SEAS is a business and economic war gaming environment developed at Purdue University in close association with the Department of Defense. SEAS replicates the "real world" in its most crucial dimensions including competition, regulation, decision variables and interaction dynamics. It consists of inter-linked goods, stocks, bonds, labor and currency markets.

In these markets two types of agents interact:

• Live: people acting as buyers, sellers, regulators, and intermediaries

• Virtual: artificially intelligent software agents that mimic human consumers in a narrow domain

This allows the environment to achieve both depth (through human agents) and breadth (through virtual agents).

SEAS game design requires four steps:

• Setting the geography of the game
• Designing the game board, pieces scoring
• Customization of the database
• Calibration of the parameters.

The SEAS war gaming process consists of three steps:

• Pre-game briefing: provides an industry overview of the players and their strategic positions as well as the rules of engagement
• Game playing: here the participants experiment with their long-term strategic and short-term tactical moves, evaluate their performance periodically, and make adjustments accordingly
• After Action Review: allows participants to develop strategic insight by reviewing the performance of each of the groups, analyzing the moves, countermoves, and their effectiveness, and learning from collective experiences

SEAS' highly configurable and flexible environment is designed to prepare business executives to meet the current and future challenges of the global business environment. It is structured around the interplay of human decisions and game events that require the active involvement of participants in the learning process. It helps participants to come to a more complete understanding of the sources and motivations behind corporate decisions by placing them in the shoes of the executives who are running the firms at different points in time. Games dealing with current or future situations help explore the potential implications of various courses of action and raise important questions for further investigation.