Sociology
Social structure, inequality, institutions, collective behavior, and social change.
The experience
Put your students inside a society.
Players receive different roles, resources, and constraints. Then they have to live with them. There is no single correct strategy and no conventional winner. What happens next is up to them.
- Negotiate for scarce resources they need to survive the session
- Join and run organizations: industry, media, political parties, a judicial council
- Travel, trade, employ each other, and communicate across regions
- Watch four quantitative indicators respond to what the society actually does
How it teaches
A shared experience your whole class can analyze.
SIMSOC isn’t a break from the syllabus. It’s the case study: one your students experience themselves and can’t dismiss as hypothetical.
- 01
Learn
Frame the concepts your course already covers (power, inequality, institutions, collective action) and set the questions you want students watching for.
- 02
Experience
Students enter the simulation and make consequential decisions under real scarcity, competing goals, and social pressure from their own classmates.
- 03
Analyze
Reflect as a group on what actually happened. Who accumulated power, and how? Who was left out? What did the society optimize for, and what did that cost?
For coordinators
The software handles the complexity. You guide the experience.
Before
Spreadsheets, envelopes, and a facilitator manually brokering every transaction.
Now
- Player interactions with game mechanics all handled automatically and reported to the coordinator
- Regional and private communication, plus optional built-in video, with no external tools to wrangle
- Pre-game assignments randomized in one click and weighted by student preferences
- Full coordinator control to adjust anything, mid-session, without stopping the game
You don’t have to be a game master. And for your first run, you won’t be on your own. Our team has been running SIMSOC sessions for years, and we help you plan and coordinate it.
Where it fits
One simulation, many courses.
The same society supports very different learning objectives: what changes is what you ask students to watch for, and what you debrief afterward.
Political Science
Power, legitimacy, governance, political conflict, and collective action.
Negotiation & Conflict Resolution
Negotiation, competing interests, cooperation, escalation, and resolution.
Leadership
Leading when goals, incentives, and group interests genuinely collide.
Organizational Behavior
Organizational dynamics, incentives, influence, and decision-making under pressure.
Social Psychology
Group formation, norms, in-group loyalty, conformity, and social influence.
Historically also run in graduate seminars, high-school and summer programs, leadership and diversity workshops, and with government officials, community organizations, and more. Tell us about your program →
In their words
What participants say afterward.
Drawn from post-session feedback forms: undergraduates, high-school students, educators, and professional facilitators.
“That violence and conflict can erupt not because a group wants the violence, but because the group needs the violence to be heard as a cry for help.”Undergraduate, Loyola University Maryland
“SIMSOC is the ultimate teaching tool for sociology, systems thinking, design, and life. As societies and cultures become increasingly individualistic, SIMSOC opens our eyes to our interconnectedness.”Coordinator, East Los Angeles College
“I was struck by how easy it was to just assume that the other groups were in the same boat as mine. It prompted some good reflection on assumptions and privilege.”Participant, Interpretive Simulations
“Over the past few days it’s been all I can think about, and it is definitely something that could change the points of view for many people.”Student, New Jersey Scholars Program
Est. 1969 · William A. Gamson
A social simulation with a history.
SIMSOC was created in 1969 by sociologist Bill Gamson, then a professor at the University of Michigan. Across five editions and more than fifty years, it became a fixture of social science teaching worldwide.
0+
participants worldwide
—The Free Press, across five editions and more than fifty years
Ready to put your students inside the experience?
Tell us about your course or program and what you want your students to explore. We’ll help you figure out the right way to run it.