Storytelling Simulations
Storytelling is a powerful feature that provides precise control over the presentation of a model to your audience. It also allows kiosk-style presentations to be created that step through the model, explaining it piece-by-piece. Many people use it only for this purpose, but storytelling offers so much more.
Because a basic premise of System Dynamics is that structure and behavior are linked, one of the key ideas behind storytelling is to allow the behavioral story to grow as the structural story unfurls. To create this effect, we neutralize structure that is not showing. This is extremely powerful because it allows you, for example, to selectively show the behavior of different loops within the system.
A simple example will solidify this concept. Consider the following simple population model:
The death rate multiplier is a simple resource constraint on the growth of population. More complex constraints would also affect the birth rate.
