The Long After Life of Simulation Software: Hidden Agenda

Simulated activities, both hands-on as well as electronic, are widely recognized as an important tool for engaging students at all levels of learning. Students become active participants, rather than just observers, and are able to construct and validate what is being learned by linking content to real-world experiences. With simulation software, age-appropriate content is taken into consideration and is incorporated within its design to allow for thought-provoking decisions, and application to real-life scenarios.

Hidden Agenda, a software game developed by Jim Gasperini in 1989, was designed to help students understand third-world politics by having them try their hands at governing a simulated country, Chimerica. "As they become invested in the game, students will suspend their North American viewpoint and learn to empathize with the plight of a developing nation."

MCLI included this program in a 1995 software evaluation initiative where faculty explored the learning potential for games and simulations. The Hidden Agenda software was dropped as a commercial program a few years later, but because of the large number of visitors who found our site since then and requested it, Jim has set up an arrangement that allows this software to live on. He will send a copy of the software to individuals who email him comments about their experiences with the game and promises to make a donation to a non-governmental organization working in Central America.

For this issue of the mcli Forum, we recently interviewed Jim via e-mail.

Alan: Can you give our readers a little background on yourself (what you do, where you live, interesting past experiences)?
I live near Berkeley, California. I seem to change what I do every few years, and have professionally edited video, apprenticed as a literary agent, edited, written children's books, designed other computer games including the third version of SimCity, and produced CD-ROMs.

My current artistic passion is stereo photography. I am experimenting with its presentation in a fine art context using a technology called Stereojet. I have just started a company called Cockeyed Creations to publish greeting cards using some of the tamer of my images. The cards come as boxes that fold flat, with plastic lenses embedded in one side.

Alan: What led to the idea of Hidden Agenda?
It came to me in 1987, in San Francisco del Norte, Nicaragua. I had accompanied my journalist brother on a trip way out into the northern hills, very close to the Honduran border.

San Juan was a town lost in time that could have been a set for a John Wayne movie, or "The Mark of Zorro." I remember watching a white-haired distinguished-looking older man ride into town on a horse, tie it to a post and walk into a shop to do his business.

The roads in and out of the valley were so bad that only the hardiest of heavy-duty trucks could make the trip more than once. Hopping on and off the back of an open-backed truck was in fact the main way people got further than walking distance. It was the way I and my brother got around after his little sports car, once the darling of a young scion of the Nicaraguan elite and then kept alive by the kind of skillful Managua mechanic you could only find on certain days on certain nameless streetcorners, conked out in front of a farmhouse where I ate one of the most generously offered meals of my life.

Anyway, rusting away on the outskirts of San Francisco del Norte sat the photogenic relic of a burnt-out bus. As my brother took pictures of this ruin, a grey-haired local woman engaged him in conversation, which he translated.

Apparently the left-wing Sandinista government had inaugurated a bus service, looping between San Juan and the nearest city via the two main roads in and out of the valley. This bus service was a good thing! No longer did she have to depend on whether or not Pedro's truck was going east when she wanted to go west to visit her sister! Now there was a schedule!

One day men with guns appeared, as the bus loaded with passengers and luggage approached town. All passengers managed to leave the bus before the Contras, anti-government rebels backed by the United States, set it to the torch. I can only imagine the way the bus, tied on the roof and sides with various bales of someone's important possessions, looked as it burned. By the time I got to San Juan, bus service was a memory, kept alive only by the rusting hulk at the edge of town.

The woman who told me this story was impassioned with the ideal of democracy. Whatever ill you can justifiably say about the Sandinistas, the moment of hope that their point of historical prominence engendered in people like this woman in a forgotten corner of the world remains a grand creation. People on many levels really did believe in democracy, or at least in its attempted expression, in Central America in the 1980's. This woman's naive faith in democracy extended even to a belief that if she could make me, a North American, understand why they needed bus service in San Francisco del Norte, and if I went back to my country and told the story to enough other Norteamericanos, well then the good people of America del Norte would begin to understand, and stop sending terrorists to blow up the buses that helped her visit her sister in the next valley over.

Alan: So how did this experience become the inspiration for a computer game?
Backtrack a couple years to a couple 20-something guys living in Manhattan looking for an ambition. Both Ron Martinez and I had written 'reader-active' books for older children. Longtime players of early text-adventure games, beginning with the mainframe Colossal Cave (which later became Zork), we saw the enormous potential of computer-based storytelling. Ron managed both the business and technical side of things, while I pursued design ideas about a game that put the player inside the mind of various creatures of the Amazonian rain forest.

An editor at Simon and Schuster decided to give us a contract. Uninterested in our plans to simulate the rain forest, he thought well enough of our technology and sensibility to entrust us with one of the parent company's premiere licenses, "Star Trek." I spent most of a year designing an adventure game based on dialogue between Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy.

By the time "Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy" appeared on the market, however, the text adventure genre had begun to decline. Games were boldly going where none had gone before- Graphics! Tinny MIDI music! Where would it all end? The time I had budgeted for doing a follow-up to our success with the first "Star Trek" adventure game suddenly became open time.

I decided to visit my journalist brother in Central America. I spent several weeks touring Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Though not my first trip to a 'developing' region (I had traveled in Asia), partly through my brother's influence and partly because of the intense focus of the world's attention on the region at the time, I began to see the world in a different way.

So I came back to New York all fired up with the idea of using the power of the new interactive medium to shift perspective, putting the player in the point of view of a Central American.

Alan: What do you see as the virtue of simulations?
I have written about this extensively before, using Hidden Agenda as one of my main examples, in a chapter of "Information Design" edited by Bob Jacobson, MIT Press.

There are many kinds of simulation, each with its own set of virtues. In the case of Hidden Agenda, my ambition was to make the player imaginatively responsible for decisions in a situation where there are no easy choices. Compared with other forms of fictionalized politics, this sort of simulation makes real choices about political economy central to the action- as compared with films and most novels, where the drama tends to derive from interpersonal dynamics, and policy choices appear only when the screenwriters manage to work them in as interesting plot points.

Alan: Do you have any idea of the reach or impact of Hidden Agenda as commercial software?
While working on this project I fondly hoped to use the game medium to interest gamers in the complexities of political economics, and at the same time to interest those interested in international politics to see the game medium as a useful way to explore and explain complex ideas. It had much more success in the classroom, alas, than it did among gamers.

Hidden Agenda had remarkable success in classrooms on every level, from middle school to high school, community college, undergraduate, graduate, and even the Foreign Services Institute of the U.S. State Department.

But as commercial software, instead of the vast audience I had imagined--the combined audience of computer gamers and the politically engaged--the audience was limited to the intersection of the two. I.e. those who both liked and understood the power of computer games AND were interested in international politics.

Hidden Agenda was published, more or less, by Springboard Software in 1989. Springboard was a Minnesota-based software company that had made some money publishing an early desktop publishing package for the Apple II. In the rapidly changing environment of the early personal computer market, they made some key misjudgments. Though the marketers and publicists assigned to promote Hidden Agenda did their best to remain professional, the company they worked for was going out of business when they were supposed to be launching it, and their attention was necessarily elsewhere.

When Springboard went under, rights eventually migrated to Scholastic. Marketing, such as it was, focused on making it available to innovative teachers at various academic levels.

So for several reasons, the commercial released of Hidden Agenda was a disappointment. At least once a week, though, I receive an email from someone who played it years ago, remembers it fondly, and has somehow been inspired to track it down through the Internet.

Alan: What happened that it came to not being sold anymore?
In the fast-paced world of computer software, it is the rare product that can survive on the shelves more than a few weeks. That Hidden Agenda appeared as a commercial product at all was due to its early appearance in a rapidly-changing industry, back when it still seemed possible to combine artistic vision, educational value, and innovative narrative design in a product that could be sold to the world.

The piracy issue deserves mention. One of my crowning moments as Hidden Agenda began to be noticed in the world was an invitation to a classroom in Arlington, VA where the State Department trained people on their way overseas. Anyone being assigned by our government to a role south of the border- including not only diplomats but also agents of the FBI, DEA, NSA, CIA, etc.- would be assigned to play Hidden Agenda by the Latin America Area Studies Department of the Foreign Service Institute. I was delighted by the idea that those enrolled in the FSI would be playing my game.

As we talked with the instructor, however, it became clear that though she well understood the first of Stewart Brand's pair of aphorisms, "Information wants to be free," she had (as many do) ignored its corollary, "Information wants to be expensive."

Eager to disseminate the perspectives encoded in Hidden Agenda, the instructor had encouraged her students to make copies, take them home, and play the game on their personal computers. So taken was she with the educational possibilities of the game that she had personally duplicated a copy for every embassy in Latin America.

I well remember my ambiguous feelings. My game had reached an audience where it might make a difference in the way people of great influence understood the world! But... my government's Department of State had bought one copy, and pirated hundreds.

People still ask why I have never followed up on my "success" with Hidden Agenda.

Link from Jim Gasperini's web site that mentions the connection of Hidden Agenda and MCLI's 1995 games and simulation software evaluation.

The entry on MCLI's web site for Hidden Agenda describes Jim's request for people interest in getting a copy of the software..

Alan: If you were to re-do this simulation software, what would you do differently?
Some interface issues embarrass me now. Otherwise, though it is a work written about then-current events which now seems focused on ancient history, I remain quite pleased at how it has held up as a sort of virtual time capsule.

Alan: Since Scholastic stopped selling your game, why would you bother to give away the software?
I don't exactly "give away" the software. The surprising amount of continued interest periodically gives me other ambitions for how to handle it, but the amount of work involved leads me to lazily leave it be.

It seemed best to directly steer whatever resources the game could still inspire toward the people whose sorry situation had been appropriated for its subject matter.

A couple years ago Ron Martinez, one of the two other main creators of Hidden Agenda, alerted me to the fact that various sites on the net considered the game "abandonware" and were letting people download it for free. I contacted the most prominent of these sites, including the Maricopa site, and let them know that it was not "abandoned."

Now I get many requests for suggestions about where to donate to worthwhile organizations. Since for many years my activist practice focused on Central America, I have a good sense of where to put dollars in that region.

I get about one request per day. I love hearing stories from people around the world who discover this game. People playing it today in Poland, Chile, Indonesia, Zimbabwe... despite the disconnect in time and geography, continue to find something relevant in their current situation.

On the one hand it surprises me that a digital work this old continues to be of interest.

On the other hand, I remember thinking when I finished it, "if I am run over by a bus in the next hour, as my life's blood drains away into the gutter I will remember that at least I made this." It is the first work of which I am unambiguously proud.