The Game Management Console is the starting point for each simulation game. Using the console, a game leader is able to start a new game or to load a previously saved game. Furthermore a game leader is able to open a logger frame which enables viewing (error) messages during the start or load of a game or during its execution.

When a game leader wants to start a new game, an experiment file is used. This file is xml-based, and describes the name of the game, the data to use, the run length, the time-unit (e.g. days), the starting-date and some information regarding the developers of the game.

Loading a previously saved game is done by opening *.ids files. These files contain all the data necessary to reload a game. Based on the file description a game leader is able to view at what time in a game the game was saved. Furthermore the wall-clock time when saving is part of the filename.

When a game is successfully started or loaded, a message appears. When it takes a long time before this message appears, or if it doesn't appear at all, a game leader should use the logger to get an indication for the (possible) problem. In the figure below we illustrate a logger frame which shows some information gathered during the execution of a game. We see that the player called "DISTRIBUTOR_USA_3" has logged in, did some caching to restore its client-side graphical user interface, was ready and eventually logged out.