At last, a Sim game for techies - "IT Manager"
Last year I took a course on the Microsoft Operations Framework. One of the best parts of the course was the McKinley airport simulation, which is an evolving simulation of IT support at a busy airport. You have to operate as a team with different roles, and there's a simple measure of success - the number of planes you land. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and really teaches the power of teamwork. Unfortunately it's just a board game, so after the course I brainstormed a bit with one of the developers on how it could be turned into a full-blown computer simulation, so that people could take the course over the net.
Anyway, Intel's beaten them to the punch - for single-player games at least - with their new game "IT Manager". Build an IT shop from scratch, juggle budgets and machine meltdowns and employee skills, and try to come out of it with your sanity intact. It's Flash, so you can play it anywhere, and they've done a pretty good job of recreating the Sim-style look-and-feel. And it's still a hell of a lot of fun. What's your best score?
(From Lamont Harrington, David Findley, and Jason Tucker, in roughly that chronological order :-))
[Updated with link to airport simulation]