This paper describes a new method of research developed by Social and Community Planning Research during the past eighteen months. The aim of the research was to arrive at measurements of community preferences so that priority values could be quantified. The method relies on interviews with groups of people who have differing experiences of the variables under study. During the course of the interview, they are asked to play a priority evaluation ‘game’ using an electronic device built for that purpose. This approach extends traditional attitude survey measurements by allowing and ensuring that respondents understand the concept of trade-off preferences.

Evaluating Community Preferences

Historians have expressed growing interest in the intellectual influences of systems thinking during the early decades of the cold war. Taken together, studies of the military, business, government, and academia between the late 1950s and the late 1970s portray the period as one when systems analysis, operations research, cybernetics, information theory, and related fields came to shape—and in many cases to dominate—myriad professional pursuits.1 In these accounts of the development and diffusion of systems think-

Taking Games Seriously

Gaming and Simulation in the Social Sciences: A Guide to the Literature.

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Institution spons'agency

Evaluating community preferences

Social scientists need a laboratory, similar to those available to physical and natural scientists, with which to analyze man's urban environment and experiment with change. Operational simulation shows promise as a way to develop an urban laboratory. After an overview of some games and simulations that contribute experience in particular fields, this article describes the City models built by Envirometrics. A new technique, modular modeling, can be used to relate the national, regional, metropolitan, city, and neighborhood elements of the urban system.

Philip D. Patterson

Papers

An Environmental Gaming-Simulation Laboratory