[Geowanking] building social modelling tools
Ok, didn’t RTFA, just skimmed it. Quite elaborate for a mailing-list post and it’s harder to read off context. (Was mentioned by Tim O’Reilly.)

The thrust seemed to be to look at causalities between social processes and environmental factors, à la Jared Diamond (of GG&S fame).

As an aside, have been more of a Civilization player. Including the open-source Freeciv. Used some examples in class. Not because of the war aspect (always try to win with “culture” in Civ3). But because of the oversimplified social model. Should probably give SimCity a try at some point.
Not a big gamer altogether.