Back in 1998 business theorist named William F. Massy got together with the video game developer Trevor Chan and Enlight Software to make a university simulation game called ‘Virtual U‘ with a million dollars. This software was used to train dozens of administrators around the country, and is very important as an artifact of higher education management culture in the 1990s. This post is part of a series of notes concerning it and my continuing research into the informationalization of the modern American university.
The Simulation Engine: Admissions
There is much talk of the commercialization of the American university. One feature of this trend is the language used to describe university functions and institutions has become purely one of business. We can see this plainly in Massey’s works in his labeling of groups of people as ‘markets’ or as ‘stakeholders’. He goes a step further than defining the prospective student body as a single ‘market’, but I don’t believe using several ‘market segments’ is more accurate simulating the actions of individuals. You could argue he gets a pass for being an old guy using the technology of 1998, but agent-based modeling has been around since the 80s and at the time of Virtual U there were already mature examples of this sort of simulation. However, the agent-based modeling that came out of the Santa Fe Institute in the 90s was inspired by attempts to model life and its associated decisions. Massey is attempting to model a business, and agency is not a central theme to his work.
According to Massey, students can be sorted into seven different groups, based on their academic, extracurricular, and athletic qualifications. This is a fairly accurate representation of how things work at many university admissions offices. As revealed at Duke University each of those attributes are turned into numbers that are then used to determine offers of admission. However, Massey doesn’t seem to be factoring in economic affluence, which is an important measure of a student’s admissions chances, although to be fair his design document was created before the model was finished. In reality, athletic ability and parental income can be used to balance out poor academic or extracurricular ratings. Massey also does not seem to be concerned that some universities might have more holistic admissions practices, but this is in line with his practice of ignoring the individual student.
During the design process of a game, it is important to ask the question of just what experience one is trying to offer a player. What challenges will there be to confront? How can the player measure success? In ‘Virtual U’, success is measured by metrics: how does your institution compare in Category X and Y with peer institutions? How can you raise performance in Area Z over the next five years? In this way ‘Virtual U’ prepared administrators for a world ruled by U.S New World Report rankings, and ‘performance-based’ state funding.
However, it also helped to bring this world about. ‘Virtual U’ as a educational video game has many strengths, but it also has its failures. As we will see, Massey’s creation makes difficult decisions more palatable by abstracting or ignoring its human effects. The best video game experiences challenge how you think about the world, not help you accept it as it is. In designing a successor, or better yet, an alternative to ‘Virtual U’, it will be important to keep this in mind.