Western European political theory defines that establishment of a coalition government largely depends on the party system, and the party system is regarded as an independent variable while a coalition government is regarded as a dependent variable. However, contemporary Japanese politics obviously deviates from such theory. In Japan, politicians often argue that the party system should be rearranged according to the form of the coalition administration that has been established previously. To introduce a new point of view to the concept of creation of a coalition government for Japanese politics, “The Parliamentary Game for Forming a Coalition Government” adopted a gaming-simulation approach.

During the game creation process, it was recognized that one of the most important characteristics of politics in general was coexistence of cooperation and competition. Also, the game demonstrated that there was no agreement about the goal of politics. This study explores common characteristics of politics and gaming-simulation. In addition, the study discusses the game development process, political characteristics implied in the game rules, findings from test play, and uniqueness of the study subject.

Experimental studies and one–shot surveys have often been conducted to study the impact of video game use on aggressiveness; however, only a few panel studies have been conducted so far that were able to address the long–term impact. In this research, a panel study was conducted with 771 elementary school students to examine causal relationships between video game play and aggressiveness. The survey was conducted twice with a 4 to 5 month interval, and the video game use of the subjects and their aggressiveness in six aspects, including physical violence, were measured. The result of the cross–lagged effect model analyses indicated that video game play had effects on physical violence. The video game play showed no influence on other aspects of aggressiveness such as verbal attacks and hostility. Implications of the study result such as how video game play influenced aggressiveness were discussed.

This paper proposes a design of role-playing gaming which enables local citizens to direct their attentions to their local society and regional environments. In this gaming, virtual decision makers, who are strangers of the town, acts as proxies of their corresponding real players. Real players are citizens who know each other very well. There are three key points regarding the exchange of information in the game. First, citizens can only observe discussions by their proxies and cannot interrupt them. After the first discussion, citizens can clarify to their proxies about what they want to say, and then they observe second discussion. Second, none of the citizens know whose roles the other proxies represent. Third, we request each proxy to express his/her opinions by taking his/her corresponding citizen’s place during the discussion. Here, the opinions should be based on his/her own preferences and not his/her corresponding citizen’s views. Evaluation roughly consists of two aspects: whether citizens can be aware of their regional context, and whether citizens and proxies can grasp points at issue in regional environmental planning.

The Dynamic Social Impact Theory (DSIT) predicts emergence of spatial clustering and other group-level phenomena as a result of independent interactions between individuals. In order to investigate the role of uniformity of distances among people in the cellular automata framework in the original studies, we took a multi-agent model approach by placing agents in a two-dimensional space. By examining roles of both the function that determines attitude changes in agents and the methods of placing the agents, we found that attitude scores of the agents became cohesive and spatially clustered. At the same time, complete agreement was rarely observed, and diversity was preserved. We concluded that concurrence of clustering and continuing diversity were indeed a robust phenomenon under practical assumptions such as cohesiveness of people’s locations and nonlinearity of attitude changes. To apply the knowledge we learned here, it will be crucial to conduct empirical studies to find out when and how these assumptions of nonlinear attitude changes occur and to learn more about how communications are determined by distances between individuals and other factors.

This paper describes the results of the social dilemma simulation game where players can change parties to interact with and assess the effectiveness of the Exit-TFT strategy, whose existence has been confirmed in experiments with university students. We conducted simulations in which Exit-TFT, Fixed-TFT, Move-AllD, and Fixed-AllD competed, tested whether the cooperative strategies could weed out the non-cooperative strategies depending on initial distribution of strategies, and drew a phase diagram. The results indicated: 1) there were areas in which cooperative strategies won the competition against non-cooperative strategies, and 2) dominance relationships circulated among the four strategies near bifurcation points.

This paper analyzes the emergence of restricted social exchange relationships in a society through computer simulations to see if such social exchange will be characterized as ‘balanced reciprocity.’ An agent is assumed to have either the noncooperative strategy or the exchange strategy (TFT). How TFT works depends on the values of its two dimensions: ‘upper limit of giving’ and ‘aspiration level.’ The simulation results revealed the following: TFT established social exchange in simulated societies; the agents who had the same value of a strategy dimension were likely to exchange with each other; and social exchange tended to be balanced. When the society was stratified so that there were rich agents and poor agents, stratification of sociability was observed; that is, a rich agent tends to exchange with the rich and a poor agent with the poor. These simulation results implied that social exchange may bring about social differentiation and that sub-cultures with different exchange rules may emerge within a society.

When considering the potential of application of interactive software agents and communication robots used in artificial intelligence studies to mental therapy, sociological knowledge, particularly regarding how individuals in modern society tend to think of the “mind,” is useful. This paper discusses the current status of software counseling and robotic therapy in modern culture and their future potentiality and risk by introducing sociological perspectives on the culture of emotions, cultural trends for mental therapy in modern society, and discourses on “health”. Then, this paper argues that: it is possible that software counseling and robotic therapy will spread in modern society via the trends of psychologism and rationalism; it is difficult to develop artificial intelligence that is able to extract the “inner self that cannot easily be described” from clients; and there is a risk that these therapy methods impose a new type of mental burden like double bind situations on clients.

The community of gaming research is a collection of diverse disciplines involving all types of social sciences. This paper proposes the initial version of a Japanese gaming terminology to be fostered by those scientists who wish to exchange their research experiences and their perspectives based on such experiences. In this paper, 112 words were selected as functional words that were essential in designing, creating, implementing, and reviewing games, and each of them was furnished with a brief definition. In this paper, we also discuss a tentative theory of gaming. This is because the selection of the fundamental gaming terminology was to be based on the understanding of gaming that scientists had thus shared, and the selected words were to be redefined. This dictionary will provide Japanese game players with basic terminology that can serve as a springboard for further development of even more advanced gaming language in Japan.