professor Noel's POLIS simulations, and was founded in the early 1980s at the University of Maryland by Professor Jonathan Wilkenfeld of the Department of Government and Politics and Professor Richard Brecht of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. As the program has developed and grown, ICONS has received substantial funding support from the U.S. Departmen of Education, IBM, the state of Maryland, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Although ICONS originally supported only university-level simulations, it became involved in secondary school programs in the mid-1980s. In 1985, the Maryland State Department of Education approached ICONS about running a "summer center" to provide an enrichment activity in international relations for gifted and talented Maryland junior high and high school students. The success of this program led ICONS to begin conducting simulations at the high school level in 1988. During the 1990s, ICONS has continued to run "International System" simulations at both the university and secondary school level. In addition, with grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education, ICONS has developed programs to meet more specific curricular needs. The International Negotiations Seminars Project supported the bringing the ICONS experience to lower-division undergraduate students who are not necessarily political science majors. The Africa-Americas Classroom Technology Project has the goal of helping instructors at minority-serving institutions--Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)--use experiential learning to help students grasp theoretical issues. As a part of these initiatives, ICONS has begun conducting regionally-based simulations. The New Europe simulation has run since 1993, the Middle East since 1996, and the Africa, Americas and Asia simulations since 1997. Finally, with the support of the U.S. Institute of Peace, ICONS has expanded its operations through the establishment of Regional Centers in Connecticut and California. ICONS simulation software has undergone a number of changes since the program's inception. In the early 1980s, the original software used in California was enhanced and ported to the University of Maryland, where it ran on a PDP-11/44, and later on a Micro VAX II. The redesigned POLNET II software used until 1997 ran on a DEC-Station 5000 on ULTRIX 4.2, with users maintaining a constant connection to the system through telnet. While POLNET II well supported the needs of simulation participants, it was far more cumbersome for users than the graphical user interfaces which had become quite common by the early 1990s. Consequently, ICONS set out to make the system more intuitive and user-friendly, as well as reduce the burden on the users of maintaining a constant connection to the ICONS server. By 1995, the World Wide Web and related technologies made it possible for us to provide users with an easy-to-use interface and minimal local computer requirements. ICONS developed an entirely new software package that replicated and enhanced the essential features of POLNET II in a web-based application. ICONSnet, which debuted in 1997, is written in Oracle PL/SQL and runs on Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server. All that is required to access the system is an Internet connection and a web browser. Many faculty members have reported that ICONSnet enriches the students’ learning experience because they can now concentrate on their simulation negotiations without having to worry about technological demands. The number of participating institutions has increased, both in the United States and abroad, so that a typical ICONS exercise involves as many as 25 universities or high schools representing more than 20 country-teams, and as many as 750 participating students. Since 1990, 162 universities and 129 secondary schools from 37 countries have participated in ICONS simulations.
Last Modified: February 13, 2003 |
