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This collection of excellent papers cultivates a new perspective on
agent-based social system sciences, gaming simulation, and their
hybridization. Most of the papers included here were presented in
the special session titled Agent-Based Modeling Meets Gaming
Simulation at ISAGA2003, the 34th annual conference of the
International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA) at Kazusa
Akademia Park in Kisarazu, Chiba, Japan, August 25-29, 2003. This
post-proceedings was supported by the twenty-?rst century COE
(Centers of Excellence) program Creation of Agent-Based Social
Systems Sciences (ABSSS), established at the Tokyo Institute of
Technology in 2004. The present volume comprises papers submitted
to the special session of ISAGA2003 and provides a good example of
the diverse scope and standard of research achieved in simulation
and gaming today. The theme of the special session at ISAGA2003 was
Agent-Based Modeling Meets Gaming Simulation. Nowadays, agent-based
simulation is becoming very popular for modeling and solving
complex social phenomena. It is also used to arrive at practical
solutions to social problems. At the same time, however, the
validity of simulation does not exist in the magni?cence of the
model. R. Axelrod stresses the simplicity of the agent-based
simulation model through the "Keep it simple, stupid" (KISS)
principle: As an ideal, simple modeling is essential.
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues
that the political ideology and racial views of American
Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism
or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the
millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of
antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved
deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative
of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional
optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants
of the Civil War era into ""premillenarian"" and
""postmillenarian"" camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian
Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the
arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing.
This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances.
Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to
actively perfect the world via moral reform-of self and society-and
free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or
racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally
comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding
human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans' utopian plans to
reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views
like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least
acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve
white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American
Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change
requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the
reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial
Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil
War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial
ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the
postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states
during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union
victory in 1865.
During his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln expressed hope
that the "better angels of our nature" would prevail as war loomed.
He was wrong. The better angels did not, but for many Americans,
the evil ones did. War Is All Hell peers into the world of devils,
demons, Satan, and hell during the era of the American Civil War.
It charts how African Americans and abolitionists compared slavery
to hell, how Unionists rendered Confederate secession illegal by
linking it to Satan, and how many Civil War soldiers came to
understand themselves as living in hellish circumstances. War Is
All Hell also examines how many Americans used evil to advance
their own agendas. Sometimes literally, oftentimes figuratively,
the agents of hell and hell itself became central means for many
Americans to understand themselves and those around them, to
legitimate their viewpoints and actions, and to challenge those of
others. Many who opposed emancipation did so by casting Abraham
Lincoln as the devil incarnate. Those who wished to pursue harsher
war measures encouraged their soldiers to "fight like devils." And
finally, after the war, when white men desired to stop genuine
justice, they terrorized African Americans by dressing up as
demons. A combination of religious, political, cultural, and
military history, War Is All Hell illuminates why, after the war,
one of its leading generals described it as "all hell."
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