Happy holidays to all PAXsims readers—we very much hope that nondenominational Gaming Santa brought everyone a sleigh-load of games and conflict simulations!

We have a few items that may be of interest:

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At War Is Boring, Michael Peck discusses his picks for the Best War Games of 2013.

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Masters of the World (Geopolitical Simular 3) will be releasing an add-on in January 2014 that will update the game with new economic and other data. It will also include a ““God’n spy game mode where you can access nearly a hundred internal hidden game engine variables, all modifiable on the fly.”

For our previous PAXsims review of the game, see here.

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The latest issue of the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation 11, 1 (January 2014) is now available. Of particular interest to agent-based modellers of conflict and cooperation will be an article by Dariusz G Mikulski, Frank L Lewis, Edward Y Gu, and Greg R Hudas on “Trust-based coalition formation in multi-agent systems.”

In this paper, we provide a framework to study trust-based coalition formation in multi-agent systems using cooperative game theory as the underlying mathematical framework. We describe how to study trust dynamics between agents as a result of their trust synergy and trust liability in cooperative coalitions. We also rigorously justify the behaviors of agents for different classes of games and discuss how to exploit the formal properties of these games for cooperative control in an unmanned military vehicle convoy.

In addition, a forthcoming article in JDMS by Jeffrey Appleget, Robert Burks, and Michael Jaye on “A demonstration of ABM validation techniques by applying docking to the Epstein civil violence model” is now available online:

The increased focus of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency has served to identify the lack of credible models and simulations to represent the relevant civilian populations – the centers of gravity of such operations. While agent-based models (ABMs) have enjoyed widespread use in the social science community, many senior DoD officials are skeptical that agent-based models can provide useful tools to underpin DoD analysis, training, and acquisition needs mainly because of validation concerns. This paper uses docking and other forms of alignment that enable the linking of the Epstein civil violence agent-based model results to other models. These examples of model-to-model analysis could serve to assist and encourage DoD ABM human domain model validation efforts.