We carried out a survey on the rate of adjourned sales of home video games from famitsu, a major weekly magazine, in order to construct a reference index of project management on the home video game industry in Japan. We chose two major platforms, Playstation2 (PS2) and Game Boy Advance (GBA), and measured the percentage of titles which were postponed for sale once or more times. The results are as follows: 1) During the first year after the release of the new platform, the rate of adjourned sale was about 30% for both platforms, 2) Though the rate in GBA rapidly decreased year by year and was 7% in the fourth year, the rate of PS2 remained at 26% even in the fifth year, 3) Game titles scheduled to go on sale around the new-year holidays or at the end of the fiscal year showed a significantly higher rate of adjourned sales.

The purpose of this study is to develop a game of opinion contrast named “ICHIBA” which means market place in Japanese. “ICHIBA” also expresses the acronym of the following phrase: “Interpersonal Comparison for Horizontal Integration by Border Awareness”. The procedure of this game is as follows: 1) List the most impressive idea about the given theme. 2) Walk around as if you were in market place and find the partner to whom you talk. 3) Explain and compare the idea with each other. 4) if each idea is alike, be together to each other. 5) Furthermore, try to find a person or group with the similar idea. 6) If you couldn’t find the similar person, you are to be alone. 7) If other persons’ idea is pleasing from that of you, you can change the idea and can become together with them. In this study, this simple game is discussed as a technique for reflection.

In recent years, there is a demand for a system designed for the procedural fairness in the field of participatory planning. Our purpose is to identify factors of a sense of fairness under planning procedure. The three candidate factors are tested: namely, opinion statement opportunity level; opinion acceptance level; and satisfactory level to the result. These are based on the literature survey about garbage-treatment schemes. A gaming-simulation is designed for representing the situation in negotiations between stakeholders such as citizens, Chamber of Commerce, environmentalists and administrators in the municipal body. After gaming, the attendees answer a questionnaire. This simple game is designed for three hours’ play and is easy for teaching university students in class in ordinary universities. As a result, it became evident that a sense of fairness was affected by both contents of procedure and satisfactory level to the result, by the experiments for students. In addition, results of the experiments showed that the satisfactory level to the result is influenced by the opinion acceptance level, and not by the opinion statement opportunity level.

A trade-off between model abstraction and model expressiveness is a fundamental issue when trying to design a new gaming simulation. In this paper, we present two different gaming simulations that have different abstractions: the coarse-grain model and the fine-grain model. According to the experimental trial, we found that the coarse-grain model has a certain advantage in that it allows easy accessibility to the model, and, moreover, the appropriate fine-grain model is educationally valuable because the complexity, which involves elements of success and failure by wins and losses, responds appropriately to the understanding of the social model structure. The study on the potential relationship between the understanding of the social model structure and the gaming score, helps to get really good information on the control of the model abstraction. We propose the need for design tests to make an abstraction adjustment in the trial stage.