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Highlights two games, one designed an American and one designed by Chinese, one taking as its subject the end of American military hegemony, the other portraying American soldiers as "the enemy." Socio-political implications of these developments are discussed, particularly how these represent a break from mainstream video game content.

"The high cost of launching resources from the Earth's surface is a significant barrier to future long- duration human space exploration. A future resource economy in space may allow resource production, processing, storage, and transportation at distributed locations, but will have many stakeholders with var- ied and potentially competing objectives. Simulation games provide a medium for communication and learning richer than papers or linear presentations by combining the technical capabilities of simulation models with human interaction. Building on technology powering military wargames, federated simulation architectures such as HLA-Evolved use independently-developed simulation models connected over a dis- tributed network of computers. This paper presents an approach for developing a multi-player simulation gaming environment where human players take on roles of organizations or government agencies within scenarios designed to address the design and operation of a resource economy in space. The game design addresses the number of players, time advancement, level of abstraction, scenario selection, and other de- cisions based on past simulation games in the domains of military-political, educational, disaster response, and business-management games. Future research will focus on evaluating game executions to analyze human decision-making under various scenarios. Quantitative analysis of decisions using game logs com- bined with qualitative analysis of interviews and surveys will contribute to strategies for a future resource economy in space."

From the introduction: "The staggering growth of violent video games in recent years raises important socio - psychological questions concerning the relationship between the civilian population, the military , and the phenomenon of violence . This thesis is based on interviews with active - duty soldiers , veterans, psychologists and gamers alike, conducting original research to gain a better understanding of the lasting ramifications of this popular genre. Many studies have outlined the negative consequences of viole nt video games, but this mor e comprehensive analysis of the medium will show a more balanced picture of the true implications of this growing phenomenon . As I will demonstrate, the growth of video games is a net benefit for society. Video games as a growing new media - and a rapidly expanding part of our culture - are not to be purely defined by the overly - negative rhetoric that has been popularized by syndicated news and the public eye, as there are so much more "nutritious" benefits games have to offer to society."

"Last Halloween, while his friends were out reveling, Otavio Good stayed home to design a computer program to reconstruct shredded documents. The military's research arm had issued a call for people to decipher messages that had been torn to bits, much the way someone might destroy evidence of a paper trail."

Air Force Research Agency in support of Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)