This week's programme in the series on Man and Science Today.
Forty prominent journalists, diplomats, academics, soldiers, and other Middle East specialists gathered at St John's College, Oxford, for three days to play a game - a game of war, or what the gaming specialists prefer to call a crisis simulation.
The participants were divided into five teams, each representing governments, and they 'played out' the Middle East crisis; sending messages to each other, issuing ultimatums, mobilising troops, and plotting political assassinations.
This kind of 'game' has' become one of the exploratory techniques employed in many research fields, in business, in politics, in strategic studies, even in the teaching of history.
For all its intrinsic drama, how valuable is it as a technique? How nearly does it provide the social scientist with the equivalent of the natural scientist's laboratory?
(Colour)