Who among us hasn’t longed to be in charge for just one day? Oh, the things we would change! Virtual U gives you that chance-the chance to be a university president and run the show. - William Massy, Virtual U “Strategy Guide”
William Massy’s “Virtual U” is a “computer simulation of university management in game form”. Designed by a former Stanford vice president with a $1 million grant from the Sloan foundation, the game models the worldview of university administration, providing a scary introduction to the world of “resource allocation theory,” “cybernetic leadership,” and “revenue center management.” It is influenced by the Hong Kong design team of Trevor Chan, best known for his prior success with the PC game Capitalism (”The Ultimate Strategy Game of Money, Power, and Wealth,” reviewed by PC Gamer as “good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself”).
Massy and Sloane felt Chan’s pro-capitalist game represented a “good match” with their “similar” vision of management strategy, and the code underlying Chan’s Capitalism 2 serves as the base for many of the modules in Massy’s game.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Precarity, academic labor system, administrators, corporate university, real institutional sleaze, university-corporate partnerships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve played Massy’s game and it really is an enlightening–if alarming–glimpse into what the administration is _really_ thinking. The idea that we can change their minds by “making reasonable arguments” is naive beyond beliief.
If you’re not organizing, you might as well quit–because the administration’s goal is to use you up and spit you out!