In 1976, I was the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to Simulation / Games for Education and Training, which had become the standard reference work for a field that was taking off rapidly. Because of our work in keeping track of all the simulations being written and published, I was in an excellent position to track the speed and take-off trajectory of the field. For that reason, I was asked to give the opening speech, assessing the field. I went a little beyond that charter and playfully turned the speech into a "simulation" as if I were giving the initial directions for something called "The Convention Game." I delivered the body of this article as the Keynote Speech for the 15th Annual Convention of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association, October 14-15, 1976, Raleigh, North Carolina. Here it is along with comments on the changes in the field I have noticed since then.

I. The Basics of the Convention Game

Welcome to the Game of Convention. You probably thought that you were coming to a real convention. No. This is a simulation game. Even if it is not real, it can be as much fun as reality. And maybe you can learn just as much. We will be playing the Convention Game together for the next three days. I will be giving you your orientation. My first job, of course, is to review some of the rules of the Game of Convention and to help you get into your role as Convention-goer. Then I'll go over some of the resources and finally I will review the scoring system.

Description of the Game

You all know what a Convention (or a Conference) is. You get about 100 or more people together in one hotel for two or more days. The Convention Game is what we simulation gamers have come to call a frame game -- you can plug any subject matter into it -- in fact it is the ultimate frame game -- in some conventions, you don't have to plug in any subject matter at all. But that is not true of us. Our subject is the simulation game applied, of course, to the real subject matter.

1999 - Conference Design
This was the first time I began to think seriously about conference design. The more I attend conferences, the more I think we need some important revisions to the basic construction of conferences. For one thing, we haven't made a lot of progress in redesigning conferences to be better information search games. We should just print the papers. People should not be allowed to read them. That medical habit persists in too many of the humanities conferences. We should make the whole conference resemble a Middle-Eastern bazaar. This would suggest that poster sessions be the central part of conferences. This would make the people you want to see more accessible and approachable, and help us get away from the basic educational design of the Middle Ages i.e. of one person delivering information one-way via speech to a huge group. Posters would also provide a boost to my other hobby horse these days, which is visual language (Horn, 1998), the close coupling of words, images, and shapes that is emerging as a truly new international auxiliary language. Visual language is the best medium for providing overviews of complex subject matter.

Subject Matter

There is the story of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man felt the leg of the elephant and said, "The elephant is big and round and solid like a tree." Another one felt the elephant's trunk. He said, "The elephant is like a large rubber hose." You might call these "subject matters." i.e. how a blind man sees an elephant. So we know what we're doing here. We're playing a frame game called Convention, the subject of which is simulation games, which are about subject matters, which are about blind men and elephants.

1999 - Subject Matter
I have spent a lot of time in the past 30 years working on a field I call the study of subject matter. My book on hypertext (Horn, 1989) and a recent summary article (Horn, 1993a) outline an approach to three broad categories ((1)relatively stable subject matters, (2) subject matters under dispute, and (3) empirical subject matters). This educational materials approach to subject matters is complementary to simulation gaming and would help it, especially in the early information providing stages of gaming.

Within every convention there are always a lot of subgames going on. I have time to recommend only a few of them to you.

Information Search Game

The Information Search Game is one of the subgames. It starts from the weakness of writers who make their program descriptions as abstract as possible, so that it is hard for the participant to decide whether to attend. When I'm playing the Information Search game, I am thinking: I wonder what is really going on in that session? Can I just go in and stand by the door and see what is going on and then slip out again? How do I handle the one where the person who is third on the panel is the one I really want to hear? There is a subgame within that which is called Trapped in a Boring Program After Having Sat in the Front Row. I have no recommendations for the best strategy moves for that one, although I have sat and fantasized many times about various moves, all the way from having a fake epileptic seizure to getting up, looking at my wrist watch and dashing out saying, "O, God, I hope Aunt Martha is all right!"

1999 - Beepers to the Rescue
To help us out of the boring program quandary, we now have pagers that can beep in the middle of a talk and, of course we also have fake beepers that you can activate by inconspicuously pushing a button. A real advance in technology!

Air Pollution Control Game

Within the conference meeting rooms, I hope we will have solved the air pollution control game. I mean the one about smoking pipes, cigars and cigarettes in meeting rooms. The data are that 5 to 10 percent of you sitting in the audience are allergic to such smoke. It shows in headaches, sore throats, nose and eye irritations. The evidence also reveals that you have higher chance of getting cancer and heart disease from someone else's smoke.

1999 - Air Pollution Game
This was my two bits worth 30 years ago. Anti-smoking was then my most active crusade. I didn't expect that by today we would have made such enormous progress as we have made in the U.S. air pollution game at conventions and other public places. Maybe we made a difference, all of us who were working quietly away on this problem!

Elections Game

Somewhere off in the back rooms we have our simulated Jimmy Carters and Gerry Fords wanting to be elected president of this organization. I must admit that I haven't heard much about the election. I guess that later tomorrow we will all simulate November 2nd and elect our new officers for our association.

1999: Elections
U.S. politics has changed a great deal in the past 30 years. I am wondering if our educational simulations have kept pace. I started out as a political scientist, and recently was startled to read William Greider's Who Will Tell the People. (Greider, 1992) If I were giving the talk today, I might have highlighted the freezing of ideas in simulations and speculate about how we can create tracking devices, including simulations, to monitor the change in our institutions.

Scoring Game

How are we going to score this Convention Game? What are the ways you can tell you've won the game?

Some of us collect our points just by being here. The rewards for getting away from the campus are sufficient. Others get their academic promotion points by delivering a paper. Presumably, I get some points for being here talking to you as your keynoter. How do you get your points? Take a moment or two to consider the ways you give yourselves points in this game.

What are the activities for which you take off points? I went to a session where they listed again for the ten-thousandth time the advantages of simulation gaming. Then my colleague comes over at lunch and says, "Boy, Jack Jones' presentation was really great. You really missed a good session."

1999 - Scoring
How we get our points continues to be one of the great philosophical and practical controversies. Points in academia continue to be awarded liberally for research and less so for teaching. Motivation research married with simulation gaming offers unusual possibilities. P.S. I don't think I got any points for this keynote speech apart from the pleasure of writing and delivering it.

Change the Rules

If I am to believe the grumbles of many simulation game makers and presenters, we have not been spectacularly successful at getting those creatures out there we refer to as Players to change the rules of the games that we make for them. Perhaps we might remind ourselves that we have not changed the rules of our Convention Game. How would you like to change it? How could that be done at this convention?

1999 - Rules
We are creatures of habit. That hasn't changed. The wisdom we can distill from all of this: "Beware of the rules you make. Nobody may get around to changing them for a long time -- not even you." This is a variation of the wisdom most parents come around to: Beware of the rules you make, because you may have to live up to them yourself.

Fantasy Experiment

Let's try something different. You've all heard of the fantasy game. I'd like to try one of those with you right now. Those of you who want to play, close your eyes. It may feel a little uncomfortable right here in the middle of a speech to close your eyes and do a fantasy game. Close your eyes. Relax. Let your mind simply relax enough that you can go inside your own selves. Think of one behavior you might like to experiment with that would be a departure from you usual role at a convention. You won't be obligated in any way to do this during the convention. This is simply an experiment to enable you to get in touch with other aspects of your personality that want to express themselves at conventions. As you are getting in touch now with the new role, just realize that this is a role that you have created and that it is all right, whatever it is, just as the role that you go around with everyday is all right. It is you. And now open your eyes and come back.

1999 - Fantasy
Guided fantasy was pretty new as an educational technique in 1976. At the time of writing, I hesitated putting this guided fantasy part of the speech in. Now, it has become quite routine, with "visioning" becoming a standard technique in strategic planning workshops in many corporations.

II. Simulated Keynote Speech

Now that we have gotten into mind the major parts of the game we are playing, I can go on to simulate the keynote speech. The keynoter plays the role of telling us where we've been, where we are and where we need to go. First of all, let us point with pride to our accomplishments.

Where We've Been

1. Modelling. In the past 25 years we as a profession have learned some things about modelling. Dick Duke (1974) calls gaming the "language of the future". We know better than we knew 25 years ago how to make more dynamic, interactive learning models.

1999 - Modelling
One of the things that has fascinated me in the last few years is how overused the word "model" has become. It has become a substitute for a whole host of words we used to use such as idea and concept. Those of you who read on toward the end of this paper will see how I contributed to that trend.

2. Experiential Education. We have begun to recognize the importance of experiential education -- that education that comes from working at a task with as much realism as can be provided by the educational environment. We have demonstrated to ourselves and to an increasing number in the educational community that listening and reading passively and test-taking are not good models of much of the tasks of our larger society.

1999 - Experiential
Experiential education has become relatively widespread these days, well enough known to have been attacked by the Religious Right in the U.S. That is a dangerous situation, although we should be able to defend experiential activities by both theory and data.

3. Important Issues. I think we also deserve to recognize that simulation has tried to tackle some of the major problems facing humanity and we have tried to deal with them with considerable complexity and sophistication. Simulation is associated with the study of the "world problematique" of Forrester and Meadows (1972) and the Club of Rome. It is associated with increasingly sophisticated work on our urban, national and world economic and ecological issues.

1999 - Issues
The global modellers have become adequately modest. Witness the title of their book Groping in the Dark, the First Decade of Global Modelling (Meadows, Richardson and Buckmann, 1982), Recently, the Club of Rome simulators released an updated Beyond the Limits (Meadows, Meadows, and Randers 1993). My impression is that the second book received much less attention than it deserves and much less attention than their original book did 20 years ago. Simulations have entered policy making in an important enough way to have attracted the attention of political animals. Kenneth Kraemer and his colleagues (1987) have documented some of this in their book Datawars.

4. Computer. Our field has been associated with the sensible use of the computer in education. The earliest computer-assisted instruction was little more than a computerized page-turner. Now, we see with the Huntington Project and other projects, that the computer is being used to permit students to interact with models and, in many cases, to make and test models of their own.

1999 - Computer
The computer has been the single biggest change in our field since my speech. My speech was originally given just a few years before the personal computer revolution. At that time, there were a modest number of simulations, mostly in business, which used computers. Now the computer gamers have their own society outside of NASAGA. Computer simulation and gaming as entertainment is a multi-billion dollar business. It does not seem to be connected with academic simulation and gaming to any great extent. There is a lesson lurking in there somewhere.

Recently I spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Human Interface Technology Labs, at the University of Washington, which is known for its pioneering work in virtual reality. One of the most interesting on-going discussions we had there was around my contention that a critical part of good simulation design is leaving out aspects of reality, whereas the main thrust of the research and development in virtual reality is to make virtual reality as much like our familiar 3-D reality as possible. The education and training researchers among us have a great deal to work on in that cluster of issues.

5. Teaching Simulation. A number of us have been working on methods of using games and simulations as the methods of teaching gaming and simulation. Thiagarajan and Stolovitch's workshop is a very good example.

1999 - Teaching Simulation
Thiagi is still at it, thank goodness!

6. Frame Games. Another development is the Frame Game which is based on the distinction between subject matter content rules and process rules of games. We have Fred Goodman to thank for a lot of this development.

1999 - Frame Games
Frame games have turned out to be one of the most important developments. The philosophical point that it focuses us on is the way we can "plug in" content to different "frames." Of course, frames become content of other frames. That is what abstract thinking does for us.

7. Whole Course Games. One of the more exciting and fruitful developments recently has been the increase in the number of simulation games that take a long time to play. A few business games require extensive periods of playing time, sometimes an entire semester. Games in the Polis Network take place over a semester and are played by students at different universities using a computer and telecommunications network. Buckminster Fuller's World Game, when first playing, took an entire summer. Now it is regarded as an on-going game that interacts with reality and has no conceived ending time. Where does simulation stop and reality begin in this game? It is, as far as we know, the longest on-going game-like structure.

1999 - Whole Course Games
Bucky Fuller's people are still at it, although their game takes only a couple of days now. Our hats should be off to them.

8. Games in the Community. I also applaud the movement of simulation games out of classrooms and into communities. Many of you are to be commended for this trend -- more than I can name.

1999 - Community
My impression is that we are in a lull in the area of community oriented games these days. But, I don't have any empirical data to support that.

9. Multiple Reality. One of the most interesting recent simulation game designs is one which Cathy Greenblat (in Greenblat and Duke, 1975) describes in her article, "Sociological Theory and the 'Multiple Reality' Game." Her premise is that you live in a different reality then I do. Even if we are present for the same event, yours is a different reality than mine. We are all beset by the illusion that we are seeing the same event. Perhaps the best example I can point to is the illusion that two partners in a marriage have the same marriage. It is fairly easily demonstrated that you have your marriage and your partner has an entirely different one. Greenblat argues that players should be given different and conflicting perceptions held by their real world counterparts. All should not be presented with the same information at the beginning of a game. She goes on to say, "It is not enough to provide missing information; we must provide misinformation." I want to return to this notion of different multiple realities in the last part of this presentation. But first I need to do the other part of the simulated keynote speech. That is the part which reminds us of problems we have not solved and urges us to strive to overcome our deficiencies.

1999 - Multiple Reality
My ex-wife is a psychotherapist. In one group session, that I was assisting at, I made up the Roshamon Scale to provide a measurement scale for the degree to which different partners in a relationship were separated by the multiple reality problem. Movie goers will remember that Kurasawa, the great Japanese film maker, made a film by that title, which showed four different versions of the same event, and left it to the audience to decide which was "real." The unit of measurement I created for my scale was the "Roshamon." People in the group were encouraged to provide a subjective appraisal of how far apart the views of reality of the partners were on various interactions. "Three Roshamon apart," one person would say. "No, at least five," another would interject. Out of the workshop came the thundering question: "Aren't we always at least one Roshamon apart?" As one book title says, "Reality Isn't What It Used to Be." (Anderson, 1990) There is a big place in living for working with the Roshamon Scale.

What We Need To Do

1. Not Enough Short Introductory Games. I take it that I could obtain fairly wide agreement in this audience that it would be better to introduce simulations by playing one then by talking about it. We have described about 1,400 simulations and games in the new 3rd edition of The Guide to Simulation/Games (Horn, 1976). This more than doubles the number that we cataloged when the 2nd edition came out in 1975. Yet among all of these simulations, there aren't more than a handful that are short enough and simple enough to be used as methods to introduce teachers and students to the idea of the simulation game. I have worked on this problem myself in putting together Participative Decision Making (in Zuckerman and Horn, 1973). It is not an easy job. You have to be able to play the simulation game within an hour. We need a larger group of them to fit them to the needs of particular audiences.

1999 - Short Introductory Games
Participative Decision Making became one of the most widely played simulations and is still used. It's topic was cutting the budget (and it used program budgeting). Today the topic is more relevant than ever. The need for short introductory simulations is even more important today than it was then.

2. Get Teachers Playing. One of the popular things to grumble about at conventions like this is that teachers are not using enough simulations. We have lots of so-called reasons for this. But basically we know that people don't change their teaching habits by reading about the advantages of gaming in articles. I would like to see all of us develop game nights like they used to do -- perhaps still do -- at Ann Arbor, where a different simulation game is played each week. So, my second charge to you for this year is start playing games with teachers. Let's help the Raleigh area start a weekly simulation gaming evening.

1999 - Teachers
We still need to work on this area. The rapid turnover of teachers is something we are always working against. Getting teachers to use simulations remains one of the keys to the development of simulation gaming as a field.

3. Proliferation and Mediocrity. I have talked about the abundance of new simulation games. Now I must mention that in making simulation games easier to make, we have created a situation where it is possible to create hundreds of mediocre ones, simulations which are poorly worked out; have relatively superficial models; and which have little dynamism and less aesthetic flair. Part of the problem here is that we have provided information about how to make simulation games without providing adequate evaluation. As Stewart Brand said recently, "Access without evaluation is destructive." I have been partially responsible for not providing more evaluation in the Guide. With the 3rd edition which will be out shortly, you can look for more of a consumer's report.

1999 - Abundance and Evaluation
We were especially fortunate to have received a large grant from the Exxon Education Foundation to produce the 4th Edition of The Guide (Horn, 1980) This enabled us to make a significant jump in the quality of evaluation, which included the evaluators playing the simulations instead of simply writing their chapters from inspection.

4. Help Stamp Out Rules. We human beings are such incredible creatures of habit. After all these years, we still write so many of the directions for our simulation games in the form of lists of rules. And they are so difficult to learn a game from. I have some conjectures about this. I was talking last year with a prominent simulation game maker, who shall remain anonymous, and I asked him what games he liked to play. "None of them!" he said, "I just like to make them. I don't like to play games!" So, my first hypothesis is that we don't play other people's games. Therefore, we haven't learned that it's awful to try to learn to play a game from the list of rules. Secondly, it is easier for us to write rules than to put the directions in any other way. We are lazy. There is also the historical hypothesis. In the olden days, everybody knew how to play the games. Cousin Bill or Uncle Charlie showed you how. The written rules were just summaries which people could look at to solve arguments. Fortunately, we have some better models. Thiagarajan (1975) has written an excellent article on how to write introductions to games. Michel Gabryziak and the Serif group in France (1) have also come up with excellent models for learning new games quickly. And we have a few really excellent models for introductions to long complicated simulation games. One of the best that comes to mind is the Marriage Game Manual by Greenblat, Stein, and Washburn (1974). Some of the work that I have been doing in developing Information Mapping (Horn et. al. 1969, 1971; Horn, 1976) can be applied to the design of player's manuals as well.

1999 - Rule Writing
Information Mapping ®, Inc., a company I founded in 1982, has made a significant impact on how instruction in industrial training is taking place. It has trained approximately 200,000 technical writers in business and government in 31 countries worldwide. (Horn, 1993a) I am sad to say that the structured writing methodology that I pioneered has not taken off in academia. And we still have considerable problems with rule writing and instructions for simulations. Our documentation of simulations is generally poor.

5. Not Many Future Games. In all of the proliferating simulation games, there are not very many yet that really help us creatively explore future possibilities for our culture, our economics, our lives. There are a few. But most of our model building has what Marshall McLuhan calls a rear-view mirror model of the future. We race down the highway at 80 miles an hour looking into our rear view mirror, yet the theories, attitudes and models that worked for us in the past may have nothing to do with the future.

1999 - Futures
I was part of the small group of six that formed the World Future Society in the mid-60's and have taken a strong interest in the field ever since. My impression is that we haven't made as much progress as I would have liked in this field of gaming of the future.

6. Conspicuous Gaps. While I am talking about gaps and possibilities, I want to mention that we have avoided many areas of the subject matter. For example we don't have enough good simulation games of the Soviet, Chinese, and Third World cultures, politics, economics and daily life. Eastern (Oriental) models, of which I shall say more in the last part of this speech, are almost totally absent.

1999 - Gaps
This is a tough job. My impression is that we have just as great a lack today as we had then in this area of understanding other cultures through simulation.

III. The Convention Game Is Part Of The Inquiry Game

Now I want to turn to some larger themes and bring them back to our Convention Game.

Defining "Game"

Think of the several senses in which we use the word-metaphor "game": for a contest; for playfulness; for pretend or "not real;" for ulterior motives. (Eric Berne's Games People Play.) I am sure that it is no coincidence that we use the same word for such different aspects of human behavior. In the dialectic of play/not play there are some profound issues. During the past few years, I have been studying psychological models of the East (models which are found mostly in the great religions of the world). One of the Hindu models of the universe is that all of life, all creation is a Game. Alan Watts (1961) points out that the biggest rule in any culture is "You must take the culture seriously." Once you start regarding it simply as a game (in all of its multi-metaphored levels) people start getting very much afraid. One thing that keeps us from seeing the game of life is taking the game of culture seriously.

1999 - Games
How to take the world lightly while still being serious is still one of the largest learnings of life.

What is simulated and what is real?

In the hustle and bustle of conventions we do not usually take our time to ponder the mysteries together. It would, for example, be much easier to get a group of people here at this conference to agree on what is a simulation than to get them to agree on what is real.

Richmond's Model

In this connection I would like to describe George Richmond's (1973) work. He modified Monopoly for classroom use. He printed play money. He sold parts of the classroom to students. Yes. He sold the classroom! He paid students for their homework and gave bonuses in play money for various things depending on the student -- everything from merely handing in a paper on time to doing creative work. He hired kids to do regular jobs around the classroom -- water the plants, wash the black board, etc., and paid them play money for it. They used the play money in the Monopoly game to build model houses on their property. Corporations grew up in the game to buy property and put capital together. Banks were needed, Richmond was printing so much money. (It was an inflationary economy). Why did the kids work for play money? He put a small "gold" standard behind the money. You could use the play money you had at the end of the semester to bid in an auction to buy baseball mits and other real stuff kids like to buy. Play money for real things. Where does the simulation stop and the reality begin?

Ramon, the kid that was always chosen last in basketball, became the class banker, because he was good at math. Kids sought his advice on investments, etc. In a couple of weeks, Ramon was no longer chosen last in choosing up basketball teams. He was 2nd or 3rd. His status had risen, though his skill at basketball had not. Where does simulation stop and reality begin? The description of the work of Richmond also brings to the forefront one of the issues of our classrooms that I think is mostly avoided. You can see that Richmond's classroom contains a so-called token economy -- which, if you believe some people, comes straight from the devil's workshop (B. F. Skinner). It is paying kids to learn. Now this area is inadequately studied as yet because we also do not know the total effect of making rewards explicit. David Green and Mark Lepper (1974) have suggested that if children like doing something already, doling out gold stars and loud praise can turn pleasure into self-conscious drudgery (2). But we cannot avoid the fact that every classroom contains a set of rewards for the participants -- each viewing them from their own realities -- and that rewards influence behavior.

1999 - Richmond
Richmond's work is still one of the most intriguing applications of our methodology and his book is still a classic in my mind. I recently saw a television program that featured him with a fully built space in a school, with a street of kid-size buildings you could walk into that was used as a setting for his on-going simulations. Bravo, George!

It looks to me like the world financial and currency markets have been creating "real" money in the same way that George Richmond created it in his class.

Transcend Reward Systems

There is some Eastern psychology here too. It says that we can develop our awareness of the rewards and our attachment to them. And then we must finally transcend these reward systems in our lives by finding or developing (there are different models here) our internal beings. By the way, it is easier according to that model to give up our attachment to the rewards or pleasures than it is to give up our suffering.

1999 - Rewards
I have mentioned reward systems already in this article. Green and Lepper's (1974) work in the field of reward research states that explicit rewards (gold stars, etc.) actually decrease the quality of learning. And there is quite a bit of evidence that explicit rewards contracted in advance in business (e.g. options for managers, bonuses) do not improve the quality of work. So there is a great deal to be learned and applied in this area.

The Model of Your Model

The game that we are about to play is basically a subset of a larger game which C. West Churchman (1971) calls the inquiry systems game. Our sciences and our philosophy are subsystems of a larger social system. They permit us to produce and acquire a resource called knowledge and occasionally an even scarcer resource called wisdom. Churchman says we need to get the assumptions of our inquiry systems straightened out if we are to make better public and private policy. He talks about five kinds of sciences. For those of you in the policy simulation field, I encourage you to dig into his work. It is one of the more promising areas of research and theory and has so far been ignored by simulation gamers. Churchman would say to us, what is our model of a simulation? What is your model of a model? What is your model of science? We need to see that it is our assumptions that determine the kind of models we project onto the world. What are the ways in which we impose boundaries on our models? What do we regard as "outside my field," or "not within the accepted subjects for models"? What are the taboos in our fields? What are our blind spots?

1999 - Model of Models
The two different technologies of simulation and scenario making have been in dialogue for 30 years at least. It appears to me that scenario making has captured the field of business and government strategic planning. (Schwartz, 1991) Why is this? The quick answer is that it is easier to write a brief scenario than it is to make a simulation. But there is a bigger answer, and that is that we need to be prepared for several different futures and to discover the trends and contingencies of key future events. The exception to this trend in strategic planning is the increased use of Forrester-model simulations. (Senge, 1990) The software available for these Forrester models enables a great many more students and practitioners to participate in simulation making.

The Scoreless Game

I asked you earlier to think about how you scored your personal game. I would like to point out to you that some Eastern models of psychology suggest you can learn to play a scoreless game. You can learn to do this even while living in a culture where everybody keeps score. How does that work? How do you get the tremendous burden of scoring off you back? That is a profound study and a great deal of work.

1999 - Scorelessness
We live overscored lives. That results in part in the self esteem game at which a lot of people seem to be losers. We've learned that arbitrary scoring simply discourages some students. More research is needed here!

Human Potential Models

There is a whole class of models that is coming out of the human potential movement. These models say things about what the possibilities for human beings are. What is your model of the potentialities of a human being? What is your model for your own potential? If we simulated your model of you through time, what kind of a human being would we have 10 years from now? There is a model in the East, the Karma model, which is an early feedback model, that says that you will be affected by the results of your current actions. It is the "you reap what you sow" model in Christian terms. How you act now influences your future karma.

1999 - Human Potentials
These human potential models are maturing now and beginning to reach mainstream. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) They've also been attacked by the Religious Right in the U.S.

Models of Consciousness

We have a very static set of assumptions about ourselves. We assume that we do not change very much. Some Eastern psychologies are based on just the opposite assumption. They are based on the assumption that the only important psychological models to understand are those of the transformation of human beings. What is your model of consciousness? Do you assume that we exist at the same level of consciousness all of the time? Does your model incorporate the possibility of living in higher levels of consciousness? In the system which I am currently studying -- that of Oscar Ichazo and the Arica Institute -- theory says there are 4 major levels of consciousness, some of which are divisible into 9 to 12 discernible sublevels. These levels stretch all the way from insanity through many levels of what we call the normal consciousness through those higher levels experienced by great mystics. I am talking about the models of consciousness here because we have a tendency to forget how limited are the models we use everyday to perceive our world. The epistomologists and the perception-psychologists are telling us what the Buddha said thousands of years ago, that as I look out at the world, I really only see my own simulation models of reality which I have projected out there. Therefore, as Oscar Ichazo has written, "If I am only contemplating my own explanations, I cannot continue being deceived by believing that I observe real objects, for although objects of the exterior world are real, I can absorb from their reality only what my level of consciousness absorbs with its understanding." (Ichazo, 1975). This is perhaps why there are many knowledgeable simulation games but very few wise ones.

1999 - Consciousness
I would say from this perspective, some 25 years later, that we continue to be controlled by a hidden presupposition that says that everything we do takes place at one level of consciousness. I believe science, philosophy and life are the poorer for it. For me, Leshan and Margenau's (1982) book on the philosophy of science introduces multiple realities and levels of consciousness better than any I know.

Conclusions

Churchman's model of the inquiry system also allows us to see that we are playing this three day simulation of Conventions within the larger world game of inquiry that our species has been playing for quite a few thousand years now. We are the latest in an unbroken tradition of world inquiry game players that stretches back as far as language and probably much farther. Humankind has become more conscious as the history of inquiry systems has unfolded. Does your model permit you to view this whole unfoldment of the universe? Does it permit you the metaphor that Alan Watts suggests, that we have been created by the Universal Game Making Process, as mobile apertures to permit the Universe to view itself.

In the beauty and mystery of this great metaphorical game that we are all a part of, I now turn you over to the assistant Game Overall Directors (these are our "fellow G.O.D.'s," as St. Abelard addressed his congregations). They have the doors open and the programs waiting for you to simulate your reality today.

References

Anderson, Walter Truett. (1990). Reality Isn't What It Used to Be. NY: Harper and Row.

Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps To An Ecology of Mind. NY: Ballantine.

Churchman, C. West. (1971). The Design of Inquiring Systems. NY: Basic Books.

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Information Mapping is a registered trademark of Information Mapping, Inc.

About the author
Robert E. Horn is a Visiting Scholar at the Program on People, Computers, and Design at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Horn is the author of the just published book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (www.macrovu.com) and a pioneering teaching tool presenting the structure, intellectual history, and status of important contemporary issues: Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think? (MacroVU Press, Bainbridge Island WA 98110)

ADDRESSES:
-Robert Horn, Stanford University, Visiting Scholar , 2819 Jackson St. #101, San Francisco, CA, 94115, USA; telephone and fax 415/775-7377, e-mail: bobhorn@well.com, URL: <http://www.macrovu.com>

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