Using conflict theory to model complex societal interactions

ABSTRACT

Conflict theory can be used to explain the interactions between societies during times of turmoil and change (i.e. revolutions, strikes or everyday debates). Games have been produced that make use of different aspects of conflict theory; however a common framework for organizing a system to produce realistic conflicts has not been created. This paper presents one such framework, based upon principles of conflict theory, which describe a generalized way of organizing a system to produce realistic conflict situations among societies. With our framework, we present how current commercial games represent conflict and how our framework can be implemented by these games in order to increase the system's flexibility and accuracy in representing conflict.

REFERENCES

• 1: Aureli, F. and Waal, F. 2000. Natural Conflict Resolution. Ed. Aureli, F. and Waal, F., University of California Press Berkeley, CA.
• 2: Barnett, T. 2004. The Pentagon's New Map. Putnam, New York, NY.
• 3: Bartos, O. and Wehr, P. 2002. Using Conflict Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• 4: Blizzard Ent.: World of Warcraft. (2004).
• 5: Cavazza, M., Charles, F.; Mead, S. J. 2002. Planning Characters' Behaviour In Interactive Storytelling. The Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation. 13, 2, 121--131.
• 6: EA Games. 2004. The Sims 2. Maxis.
• 7: Firaxis Games. 2005. Civilization IV. 2K Games.
• 8: Fry, B. and Reas, C. Processing, http://processing.org/
• 9: Homans, G. C. 1968. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
• 10: Levy, J. 2001. Theories of Interstate and Intrastate War. In Turbulent Peace. Ed. Crocker, C., Hampson, F., and Aall, P. United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington, DC. 1--27.
• 11: Marx, K. and Engels, F. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Group, New York.
• 12: Mateas, M. and Stern, A. 2003. Facade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama. In Game Developers Conference. San Francisco.
• 13: Allen Newell, Unified theories of cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990
• 14: Michael J. North , Nicholson T. Collier , Jerry R. Vos, Experiences creating three implementations of the repast agent modeling toolkit, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), v.16 n.1, p.1-25, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1122012.1122013]
• 15: Charles Ofria , Claus O. Wilke, Avida: a software platform for research in computational evolutionary biology, Artificial Life, v.10 n.2, p.191-229, April 2004 [doi>10.1162/106454604773563612]
• 16: Katie Salen , Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The MIT Press, 2003
• 17: Si, M., Marsella, S. C., & Pynadath, D. V. 2004. Thespian: modeling socially normative behavior in a decision-theoretic framework. In 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Marina del Rey, CA.
• 18: Waltz, K. 1959. Man, the State, and War. Columbia University Press, New York.
• 19: Watrall, E. 2000. Chopping Down the Tech Tree. In Gamasutra.
• 20: Weeks, D. 1992. The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution. Putnam, New York, NY.
• 21: Wilmot, W. and Hocker, J. 2001. Interpersonal Conflict 6th ed. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.8 PERSONAL COMPUTING
      K.8.0 General
          Subjects: Games

General Terms:
Design, Theory

Keywords:
conflict theory, digital games, social modeling