Increasing Impact of Simulation/Gaming and Simulation & Gaming

Abstract

This issue concludes the first year with Timothy Clapper, Willy Kriz, and myself as the co-editors of Simulation & Gaming. It in many ways exemplifies the long history of our journal. Alongside three normal issues have been one double-issue on an affiliated conference and one symposium issue on a topic of special interest to the simulation and gaming community. Many classic veins of Simulation & Gaming continue to be present: business, management, and education, as well as engagement, debriefing, and simulation fidelity. At the same time, we have also implemented significant changes. First and foremost, by adopting the use of ScholarOne, our electronic manuscript submission system, we have been able to shorten the time most articles spend in review. Secondly, the concept of Games Ready To Use (GRTU) submissions has been altered: from this point forward, such game articles will also contain an academic part, which not only describes results from the use of that particular simulation/game, but also provides theoretical background for its design and application. We believe that this requirement will increase both the use and the usability of GRTU submissions, which have for a long time been a popular section of Simulation & Gaming, but only rarely enjoyed solid long-term impact beyond their creators' immediate networks. Feedback from earlier contributions in a similar vein (e.g., Eckert & Luppino, 2016) strongly points toward this direction. Ours is a field of growing interest, also outside the study of simulations and games proper. Alongside the many high quality journals that focus on recreational gaming, such as Games and Culture and Game Studies, Simulation & Gaming is one of the few that focuses on educational and instrumental uses of simulations and games. This is especially reflected in the recent influx of new types of submissions to the journal, which have seen for example a significant rise in articles discussing medical and health-related simulation. Likewise, the journal's roots in business and management simulation are re-surfacing, as those fields are gaining a fresh interest in games as both tools and as subjects of study, and thus enter into new, fruitful dialogue with simulation and game studies (e.g.,

Game Science: Foundations and Perspectives

“…Additionally, we notice a great variety of fields of application, gaming and simulation methods and techniques and descriptions of concrete game artifacts and their forms of play (cf. Clapper, 2016; Harviainen, 2016; Kriz, 2017).…”

Types of Gaming Simulation Applications

“…In the last editorial articles my co-editors J. Tuomas Harviainen (2016) and Timothy C. Clapper (2016) described the rich history and currently growing interest in gaming simulation and discussed the diversity of the field.…”

“…

In the last editorial articles my co-editors J. Tuomas Harviainen (2016) and Timothy C. Clapper (2016) described the rich history and currently growing interest in gaming simulation and discussed the diversity of the field. Jan Klabbers (2006) has pointed out that the diversity is partly related to the fact that contributors of articles on gaming simulation find themselves in a dual position.

…”