Modelling4All project blog

We are unsure about the value/appropriateness of trying to assign a happiness score to actions. I think we do need another dimension other that money/wealth otherwise the godel could turn out dull*. Maybe the answer is to include health, as mentioned in previous post e.g. how much malaria effects a farmers ability to work.

Now for an update on the coding process:

• Create schematic map of village and surrounding area e.g. river, forest, existing fields, housing, main village institutions (using GIMP 2 (and all its wonderful complications).
• Add UI elements that allow player to control what their character in the godel is going to do each month e.g. how many days they’ll spend clearing field(s), how much fertilizer they’ll apply, how many days they’ll work on a friend’s plot, which seeds they’ll plant (e.g. yam, maize, potato). Some tasks will be generic e.g. weeding, while others will be specific to a crop e.g. picking coffee
• Each action will have a corresponding cost (financial) which would be accounted for as the simulation runs e.g. cost per gallon of fertilizer, cost of seeds (however these are measured), cost of tractor
• The NL View will be annotated so it is reasonably easy to see what the farmers are doing, and the output(test)  box under the view will also say what is happening as the simulation is running e.g. just harvested 10 kg of potatoes
• Each month the simulation stops and the values from the previous month are stored to pre-populate the user interface during the same month the next year. In this way we can capture what farmers might do over a 12-month period, and the players can run consecutive years fairly quickly. (We can pre-populate the godel with sensible/typical values so the godel will run without any effort (press: load map, setup, go, and then go-again each month).
• We can then crank up environmental parameters to make farming harder and so force players to make decisions e.g. changing crops, trying new technologies.
• One idea is to add N other “AI” farmers to the model and to seed these with pre-configured settings for actions, maybe based on the options the gamer chooses…this needs more thought
• Another idea is to add events that happen within a month e.g. “a friend has just asked you to help with their field, accept? Y/N”
• Lastly for this post – what would happen if I loaded all the agents in the model with data from the way real players have configured simulations?

*  (Who would live to obsessively maximise their personal wealth…the people that game the rest of us into having to do the same).