About

1965–1969 · The idea

What interested him was not a game so much as a question he thought students were too quick to assume away: why does social order exist at all? He opened the manual by refusing the easy answer.

When citizens riot, when governments use indiscriminate violence against their citizens, when generals seize power and liquidate political opponents, when armed gangs terrorize their neighbors, we begin to recognize that the existence of order and legitimacy is a mystery to be explained rather than part of the world’s natural organization.William A. Gamson, preface to the fifth edition, 1999

SIMSOC was built to put participants inside that mystery rather than describe it to them. It does not hand anyone a just society, and it deliberately does not tell them in advance where they will stand in it. Discovering that, and deciding what to do about it, is the exercise. Gamson expected the situation to do the teaching on its own: “Demands for inclusion and social justice inevitably generate conflict.” What participants take from it, he wrote, “will depend on what one puts into it.”

1969–2000 · Five editions

Five editions followed across three decades: 1969, 1972, 1978, 1991, and a final revision in 2000. Each pass simplified the rules and widened the audience. By the last edition SIMSOC could run for as many as ninety participants and shipped with selected readings from writers including Robert Putnam and Nicholas Lemann.

It travelled well beyond sociology departments. SIMSOC was run in introductory courses and graduate seminars, inside companies including MGM and Lucent Technologies, and by charitable organizations, local government agencies, and leadership programs.

2000–2021 · After Michigan

Gamson himself had moved on from Michigan to Boston College, where he taught full time until 2000 and stayed close to the work long after. He retired in 2010 but remained engaged with SIMSOC for the rest of his life, until his death in 2021. Groups went on running the simulation throughout those years, though no further edition was published.

Running SIMSOC has always asked a great deal. A session wanted four separate rooms, a printed manual and a pencil for every participant, eight hours or more of scheduled time, and a coordinator holding the bank, the forms, and every transaction in the society by hand. SIMSOC Online automates nearly all of that bookkeeping, so a coordinator can spend a session running the simulation instead of running the numbers.