*Creating Effective Management Simulations: Rapidly, Responsibly, Relevantly DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106430*

Further into the statement, however, the topics of knowledge and understanding that a business and management graduate should be able to exhibit are made more explicit. These is an extensive list: markets, marketing and sales, customers, finance, people, organizational behavior, operations, information systems and business intelligence, communications, digital business, business policy and strategy, business innovation and enterprise development, and social responsibility [7]. There is no expectation that graduates have equal knowledge of these thirteen or seventeen categories as many are interrelated. But despite this interlinkage, the list also emphasizes the breadth of knowledge expected of a graduate in this field. The list of expert skills that are expected to manifest within a business graduate is also impressive. The list covers seven or ten quite divergent capabilities: people management, problemsolving and critical analysis, research, commercial acumen, innovation, creativity and enterprise, numeracy, and networking. Graduating with the knowledge and skills expected by the benchmark statement does help to explain why business degrees are sometimes regarded as being general-purpose or even generic degrees but perhaps they are better seen as multipurpose.

The challenge that comes with such a broad range of topics and skills is that few Bunsen burner effects emerge with topics that can largely be taught in a traditional or online classroom. Students new to business studies can also bring many misconceptions to this classroom, driven by their own consumption of mainstream media representations. The HBO series Succession or the Netflix series Ozark may shape their understanding of how business works, it may even have been viewed by the prospective student as a type of documentary. A distorted and exaggerated representation of businesses permeates media consumption from an early age, for example, with the Krusty Krab, through to media requiring viewer discretion, such as Los Pollos Hermanos. There are most certainly lessons to be learned in all these examples that align neatly with the subject benchmark statement, but no business degree exclusively uses the deconstruction of popular media representations of business to deliver their intended learning outcomes. Teachers and academics will tend to focus on issues, examples, and concerns that are currently pivotal or were perhaps contemporary during the period of their own studentship. If the academic has actively engaged in research of the topic, they will tend to use this material in the classroom too. In 2018, the UK communications regulator Ofcom conducted research to identify news consumption patterns. Of the 12–15 age group, 40% indicated little or no interest in the news, but 53% said it was "important to know what is going on." However, the most interesting news topics for this age group were sports (19%) and music (18%). Although this age group cited Facebook (34%) and YouTube (27%) as popular new sources only 34% thought that social media sources reported content truthfully [8]. This milieu of perspectives can create a frustrating session for an academic trying to bring some contemporary issues into a first-year business studies classroom.

These gaps in perspective need to be bridged to deliver effective teaching that will translate into contemporary learning. But a classroom environment does not reflect any graduate's day-to-day reality. At this point business educators often turn to management simulations for a solution but the prevalence of games in everyday life and the potential misnomer of "business games" then opens up a chasm. Students are offered what appears to be a Bunsen burner moment with the tantalizing use of "games" only to be disappointed by—depending on the simulation being used—a clunky, nonintuitive interface that they must first be trained to use before they even begin playing a "game."

Business simulations have a long history of merging the need for understanding key concepts within the framework of current and future issues. Although it may seem outdated now, MIT's Beer Game from 1960 sets the tone for most subsequent simulations being used today. This heritage brings challenges. Reflecting this sixty-year heritage most business simulations present a user interface that will invariably feel dated to an audience who are daily immersed in the rendered game worlds, slick apps, streaming videos, and dynamic content. Almost all existing simulations are designed with pre-set values and built for a single disciplinary standpoint among the 13 or 17 options found in the subject benchmark statement. These simulations generally used fixed calculations and present a pre-configured scenario with set decision points. More recently introduced products have brought greater ability to "tweak" some values but generally only modestly in order to not overly disrupt the core scenario. Most management simulations can be characterized as standalone opaque-box software with variable capabilities to integrate with institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS).

Although somewhat of a tangent to the main thrust of discussion, the relatively slow evolution of management simulations in contrast to the development of entertainment game genres, does also reflect the absence of critical software studies within academic discourse. Examination of software as an artifact of the organization and the cultural conditions that built it is a fruitful but under-recognized line of inquiry. The tendency is to examine individual pieces of software as separate phenomena characterized by the descriptions of sales volumes or active monthly users. Reporting of this type reflects the assumed neutrality of software that pervades mainstream thinking. However, the software does shape opinions and perspectives. This can be evidenced by a variety of examples from social media where the anonymity of the 4chan system enabled the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory [9], the use of the 3½" floppy icon to indicate the save function on even the most recent user interfaces despite not being in common use for 20 years [10] and then consider how during the COVID-19 pandemic people would always complain when asked to use a video-conferencing software that was the not *first* one they used [11]. The general basis of resistance was that it was not simple or intuitive enough in comparison to their favorite–first–video conferencing software they experienced. For the student of business taking a critical view of software is beneficial [11]. Many management simulations exist and these cover the full range of knowledge areas they must cover. As different products are offered by different companies there is no consistency of user experience between titles in this genre of software and there is often a need to "train" the learners on every new simulation they encounter.

The productization of management simulations means that few institutions now have the capacity or infrastructure to create their own simulations. Instead, they must identify the best possible fit from among available titles and either work with that existing configuration options or possibly pay additional fees to enjoy customizations that make the simulation closer fit the curriculum requirements. In a period when work to decolonize the curriculum [12] is receiving renewed and reinvigorated attention this lack of flexibility will eventually force more rapid evolution among simulation software vendors.

As it currently stands and much to the disappointment of many first-year learners, a business "game" is not what they expect.
