Construction of a single-user model to simplify, understand, and complement The U.Va. Bay Game™

A collaborative team of U.Va. professors and students from eight different schools as well as private consultants built a large-scale agent-based model as a multiplayer game (The U.Va. Bay Game) to simulate the sources of pollution and the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In a test run in 2009, 144 players (mostly students) participated as farmers, policy makers, watermen, etc. over four days in ten rounds of play. As players made decisions in each round, the underlying model calculated the health of the Bay as well as socio-economic results. One of the key lessons from this test was the importance of well-educated players who understand their place in the entire simulation as well as the nature of nonlinear tradeoffs. This paper will describe the NetLogo application that models a simplified version of the entire U.Va. Bay Game¿ called the UVA Mini Bay Game (UVAMBG). Instead of requiring hundreds of decision makers to see the results from each round, a single individual can make a logically-grouped subset of the decisions through a web interface and visualize the results immediately. UVAMBG will help prepare players of the real game by giving them the opportunity to understand better the underlying simulation dynamics prior to multi-user game-play. This single-user game is also a stand-alone tool to raise awareness of the issues surrounding a complex socio/environmental/technical system.