I’m Mika Armenta, a social and experimental psychologist who became a systems analyst and serious game developer at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). After learning some stuff in school at the University of New Mexico and University of Chicago during which time I interned at SNL, I conducted research for a bit in Iraq on social conflict and then returned to SNL as staff.
All in all, I’ve been with Sandia for 10 years and in that time have been blessed to work with and learn from phenomenal people in fascinating domains ranging from exploration of the peaks of human performance after strapping heartrate monitors onto victims – err, participants – as they hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, and thought-exercising on the potential weaponized impacts of extreme weather interventions, to designing and analyzing analytic and educational serious games (think Risk or Axis and Allies, but smarter and with data-generating capabilities).
At the core of my work is a consistent application of psychological insights to solve complex problems in different spheres including but not limited to national security, energy, intelligence, and individual and community well-being. My academic background focused on social influence, group dynamics, and related emotions and behaviors like violence and prosociality, and my work at Sandia though more applied, often draws on this foundation. First and foremost in my methods, though, is participatory methods – the integration of the participants, the user, the customer, into the R&D process which almost always results in a better end product than if they were not made a part of the team.
The educational and analytic serious game developed by Amanda Wachtel and me, “DECIDE”: Decision-making for Effective Choices in Integrated Distributed Energy, exemplifies this approach. The game is designed to walk players through the community energy project process from initial goal identification to project implementation; beginning to end, and to teach them the tradeoffs involved in such decisions. I look forward to demoing the game and talking with participants at Resilience Week about it.