Footnote [33]:
Environmental and health care issues are usually related to "quality of life" matters, which are in turn related to policy issues. Furthermore they are often intangible factors of human activities. To incorporate these and other social factors in computer models they must first be quantified, but we must recognize that our knowledge of how to do this is limited. This is particularly true of the term "Quality of Life" (QoL), which has come in for considerable discussion recently. As the words imply, quality and quantity are different, as orange and apple.

The "Quality" of life can only be judged and described by the person or persons who are involved, and their evaluation of the quality of their lives will be based on their personal experiences and traditions of their cultures, which may be deeply rooted in their religions. From this viewpoint, I think that the attempt to quantify QoL, as has sometimes been attempted with Systems Dynamics and other models, may be a serious mistake.

We therefore need here to include a "normative gaming" approach, with the use of negotiation techniques by participating game-players of various countries whose traditions and cultures are different from one another, to exercise conflict resolution, and hence the collaborative environmental peace gaming, namely, the quantitative simulation approach based on facts and figures should be complemented by qualitative, normative gaming. Gaming players dealing with global issues from their own locations should utilize all available telecommunication media for communicating with their counterparts. This is why we need distributed global simulation models -- which we will discuss more later.

Because of the limitation of our knowledge, we will try to rely on the expertise of participating regions and sectors for their database and simulation model building, which database and submodels will then be tied together through global neural computer network, i.e., Internet, to have the connected whole act as a single system.

However, technical know-how of building such databases and simulation models should not be left within the domain of professionals. We should foster such capabilities among youngsters, say in upper level of high school, colleges and universities. By this do-it-yourself (or experiential) approach, they will gain insight of complex, interwoven relationship of various social factors, with critical thinking and rational analysis -- this is one of my motivations and the reason we are now pursuing our "Secondary School Teacher Training Program (SSTTP)" project -- more later.