A Delicate Balance describes an elaborate game created last year by the McCombs School of Business in Austin teaches students about handling the delicate balance of business and ethics, and the sometimes high moral price of too much cost cutting:
‘I just killed 350 people,’ said a dazed David Marye, InfoMaster’s 25-year-old chief ethics officer. ‘I made a bad call, and people died. It’s going to be hard to sleep tonight.’Luckily for Mr. Marye, both InfoMaster and the terrorist attack were fictitious, part of an elaborate game created last year by the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Three made-up student-run companies competed in the cutthroat computer-hardware industry, all trying to maximize revenue, keep costs down and beat back competitors. But the prizes — $11,000 and the chance to perform in front of a high-level, real-world executive panel — were real.
I love this aspect:
The results were eye opening — and painful. Idealistic students, who started the game preaching virtue, succumbed to the everyday challenges of making their numbers and whipping the competition. Buying cheaper components or hiring cheaper workers would allow more production. Not spending resources on training or quality control would let them get new products to markets faster, but there might be a price to pay down the road. The game proved so realistic that some students were stunned that, under pressure, they readily chose corner-cutting paths they had vowed never to take.
Where did this game come from?
Steven Tomlinson, a finance lecturer who has a background in theater, pushed to put students under pressure and throw choices at them. He hired Allen Varney, an Austin-based designer of video and board games, and consulted with a soap-opera scriptwriter and corporate executives. Scripts were written, rules devised and software created to track decisions.
Allen Varney, the designer of “video and board” games, actually has a long history of designing paper-and-pencil roleplaying games (à la Dungeons & Dragons).