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Games Entertainment

Virtual-U (SimUniversity) Now Available 147

Posted by chrisd from the hope-it-can-simulate-my-last-3-credits dept.
Ben Sawyer writes "The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Virtual U project recently shipped a new version our university simulator. This software simulation game, available at www.virtual-u.org lets you play as president of a U.S. university. You choose how faculty spend time, allocate funds, and decide if you should give special admission to athletes. Version 2.0 improves the model, and adds new features. The product is supported through a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The product runs on Windows 2000/XP/9X/ME. The software is being used by a number of university education programs, and is part of an overall project to improve thinking about how universities are managed." No word on if virtual-u features a "BSA attack" scenario.
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Virtual-U (SimUniversity) Now Available More

Virtual-U (SimUniversity) Now Available

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  • Woo hoo! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by AnimeFreak ( 223792 )
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/16/182723 4&mode=thread

    Now I can see if this works!

    Will it also have a party simulator so I can join-in? :)
  • ...if they can simulate my idiotic dorm roommate who puked on the sofa, didn't clean it, and didn't tell anyone about it...
    • 2 friends passed out and puked on my waterbed. When they rolled around is squished under the entire bed.

      It Was washable, but No fun.

  • I believe an article was posted on this a few months back, but it seems to be there have been a few updates.

    I think this software might actually be fun to play, plus as an added bonus, it might give some insight into the "bureacracy" and "red tape" that are experienced in so many large institutions. Making decisions that will effect thousands of people is never easy, and a redundant system of checks is needed to prevent disaster.

    • Re:Posted already? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ben Sawyer ( 562666 )
      Hi,

      I don't think anything was posted given that I'm involved with the project and do the postings and grassroots reachout.

      We've been around for a while but until 2.0 was complete we hadn't done a ton of aggressive posting about the project. I did submit a note about a paper on public policy games of which Virtual U was mentioned but that was a general discussion of games in general not Virtual U specifically. Perhaps someone else might have posted something about it? In any case the only other thing I would submit is when the source becomes available later next month...

      Ben Sawyer
    • "... it might give some insight into the "bureacracy" and "red tape" that are experienced in so many large institutions"

      So the game makes you wait in line for two hours during registration time? Or do you get to design paperwork and the 80 steps required to process it?

      "decisions that will effect thousands"

      Yup, that sounds like the real Taco.

  • MAD (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Alfred E. Neuman foundation!

  • To make it truly realistic... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:50PM (#3419919) Homepage

    ... I'm going to skip it.
  • So someone will get a nice big research grant to sit around watching how a virtual university works, and then find out how to improve their university.

    They will do this while sat in a perfectly good university, with all those "real" things happening. Sadly they will miss this because they are too busy playing The Sims "Brainy People Edition".

    • Actually (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gatesh8r ( 182908 )
      With The Sims, various Housing and Urban Development groups have been using this to simulate ideal conditions for people to live in since there has been a great deal of research done with the game to provide a more realistic situation with various designs.


      It may seem to be a game these simulations, but in simulations it allows for a faster delivery of results statistically and realistically. Most of the time these simulations are money well spent. It doesn't mean that some stat geek isn't going to have some fun and poke around with things as we may do to have fun. You just can't do some things with certain senarios due to time and money.

  • To me this doesn't sound all that fun, however, it will give the Student Governments of the world something better to do than write letters to the paper.
  • I hope the game has a more realistic simulation of people lives and economics than The Sims had. If so, it could be an extremely useful tool not only for universities, but for all large organizations - I imagine they face many of the same types of challenges.

    Of course, like all such games, it's limitation will be your in-ability to impliment any policies or creative solutions that the game designs didnt think to allow. For instance, I bet the game doesn't let you switch to an Open Source IT infrastructure...

    Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]

    • Re:The Sims (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ben Sawyer ( 562666 )
      No we don't let you switch to an open source IT infrastructure. As your point says, it's hard in a game to provide the same level of penultimate decision making that real-life allows.

      This can be dealt with in a few ways:

      1. Build a framework that lets you add over time ever more detail and realism

      2. Build a game where many areas are conceptual and abstract so that people can explore core issues and imagine the details that make up their more general decisions (i.e. fill in your own backstory as you cut the IT budget because you're moving to open source IT tools).

      3. Build some that has immense detail in it. (aka never finish.)

      With Virtual U we went with a bit of the first 2 ideas. Ideally overtime with support we hope to continue progressing things toward ideas like more detail to the IT decisions given feedback and such however the original goal is to focus on the big issues and general decisions.

      One other issue with the IT stuff that is important is to understand what the real impact is. Is there detailed analysis available saying what switching to an open-source infrastructure does to a universities IT budget? Does it really work? While we've undoubtably put some bias in our product, as we go forward and begin to add more detail like this we're inevitably going to add more bias to the model.

      Also I think it can be safely assumed that in Virtual U some % of your overall IT budget is going to open source tools and infrastructure. It would be interesting to know what % of universities IT budgets are spent on such tools and services. Maybe the guys at Educause would know. I'll ask them.

      Ben Sawyer

      • Re:The Sims (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gilroy ( 155262 )
        Blockquoth the poster:

        2. Build a game where many areas are conceptual and abstract so that people can explore core issues and imagine the details that make up their more general decisions (i.e. fill in your own backstory as you cut the IT budget because you're moving to open source IT tools).

        I haven't read the code, so I might be entirely wrong. But my guess is, cutting the IT budget would lead to lower available services and thus inefficiency and more student gripes. But that doesn't (necessarily) model the switch to Open Source. Open Source breaks the financial model of "higher price == better (more) service". In other words, just because you don't pay for the tools, doesn't mean the tools are garbage.



        On one level, you could abstract this by saying the IT budget reflects license costs and service costs. If we drive down the license costs, then we can spend more on services in the same budget. But actually the model doesn't work that way. There's simply no way that paying for Office licenses (and Windows licenses) is intrinsically equal to paying for more help desks. If we need to abstract this much, then a very useful sim capability -- test whether Open Source can work as well for less -- is not available.


        On the other hand, it's hard to see how you could code for that without simply incorporating your own personal bias towards Open Source (or against it) into the simulation. Is there hard data anywhere?

  • My choices as president (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ayatollah ( 172519 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:53PM (#3419928) Homepage
    Naturally, tuition goes up every year no matter what. I will also enfore the no-reusing-of-textbooks policy set by my forefathers. Lastly, I will work harder to admit more students who only want to party. They know they're buying the degree, not the education, so let's have a wet t-shirt contest instead of a group study. Pass the beer bong, dude!

  • The criterion for determining how good a game is.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neologic ( 48268 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:53PM (#3419929)
    I always determined how good a game is by asking the question, "Would I skip class to play this?".
    Can't see that happening with this- would you skip class to play at going to class?

    From the website: Virtual U is a caricature of real academic life grounded in authentic conceptual structures and data.
    Silly me, I always thought academic life was a caricature of reality already, how could they caricaturize it further?

  • the site gets posted on /. so i naturally figure i better download the game and try it before i comment.

    and i get 227 KB/s from their server while it's the top story at /.

    impressive, well either that or the game sucks so bad that nobody is even bothering to grab the file

  • I'm going to ban my students from using P2P services and allow my research staff to patent my research ... if the typical slashbot is correct about the merits of these actions, I should lose my game quite quickly.
  • I hope there is a feature to 'Prevent all Grad Students who speak unintelligible English from teaching'. I just don't see why this happens. Many colleges seem to think it's ok to let the profs get by letting their grad students teach for them, but I don't see how this is what the student is paying for. They are there to learn a subject from a professional educator, not learn how to interpret thickly accented versions of their own language from another student. If a grad student wants to go into teaching the subject, it is reasonable, but in order to teach they have to be understood first.
    • A lot of schools require their graduate students to do at least some TAing. Often they have English competency exams, but apparently, they aren't enough...
      • Wichita State University ( www.wichita.edu ) is INFAMOUS for this. WSU has a VERY high arab student population. In fact, most of those news stories you heard about student visas included profiling our school. One of first WTC bombing guys had an expired WSU student Visa (never came to WSU, just got accepted and the visa to get in the US). Rumor has it that one of the 9/11 pilots did the same, however that is un-confirmed. That, however is beside the point. The point is that a heavy minority of the student population does not speak native english, and ESL (English as a Second Language - which I do TA for Spanish -> English) is not flying. Example:

        I started out as a CS major. First college class: Calc I. I had looked at calc stuff before, had a basic understanding - but was ready to learn. My teacher was a jack-ass who normally only taught grad-courses but taught calc once every 3 years "to stay fresh." Luckily, we have a "math-lab" (always sounds like meth-lab) for students. Problem: You can not understand the god damned tutor. I polietly asked him to repeate himself time and time again, and I still had no fucking clue. For the 6 weeks I was in Calc, before I dropped and changed majors, we had 3 subs - one russian, two arabs of some sort. I could not understand one fucking word that came out of their mouths. Reminder: I am a spanish major and I am pretty good at listening and picking things out. My boss at the time had a stroke and I could understand him.

        Anyways, simulate having such a small pool of elligable profesors to where you have to put people who can not "speaka da english" and then you have a winner. (I would not play it, but I would not play Sims and thats a best seller - who the fuck knows. I cant wait for the sim where you sim playing sims!)

  • Virtual Sim - U scenarios? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Navius Eurisko ( 322438 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @11:56PM (#3419938)
    Any good sim game has to have scenarios you can play where an impending crisis looms before you. Here are my thoughts on some possible scenarios:

    - Your campus' Athletic fraternity have lost their frat house to a natural distaster. They, in turn, kick the nerd fraternity out of their house. Do you let the Athletes stay in the house or help the nerds get on the Greek council?

    - The RIAA is threatening to sue your university over student mp3 servers running on network. Do you rebuff the RIAA or crack down on the warez sites?

    - Students have petitioned administration to switch the student computer labs over to linux, saving thousands. The Evil company providing your university with their OS, has bound you with restrictive licences. Do you ignore the students or try and find a way around the licences?
  • ... the address to download a Cmdr. Taco and Wife set of skins?

  • I love these kinds of games, since they're very much geared towards learning.

    Am I mistaken in thinking that these guys helped fund Reinventing America (I and II)? That was a really cool idea which I'd like to see brought back.

  • BSA == world domination? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ryman ( 518071 ) <[moc.oohay] [ta] [0801namyr]> on Saturday April 27, 2002 @12:03AM (#3419952)
    Speaking of the BSA: Did anyone else notice the graphic on the BSA's website of a copyright symbol superimposed over the earth? Maybe I'm just paranoid....
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • if they have an expansion pack so i can improve my social life in college too... just install *Hot Date* and i can find cuter girls in my computer engineering classes (or girls period)
  • So, is there a secret part of the game where you get to be president of Clown College [tvtome.com]?
  • Maybe we should send a copy of this to the demented Judge Stephen Limbaugh (Brother of the Big Fat Idiot [differentvoices.com]) that ruled that games were not Speech [slashdot.org] and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech" in the games.
  • This reminds me of a discussion I had with my friend today. We were discussing how crappy his MIS class is and how useless the skills he was practicing were (he is not at all technically inclined).

    We basically came to the conclusion that all college professors should write their textbooks. They should draft them and have an on campus press print them. Nothing fancy, just the core information they are trying to present. This would certainly kill the college textbook racket as well as weed out the really incompetent Professors. Any thoughts? Of course I understand that it will never happen, even on the coldest day of a winter in hell, but still, it is an interesting concept to discuss.
    • You, sir, have stumbled upon a key criterion. How many professors have published pedagogical materials within the last ten years that are still in use?
    • I wholheatedly agree. The most interesting and valuable class I have ever taken was an introductory physics course in which the professors (a husband-wife team) had written the textbokk specifially for that course. The book is also used in several other introductory physics courses, but its insightfulness is only really appreciated by students of the authors, since the lecture material is so well-coordinated with what we read in the book. Fortunate as it would be, it is unrealitic to expect all professors to care about their students to that degree. Sadly, for most professors (particulary at research universities), teaching is just something they have to do so they will be able to do their research.
    • We basically came to the conclusion that all college professors should write their textbooks.

      How about just producing notes for the class? I've had experience of books that were just written for the course and to be honest they were pretty awful. The best way I've seen of doing it is producing notes from the lecture slides that were given. This way the notes tie in with the lectures.

  • Yay! now I can get my virtual degree in jornalism.
    Will that at least qualify me to write virtual articles for slashdot? :)

    Finally a game that is virtually real!
  • MSFUDMOD01.ZIP: Introduces Bill Gates' henchmen to your IT/Finance dept. This will install "virtual IIS" on every campus machine, increases complexity geometrically, saps resources, makes the better CS students grouchy.

    PSEUDCHTMOD01.ZIP: Enforcment of such gems as "trying to learn how to be a CS major will get you thrown out of the class".

    SLAVEMOD01.ZIP: Increases revenue for the school by making all of your students research yours to sell.

  • Don't bother (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tfreport ( 458641 )
    Downloaded and played it. The game would definitely benefit from either a tutorial or at the very least more active help features at the beginning. The interface is such that you are lost trying to figure things out. I wasted a half hour before realizing that I was getting nothing out of it and was figuring very little out. Seems like a great idea, I just need some sort of documentation to better understand what I am doing right and wrong.

  • How realistic... (Score:4, Funny)

    by zubernerd ( 518077 ) on Saturday April 27, 2002 @12:49AM (#3420043)
    can such a program be made to be... Let's see, it should simulate:

    (1) Backstabbing and in-fighting among the professors. Let's face it, not all profs are looking out of the best interest of the students. Some just want to do their research and not be bothered by such pesky details such as students who want to learn. At the Univ. I'm at, the chair of the deptartment I'm in is about to retire; in other words, there is blood in the water, and there is going to be a ego/pissing contest to get that seat.

    (2) A lazy student gov't Let's face it, what is the job of student gov't? To serve themselves and get laid, what else! Really, the student gov't where I'm at is corrupt and has done nothing for the students. However, I hear their desks are used for more than writing papers...

    (3) 'Loopy' Deans Overheard to between a dean and a prof: Dean "You need to get the enrollment up in your program before we can fund it anymore" Prof: "You need to fund us, since we are near broke and need money for facilities and staff to get studnets in the program" Dean: "You need to enroll more students to get more money" (Now, think endless loop...)

    (4) 6 Chancaller, 10 year... We go through head hanchos like toilet paper, each with their own 'texture'... Really though, there seems to be little direction from the top.

    Ok, really, this is a cool game; I just hope it can help teach the next generation to run a university (and NOT run it into the ground)

    • (1) Backstabbing and in-fighting among the professors. Let's face it, not all profs are looking out of the best interest of the students. Some just want to do their research and not be bothered by such pesky details such as students who want to learn. ...

      Don't forget the reverse is also true. I remember a professor at the university I was at who was let go precisely because he spent so much time with the students, helping them to learn, and not nearly enough time publishing papers. There was even a petition signed by a few hundred students, to no avail. Last I heard, he'd gotten a better-paying job at a lab in the area.

      (2) A lazy student gov't Let's face it, what is the job of student gov't? To serve themselves and get laid, what else! Really, the student gov't where I'm at is corrupt and has done nothing for the students. However, I hear their desks are used for more than writing papers...

      Damn, I must've missed that action when I was in the SGA. I was part of a group that actually got pissed off with the then-current, frat-run SGA. We organized online, initially via the general discussion newsgroup, then through a nice majordomo list (it helped that we were almost all CS and/or IS students initially). We ran a unified campaign for both the "executive" and "legislative" sides ("judicial" was appointed by the administration).

      We took the legislative, but certain large special interests on-campus managed to secure the presidency. One half of the student government was arguably corrupt, but it wasn't the side I was in. Not that we were able to do anything about it, even though we worked our asses off, even working through the summer before the new year started. We managed to rewrite most of the policies and governing documents, since no one had bothered to keep track of such pesky things as amendments, the passed/failed legislation, etc.

      I'd like to think that we made a difference, but being brutally honest, we didn't accomplish much. I went back a few years later, and basically everything we'd done had been reversed. Then, because of a certain amount of...financial improprieties...allegedly perpetrated by some people on the exec side, what little influence the student government had was eventually crushed by the university administration. Nowadays, I don't even recognize the new organization at all.

      But that year and a half was one of the best times I'd ever had. There were 4 of us living together on-campus, all who'd gotten involved. We became the de facto campaign headquarters, and throughout the year we actually served, still managed to have most of the senate over regularly, and at all hours. Ah, the sleepless nights...tripping over campaign materials...having a half dozen people sleeping on the floor...

  • Any porting projects? (Score:3)

    by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Saturday April 27, 2002 @12:54AM (#3420049) Journal
    I skimmed the license agreement, and it looks like (at first glance) a BSD-advertisement license. In any case, the source is available, so (naturally) I am wondering if there are any attempts to port it to Linux/*BSD. Or does it use DirectX? I guess DirectX wouldn't preclude porting, just make it more difficult. Thoughts?

    :Peter
    • Here's what the FAQ [virtual-u.org] says;

      1. What is the public source version of Virtual U?

        The public source version of Virtual U is now available and provides access to the very source code and source elements (i.e. graphics, sound, etc.) that comprise the actual Virtual U program. This source code is available for free for non-commercial purposes. Licensing of the source code will be made available to commercial interests (be they commercialized interests on behalf of public/private institutions, or industrial entities). All interested licensees of the source code can contact Ben Sawyer at bsawyer@virtual-u.org for more information.

        ...

        Why isn't there a Macintosh version of Virtual U?

        Our development team was skilled with Windows programming and thus Virtual U was originally developed for Microsoft Windows. Due to some of the proprietary graphics features and programming used to create Virtual U's unique graphical interface, it wasn't possible during the development of the first version to do a Macintosh version of the software. However, hope to eventually port Virtual U to the Macintosh. We are actively looking for volunteers who wish to port the core simulation kernal to the Macintosh and create a graphical interface suitable to the Macintosh. If you are interested in working with us on this, please contact Ben Sawyer at bsawyer@virtual-u.org.

        Why doesn't Virtual U run on Windows NT?

        In order to display its graphics, Virtual U uses a special graphical programming API (application programming interface) known as DirectX. Windows NT is only compatible with DirectX 3.0 while Virtual U requires DirectX 6.1 or higher. Because Microsoft never updated DirectX for the NT platform, Virtual U doesn't work with Windows NT. Windows 2000, the upgrade to Windows NT, supports DirectX 7 and higher and thus is compatible with Virtual U.

  • I can't wait... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 )
    ... for the Panty Raid Party Pack!
  • "Windows 2000/XP Users: If you experience any blacking out or..."

    hmm...

  • Virtual-university awards virtual degree, which in turn purchased by virtual "success people" to create virtual qualification.

    My email box is half flood of these. :-P


  • ...I'd be able to assassinate Brother Jed.

    Cheers,
  • I want to donate a copy of this to some of Stanford's management staff. They've made some bad decisions lately. Splitting off the hospital as a for-profit operation, then merging it back a year later [stanford.edu], for example.
    • This is funny because the software was designed by a previous CFO of Stanford...William Massy. Also a big request of some larger universities is do we model a med school. Evidently they are notoriously ornery situations to deal with. - Ben Sawyer
      • Do you model mergers and acquisitions? The Stanford hospital mess involved splitting off the Stanford and University of California at San Francisco hospitals, privatizing them under a new entity, and then undoing the whole transaction a year later, at a cost of perhaps a billion dollars.

        Merger and acquisition activity has such a strong impact on a university that it's worth thinking about modelling it.


  • In 1998, illegal copying of software resulted in losses of more than $2.9 billion in the U.S. alone.* This has a significant impact on the U.S. economy. In 1998, software piracy cost the U.S. 109,000 jobs, $4.5 billion in lost wages and nearly $1 billion in lost tax revenue.**


    Umm.. yeah, right.
    I wanna see some documents to back THIS up. Let's audit the BSA!

  • I wonder if one of the goals is to become a spinless politically correct nitwit similar to what Penn State's President Graham Spanier is really like.
  • Virtual-U = training ground for those aspiring to be University Presidents.
  • If you misallocate all your funds and can't build any more units on campus, other local universities will send wave after wave of orcish peons to overrun your administration building. Zug zug!
  • in order to make it fully realistic, you should be able to model your school after corporate structures. that is what is happening at my school right now - the CSU Chico administration has been steadily increasing administrative pay rates and expenses, while replacing tenured professors with part-time staff. i wouldn't be suprised if many other schools in the U.S. are following similar trends of corporatization.

    here are the stats given by the chapter of our faculty association:
    "The number of administrators increased by more than 125 percent from 1975-76 to 1998-99. During the same period, the number of full-time equivalent-students grew by 16.8 percent, and the number of faculty increased by approximately 6.8 percent."

    peachy.

    tim
    • There is an interesting problem of economics revealed here.

      We tend to think that economies of scale apply to management costs. If you double the size of a company, then management costs should increase, but they will still be less than double what they were.

      In fact this is often the case, especially when the company is simply doing more of the same activity that it was doing before. The task of management is to solve an information problem. If the problem remains much the same, even as the company grows in size, then the management costs will remain much the same.

      Sometimes, however, the information problem becomes considerably more complex as the size of the company grows. This is often the case if the company diversifies its product line. If the difficulty of the information problem increases at a faster rate than the size of the company, then management costs will come to make a up a larger part of overall expenditure.

      This is most of the reason why the economy has not be taken over by a single monopoly (as Marx claimed would happen). At a certain point growth becomes impossible because the increases in management costs would outweigh any remaining economies of scale.

      Universities provide particularly acute examples of this problem. In a university there are always economies of scale to be had - you can squeeze more students into a class, you can utilize sqace more efficiently, and so on. But at the same time the task of managing all the resources of a university becomes imensely complex as the university grows. So the result is a lot of universities that are growing in size, and spending an ever increasing share of their total expenditure on management.

  • Growing trends towards simulation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JohnBE ( 411964 ) on Saturday April 27, 2002 @02:35AM (#3420175) Homepage Journal
    I find the trend towards simulations of real life interesting. Does anyone else remember space simulations such as Elite [clara.net]? In a nutshell they were science fiction simulations. Isn't it odd that as computing power has increased more and more real life situations and systems are been simulated! Sim-this, Sim-that, Sim-U, Sim-Pets etc..

    I wonder if there'll be a Sim-Slasdot, where you have to manage revenue over costs and keep the mods in line ;-).

    So you increase your computing power and instead of simulating unreality, you simulate existing reality (albeit someone elses), there has got to be something backward.
  • Perhaps it should be sold to Maxis and be made part of The Sims family.

    Ugly Bob
    • I doubt that Maxis is interested as a publisher but Will Wright has seen the game and generally was supportive of our efforts. He is freinds with the program officer at the foundation that backed it. In general Will supports all sorts of stuff like this. I think he's happy to see games and game design approaches being applied to other needs. Even if we pale by comparison to some of his works it's nice to be seen as an outgrowth of his work. Ben Sawyer
  • ...when student parking runs out, a real university ups the cost of parking fines and passes. It does not build more parking. It gives the students a nice tutorial in modern capitalism.
  • Where the hell is the "Commit NCAA Infraction" key?
  • "Your virtual university always features a football stadium and basketball arena"

    "Set your athletic policies and build a winning sports department "

    Sports department? I really don't _want_ a sports department! :)
  • Hiya,
    I just downloaded and installed Virtual-U and i'm getting an error bitching about not being able to open RESOURCES\A_WAVE2.RES. Anyone else getting something like this?

    - Sadiq
    www.toao.com
    • This problem should have been solved... I'm checking on it. Run the Vu.exe from the root directory you installed it too and see if that solves it... it's a problem in a desktop shortcut that shouldn't be there. We might have some latent downloads still out there which weren't updated. I have my admin looking into it. Sorry. - Ben Sawyer
    • I got it the first time I ran it and then when I tried to run it again the problem went away. Keep at it, I guess.

  • you know (Score:3, Funny)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld.gmail@com> on Saturday April 27, 2002 @06:03AM (#3420394) Homepage
    I bet if I played this it would end up like all the sim kinds of games I play.

    An angry populace, a police station on every corner, 0% spent on social programs, and me hiding in my mansion.

    Kind of strange how it always ends up like that...I mean, I don't INTEND on implementing libertarianism...
  • Was just enjoying a fantasy world where, everytime you run into a bug in commercial software you can get a court order and armed federal marshalls, raid the company, bust in their doors, install auditing software to track down and 'cuff the programmer responsible and demand they fix it or face $150,000 / day / bug fine.

    Then I woke up.
  • they grade you on things that don't necessarily reflect the performance of the university. ethnic diversity of students and faculty, for example. it would be far more interesting to compare how a university with a wide ethnic diversity performs as opposed to one without.

  • http://www.vu.union.edu/about.html [union.edu]

    Our version allowed you to waste time, mis-appropriate Student Activities funds, and decide if you should revoke accounts for warez hosting.

    Hardware requirements are minimal, but the renewal fee is quite high (34+ K/year.)

    -Chris

  • The next poll: how many minutes will it be before we start getting spam promising us degrees from Virtual U?
  • From the buglist:

    8. Initialization produces too much Financial aid
    Our financial aide algorithm is setting financial aid to about 50% of gross tuition...

    "Thats not a bug, its a feature!"
  • I played this a bit under the "slash the budget scenario". Athletics was the first targeted, followed by cuts to administration budget, increase in IT and distance learning budgets, decrease in non-traditional students. Got accolades from state board and students. :)

    Game crashed when allocating budget for year 2, though. Blah. Kinda buggy.

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