This was actually a super challenging simulation! I felt as though there were far too many different elements that lead to the success of a village that I had simply not considered before. Specifically, I realized that there were a lot of infrastructural luxuries that we, as members of a highly developed society, have grown accustomed to. For example, our society has a pretty traditional schedule that most working people follow every day. We get up, eat breakfast, go to work for a government regulated amount of time (i.e. minimum wage jobs can’t make you work for more than x amount of hours before having to pay you overtime), and then expect to have time to go home and rest before repeating this again. This schedule may seem bland and irrelevant to most people, but in reality it is one of the reasons we are as financially productive as we are. We, as a society, accept that making money is a huge part of our day to day lives, and as a result we have agreed to give everyone time to do that. In a rural village such as the one being represented in our simulation, has no such infrastructure. In fact, it was because of this lack of infrastructure that my village did not survive for very long.
Dorner believes that we as humans are using every bit of our brain power to achieve our tasks in the most efficient way we know how. A lack of success, then, can be denoted to the little “mistakes” we make every day that turn into bad habits. For example, I probably will have a lower GPA by the end of my college career solely because I never charge my computer and have to wait a few minutes for it to turn on before I start studying. In a village, however, making these little mistakes can be the difference between life, prosperity, and success, or death. In the case of my village, I just couldn’t get the hang of how much time I should spend collecting combustion fuel versus water. Over time, this lack of societal infrastructure lead to the death of both of my villagers, as they began to lack clean water and started to get diseases. Overall, crazy simulation.
I agree this was a very difficult simulation, it seems as though part of the complexity is the numerous different systems within the village that can easily be disturbed. As was probably the point of having us play the simulation, it is impossible for one person to manage.
I’m fascinated by the idea of compounding “little mistakes”. I had a similar experience with the simulation, where I couldn’t figure out the proper balance of allocating resources. What’s crazy is that I had the benefit of ending the game and starting over with new choices. Even with the artificial benefit of hindsight, my brain is not capable of accurately predicting the impact of all of the various factors in conjunction.