Games and Simulations Archive
This page provides a description of the games and simulations I reference throughout this website, as well as a few I just find interesting.
Everything is in alphabetical order. Please note that if a game starts with "The" it will be listed by the second word instead. For example, The Sims will be "Sims, The". If you find one that should be here or is missing, please let me know!
Everything is in alphabetical order. Please note that if a game starts with "The" it will be listed by the second word instead. For example, The Sims will be "Sims, The". If you find one that should be here or is missing, please let me know!
Alice
“Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation, an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.”
BioShock
I will not lie and say that I have played BioShock. Honestly, it scared the living daylights out of me when my boyfriend handed me the controller and dared me to play. This is not a game for the faint of heart. BioShock is a survival horror first-person shooter set in an alternate world during the 1960’s. The player takes the role of Jack, who just survived a plane crash, and is exploring an underwater city, Rapture. Rapture was basically an underwater research lab that could avoid the radar of government and religion. However, when the scientists in Rapture discovered a sea slug whose DNA could grant superhuman characteristics a disturbing business venture took over. I won’t give too many spoilers here, but this game is full of tough choices, a compelling story line, and contrasting philosophies.
CandyFactory (Virginia Tech)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/candyfactory-educational-game/id533213891?mt=8
CandyFactory is a game developed by Virginia Tech that teaches the concept of fractions to middle school students based on splitting operations with partitioning and iterating. The game is unique in that it teaches concepts rather than just reinforcing material that students already know. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Evans, who is the principle research investigator, about the game. CandyFactory is fairly new as it was developed in 2011 and is still being implemented and researched. The second version of the application featured game mechanics to increase student engagement. CandyFactory is available for free in the Apple store for the iPad (see second link) and is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Chore Wars
(see McGonigal’s book “Reality is Broken”)
Chore Wars is an alternate reality game and is ideal for families or roommates. Chore Wars turns doing chores into a fun and competitive game. Each “adventurer” is given an avatar on the computer and can earn virtual gold or experience points for doing chores. As each player performs more chores (before their sibling or spouse gets to them), the avatar character will get stronger and earn more gold. The family or roommates can then decide what the virtual gold means (allowance, a trip to the beach, choosing the music in the car, the next big family purchase, etc). The whole game is very amusing. To do laundry is to “conjure clean clothing” and to brush the dog is to “save the dog-damsel in distress from clumps and sheddings.” There are rave reviews and silly stories from moms who suddenly found their husbands and children ecstatic to do chores.
Civilization
Civilization is a turn-based strategy game (that is, it is not in real time) where players play as one of the famous civilizations, such as Alexander of Greece, Napoleon of France, Catherine of Russia, and Gandhi of India. The latest version is five, released in 2010, although many players still play previous versions. Every player (this can be played solo or online with friends) begins with a single settler and raises their small, humble city to a complex, large civilization using technology, culture, economics, and military units. The player must balance all four to have a competitive, stable, and protected civilization, but they may choose to focus on one. There are several ways to win the game, whether by winning the space race (technology), taking over all the other civilizations (military), filling out five “culture trees” to develop the Utopia project (culture) or winning the most votes through diplomacy in the United Nations.
While the game in itself is a masterpiece requiring careful strategy, the most impressive part of the game is actually the meta-game (the community around the game). There are numerous forums dedicated to sharing solutions, offering advice, reenacting historical events, and creating mods (modifications to the game design). However, the most popular one is Apolyton. I encourage you to browse the forum because you will never feel the same way about gamers. In Apolyton University, they have courses, boot camp for newcomers, and even simulations and mods about how WWIII would occur and be carried out. The purpose is not to win the game in Apolyton University, but to share as much information as possible whether their strategy was a success or failure. Members ask questions and admit their struggles (Squire 2011).
CSI: Community Science Investigators
“CSI is a technology-based and community-focused after-school program. To explore issues in their community, students design and play augmented reality games, and use geospatial technologies. They then use that knowledge along with data they've collected to choose and implement a service learning project that impacts their community. Teachers act as facilitators in this inquiry-based learning environment.
Students first get outdoors in their community to play augmented reality games, built on STEP's MITAR software platform. They quickly move on to writing and building their own narrative games tailored to their school or neighborhood. They also use geospatial technologies like GIS and other mapping tools to collect and visualize real data, focused on a local science-related topic - for instance, local food production, or invasive species.”
Environmental Detectives
Environmental Detectives is an augmented reality game that uses handheld devices with a GPS to teach students how a toxin moves. As expressed on the website, “Students watch a 60 second digital video-briefing from the University president where they are enlisted to investigate the spill of the toxin, a carcinogenic degreasing agent which is commonly found in machine shops, cafeterias, and hospitals. The goal of the game is to locate the source of the spill, identify the responsible party, design a remediation plan, and brief the president of the University on any health and legal risks so that he will be prepared for a meeting with the EPA – all within two hours. At the end of the game, students make a five minute presentation to their peers outlining their theory behind the spill.”
Evoke
Evoke is an excellent augmented reality game. It calls itself a “crash course in changing the world” and is a social innovation game. It was developed by the World Bank Institute and directed by Jane McGonigal (the popular ARG genius). In Evoke, you are a secret agent presented with different videos, pictures, and documents about your “mission” which is a world issue, such as energy policy, food security, poverty, and disaster relief. All the missions are presented in a fun and high quality comic book style. You then browse for evidence, which you will post online. You can browse the evidence that others have provided and vote on their evidence. When others vote on your evidence, you will gain “powers”, such as collaboration, creativity, local insight, sustainability, and resourcefulness.
As described on their website, “Evoke is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”
Deus Ex
Deus Ex has a whole lot going on. It’s a role-playing first-person shooter adventure simulation game (say that 10 times fast!). The player takes on the role of JC Denton in a futuristic, dystopian world. Denton is a nano-tech augmented operative for the UN Anti-Terrorist Coalition, and the nanotechnology basically makes Denton a superhuman. The world Denton lives in is chaos with the “Gray Death” (an epidemic with no cure). Ambrosia is the only vaccine available that can nullify the effects of Gray Death, but it is in short supply and only given to the elite. Naturally, this world is full of riots and terrorism from the angry masses. Denton is, therefore, told to track down one of these terrorist groups that has stolen some Ambrosia shipments. Deus Ex focuses heavily on player choice, which leaves the player making some very difficult decisions in a game world full of conspiracies. In the end, the player must make a decision that determines the course of the future.
Foldit
Foldit is a puzzle game about protein folding that was developed by the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science. As described on their site, “In Foldit, players are presented with a model of a protein, which they can fold by using a host of provided tools. The game evaluates how good of a fold the player has made, and gives them a score. Scores are uploaded to a leaderboard, allowing for competition between players from all around the world.”
“Since its release, Foldit has gained over 100,000 players from all walks of life… Foldit produced predictions outperform the best known computational methods. These results were recently reported in Nature journal, marking the first time the leading scientific journal has published a paper with over 57,000 authors, vast majority of whom have no background in biochemistry. More generally, Foldit showed that it is possible to effectively “crowdsource” human problem solving to solve very hard scientific problems, and that the gaming environment is capable of turning novices into highly skilled researchers.”
Mad City Mystery (MIT Education Arcade)
“Mad City Mystery was designed to help students think like scientists, specifically to see interactions in their environment as interconnecting geochemical processes and to use scientific understand and scientific argumentation to understand key contemporary issues facing their local environment. It is a GPS handheld game meaning students could travel around with a palm pilot device to interview virtual characters and find the source of the toxin. It took place on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus near Lake Mendota and students usually spent about 90 to 120 minutes playing.” (Squire 2007)
Students were instructed to form hypotheses about the death of the virtual friend, Larry, who suddenly drowned while fishing. They then had to find evidence that supported those hypotheses (whether it is a toxin in the water/air, mercury from the fish, suicide, etc). Virtual characters (doctors, Larry’s friends and family, life insurance companies claiming fraud) would provide counter-hypotheses and evidence, and students could use virtual tools (water testing kits, research documents, patient records) that were on the handheld device.
Minecraft
Minecraft is described as a sandbox-building game, meaning that the player builds and designs their gameworld. It was created by an independent developer, meaning it is easier and cheaper to obtain. Players use cubes of stone, wool, wood, glass, and other materials to create anything they can imagine. The game also features “redstone” which can be used to create electronic circuits that can open doors, create traps, or push a cart down a rail. Minecraft teachers have become incredibly creative with this game. Not only did they form MinecraftEdu with the developers, but they have created lesson plans on everything from animal cells to contour maps to geographic features. They have used it to recreate the Taj Mahal or build a digestive system that students can explore. See the Examples page for videos.
Pandora Project, The
The Pandora Project was a role-playing game in which students developed islands of expertise in the science and ethics of xenotransplantation by engaging in the practices of professional mediators. As explained on the website, “Players take on stakeholder roles in groups of three and spend several class periods conducting a conflict assessment, using internet links in the game to research their positions on xenotransplantation and the positions of the other stakeholders. They gather information on genetics, epidemiology, and cell biology they need to argue for their position. Based on their research, each stakeholder group prioritizes the issues in the dispute and the various options for each one. Using these priorities, players divide into groups, with each player representing a stakeholder in one of three separate negotiations. The negotiations take place over several hours, and the game ends with the same kind of debriefing that takes place in a negotiation practicum.”
Portal
Portal and Portal 2 are challenging commercial puzzle-games created by Valve. These games are unique because they also have a rich story line and meaningful narrative, which can be rare for puzzle games. In Portal, the player navigates Chell, the protagonist, through the fictional Aperture Science Laboratory. Each room features a different puzzle where players must use the laws of physics, logic skills, and scientific inquiry to progress. Chell is equipped with a portal gun, which can create two portal ends that she and other objects can travel through in 3-dimensional space.
Cameron Pittsburgh, a high school physics teacher, has become a bit famous by using Portal in his classroom. Pittsburgh has used Portal 2 for teaching everything from oscillators to parabolas to the ideal gas law. He has now teamed up with Valve and developed Teach with Portals. This website provides several lesson plans in physics, geometry, language arts and chemistry. Valve has also provided teachers with a puzzle-maker for Portal 2 which gives teachers more control over the design of the game and lets them (or even students) create their own puzzles for students to solve. See the Examples page for videos.
Quest Atlantis
Quest Atlantis is an international online 3-D game for children from 9 to 15 that features scientific inquiry. It has many different units that encourage children to take on the roles of scientists, doctors, reporters and mathematicians. Most of the units inspire social action, such as the Taiga Water Quality unit. As expressed on their website, “The Taiga Water Quality Unit is an interactive narrative set within an aquatic habitat (Taiga National Park) where a serious ecological problem has resulted in many fish dying. In the unit, students navigate through the virtual park and interact with other players and non-player characters who communicate their perspective on the problem. Taiga best exemplifies the potential for connecting content with context by supporting students' experience of the consequentiality of their actions. For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company).”
River City
River City is a 3D virtual environment that aims to facilitate 21st century skills and scientific inquiry. As explained on the website, “River City Curriculum is interdisciplinary in scope, spanning the domains of ecology, health, biology, chemistry, and earth science, as well as history. Three diseases simultaneously affect health in River City, based on historical, social, and geographical content. As students explore these diseases, they learn how disease is spread and how human interactions can have effects far from the initial site. This situation allows students to experience the realities of identifying a problem, investigating it, and delineating the multiple causes that underlie a complex phenomenon. Students follow multiple threads that potentially lead to very different hypotheses and experiments. This helps refute the common belief that there is one right answer to any science experiment.” The game is a 17 hour course that is designed to replace existing class lectures.
Roller Coaster Tycoon
Roller Coaster Tycoon is a commercial construction and management game where players design roller coasters and also the theme park they exist in. Players have to overcome and utilize different forces like momentum and gravity. The player’s rides must carefully choose the direction, loops (corkscrews, vertical loops, zero gravity rolls), and height of their rides to meet their customers’ preferences. If they are careless, the rides can crash and cause injuries and their park’s popularity will plummet.
SimCity
Sim City is a city-building simulation game that allows players to build and design a city. There is no specific goal to achieve; instead, players must manage their commercial, industrial, and residential zones while expanding their city and nurturing their economy. The player must simultaneously keep an eye on crime levels, power supply, population, and traffic congestion. Natural disasters and power plant accidents may interrupt the player’s efforts. The player is also evaluated by the citizens depending on the production of public goods and tax rates.
Sims, The
The Sims is a commercial life-strategy simulation game where players can create a Sim (person) and guide them through their life. Sims will need to get jobs to bring in income, balance a social life with neighbors and family, and also fulfill their dreams. Players manage their Sim’s bills while also directing them to obtain skills, like playing guitar or logic, which help obtain promotions at work. The Sims also has an impressive architecture tool, and players can design the houses that Sims live in from the ground up and can create entire communities.
SpaceChem
Zachtronics has a handful of games developed by Zachary Barth, a popular indie game developer. One of the most popular games is SpaceChem. Players take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Players construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products while streamlining designs to meet production quotas and survive encounters.
While Zachtronic games have not been studied for their educational value, these games are incredibly examples of what games can achieve. They are extremely challenging puzzle games with a devoted fan base that is consistently posting very complicated and scientific forum posts on strategy and solutions (click here for an example). Click here to see the SpaceChem guide for educators.
Sparked
Sparked is an augmented reality game formally known as The Extraordinaries. Players sign up and make their profile, listing all the skills that they have (brainstorming, web design, drawing, social networking, etc). Non-profits, businesses, and other organizations then list all their “missions” that players can choose to take up. It might be something like reading an audio book for a blind child or helping a charity spread their message around. Players can collaborate with each other to take on difficult missions or spend 10 minutes doing one. They are rewarding and thought-provoking.
As discussed on their site, “When a user logs into Sparked, our challenge-matching engine recommends a series of challenges based on the person's skills and interests profile. We use this same engine to select and email a "Weekly Challenge" to your users. While Sparked has its roots in online volunteerism (Requesters being nonprofits and Solvers being volunteers), the platform can and has been private-labeled and used for multiple purposes centering on online engagement.”
Spore
Spore is a simulation/strategy game where the player develops a species as it undergoes evolution. It falls in the category nicknamed “god games” in that the player has complete control over the game world and its design. The player starts with a microscopic organism and eventually develops it into a complex creature with social and intellectual features. The player must develop his species’ assets to survive the changing environment. Spore is also famous for its community aspect as players can upload their own creations to Youtube and to Sporecast.
StarLogo
“StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the behaviors of decentralized systems, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, and ant colonies. It is designed especially for use by students. In decentralized systems, orderly patterns can arise without centralized control. Increasingly, researchers are choosing decentralized models for the organizations and technologies that they construct in the world, and for the theories that they construct about the world. But many people continue to resist these ideas, assuming centralized control where none exists--for example, assuming (incorrectly) that bird flocks have leaders. StarLogo is designed to help students (as well as researchers) develop new ways of thinking about and understanding decentralized systems.”
SuperBetter
(see McGonigal’s book “Reality is Broken”)
SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better into a multi-player adventure. It’s designed for anyone recovering from an injury or coping with a chronic condition to heal with more fun and less misery. You are to do at least one mission a day so that you start seeing yourself as powerful and not powerless. First you pick your identity and choose your superpowers. You then recruit your “allies” who will be your inner circle of friends that will give you weekly achievements and will play the game with you. You then identify the “bad guys” as those things that make you feel worse and need to destroy or avoid. You then identify your “power-ups” or what make you feel stronger. Finally, you create your “superhero to do list” where you make a list of goals for yourself that show off your strengths and progress. As you progress, you unlock achievements like “The Harvest” for eating vegetables for dinner or “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” for ignoring your e-mail for an entire day.
Supercharged!
Supercharged! is a 3-D simulation game designed to help introductory physics students develop intuitive understandings of electrostatics. As the website explains, “The game places students in a three dimensional environment where they must navigate a spaceship by controlling the electric charge of the ship, placing charged particles around the space. Students must carefully plan their trajectory through each level by tracing the field lines that emanate from charged objects, and in the process of doing so, develop a more hands on understanding of how charged particles interact.” The idea of the game is that “by representing complex scientific content through tangible, experienced nontextually-mediated representations, simulated worlds may also engage reluctant learners in the study of science.”
World of Goo
World of Goo is a commercial physics-based puzzle game. Players must build bridges, towers and other structures using goo balls and balloons. The structures must overcome forces working against them, such as gravity, while avoiding obstacles like other structures, hills, and spikes.
“Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation, an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.”
BioShock
I will not lie and say that I have played BioShock. Honestly, it scared the living daylights out of me when my boyfriend handed me the controller and dared me to play. This is not a game for the faint of heart. BioShock is a survival horror first-person shooter set in an alternate world during the 1960’s. The player takes the role of Jack, who just survived a plane crash, and is exploring an underwater city, Rapture. Rapture was basically an underwater research lab that could avoid the radar of government and religion. However, when the scientists in Rapture discovered a sea slug whose DNA could grant superhuman characteristics a disturbing business venture took over. I won’t give too many spoilers here, but this game is full of tough choices, a compelling story line, and contrasting philosophies.
CandyFactory (Virginia Tech)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/candyfactory-educational-game/id533213891?mt=8
CandyFactory is a game developed by Virginia Tech that teaches the concept of fractions to middle school students based on splitting operations with partitioning and iterating. The game is unique in that it teaches concepts rather than just reinforcing material that students already know. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Evans, who is the principle research investigator, about the game. CandyFactory is fairly new as it was developed in 2011 and is still being implemented and researched. The second version of the application featured game mechanics to increase student engagement. CandyFactory is available for free in the Apple store for the iPad (see second link) and is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Chore Wars
(see McGonigal’s book “Reality is Broken”)
Chore Wars is an alternate reality game and is ideal for families or roommates. Chore Wars turns doing chores into a fun and competitive game. Each “adventurer” is given an avatar on the computer and can earn virtual gold or experience points for doing chores. As each player performs more chores (before their sibling or spouse gets to them), the avatar character will get stronger and earn more gold. The family or roommates can then decide what the virtual gold means (allowance, a trip to the beach, choosing the music in the car, the next big family purchase, etc). The whole game is very amusing. To do laundry is to “conjure clean clothing” and to brush the dog is to “save the dog-damsel in distress from clumps and sheddings.” There are rave reviews and silly stories from moms who suddenly found their husbands and children ecstatic to do chores.
Civilization
Civilization is a turn-based strategy game (that is, it is not in real time) where players play as one of the famous civilizations, such as Alexander of Greece, Napoleon of France, Catherine of Russia, and Gandhi of India. The latest version is five, released in 2010, although many players still play previous versions. Every player (this can be played solo or online with friends) begins with a single settler and raises their small, humble city to a complex, large civilization using technology, culture, economics, and military units. The player must balance all four to have a competitive, stable, and protected civilization, but they may choose to focus on one. There are several ways to win the game, whether by winning the space race (technology), taking over all the other civilizations (military), filling out five “culture trees” to develop the Utopia project (culture) or winning the most votes through diplomacy in the United Nations.
While the game in itself is a masterpiece requiring careful strategy, the most impressive part of the game is actually the meta-game (the community around the game). There are numerous forums dedicated to sharing solutions, offering advice, reenacting historical events, and creating mods (modifications to the game design). However, the most popular one is Apolyton. I encourage you to browse the forum because you will never feel the same way about gamers. In Apolyton University, they have courses, boot camp for newcomers, and even simulations and mods about how WWIII would occur and be carried out. The purpose is not to win the game in Apolyton University, but to share as much information as possible whether their strategy was a success or failure. Members ask questions and admit their struggles (Squire 2011).
CSI: Community Science Investigators
“CSI is a technology-based and community-focused after-school program. To explore issues in their community, students design and play augmented reality games, and use geospatial technologies. They then use that knowledge along with data they've collected to choose and implement a service learning project that impacts their community. Teachers act as facilitators in this inquiry-based learning environment.
Students first get outdoors in their community to play augmented reality games, built on STEP's MITAR software platform. They quickly move on to writing and building their own narrative games tailored to their school or neighborhood. They also use geospatial technologies like GIS and other mapping tools to collect and visualize real data, focused on a local science-related topic - for instance, local food production, or invasive species.”
Environmental Detectives
Environmental Detectives is an augmented reality game that uses handheld devices with a GPS to teach students how a toxin moves. As expressed on the website, “Students watch a 60 second digital video-briefing from the University president where they are enlisted to investigate the spill of the toxin, a carcinogenic degreasing agent which is commonly found in machine shops, cafeterias, and hospitals. The goal of the game is to locate the source of the spill, identify the responsible party, design a remediation plan, and brief the president of the University on any health and legal risks so that he will be prepared for a meeting with the EPA – all within two hours. At the end of the game, students make a five minute presentation to their peers outlining their theory behind the spill.”
Evoke
Evoke is an excellent augmented reality game. It calls itself a “crash course in changing the world” and is a social innovation game. It was developed by the World Bank Institute and directed by Jane McGonigal (the popular ARG genius). In Evoke, you are a secret agent presented with different videos, pictures, and documents about your “mission” which is a world issue, such as energy policy, food security, poverty, and disaster relief. All the missions are presented in a fun and high quality comic book style. You then browse for evidence, which you will post online. You can browse the evidence that others have provided and vote on their evidence. When others vote on your evidence, you will gain “powers”, such as collaboration, creativity, local insight, sustainability, and resourcefulness.
As described on their website, “Evoke is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”
Deus Ex
Deus Ex has a whole lot going on. It’s a role-playing first-person shooter adventure simulation game (say that 10 times fast!). The player takes on the role of JC Denton in a futuristic, dystopian world. Denton is a nano-tech augmented operative for the UN Anti-Terrorist Coalition, and the nanotechnology basically makes Denton a superhuman. The world Denton lives in is chaos with the “Gray Death” (an epidemic with no cure). Ambrosia is the only vaccine available that can nullify the effects of Gray Death, but it is in short supply and only given to the elite. Naturally, this world is full of riots and terrorism from the angry masses. Denton is, therefore, told to track down one of these terrorist groups that has stolen some Ambrosia shipments. Deus Ex focuses heavily on player choice, which leaves the player making some very difficult decisions in a game world full of conspiracies. In the end, the player must make a decision that determines the course of the future.
Foldit
Foldit is a puzzle game about protein folding that was developed by the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science. As described on their site, “In Foldit, players are presented with a model of a protein, which they can fold by using a host of provided tools. The game evaluates how good of a fold the player has made, and gives them a score. Scores are uploaded to a leaderboard, allowing for competition between players from all around the world.”
“Since its release, Foldit has gained over 100,000 players from all walks of life… Foldit produced predictions outperform the best known computational methods. These results were recently reported in Nature journal, marking the first time the leading scientific journal has published a paper with over 57,000 authors, vast majority of whom have no background in biochemistry. More generally, Foldit showed that it is possible to effectively “crowdsource” human problem solving to solve very hard scientific problems, and that the gaming environment is capable of turning novices into highly skilled researchers.”
Mad City Mystery (MIT Education Arcade)
“Mad City Mystery was designed to help students think like scientists, specifically to see interactions in their environment as interconnecting geochemical processes and to use scientific understand and scientific argumentation to understand key contemporary issues facing their local environment. It is a GPS handheld game meaning students could travel around with a palm pilot device to interview virtual characters and find the source of the toxin. It took place on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus near Lake Mendota and students usually spent about 90 to 120 minutes playing.” (Squire 2007)
Students were instructed to form hypotheses about the death of the virtual friend, Larry, who suddenly drowned while fishing. They then had to find evidence that supported those hypotheses (whether it is a toxin in the water/air, mercury from the fish, suicide, etc). Virtual characters (doctors, Larry’s friends and family, life insurance companies claiming fraud) would provide counter-hypotheses and evidence, and students could use virtual tools (water testing kits, research documents, patient records) that were on the handheld device.
Minecraft
Minecraft is described as a sandbox-building game, meaning that the player builds and designs their gameworld. It was created by an independent developer, meaning it is easier and cheaper to obtain. Players use cubes of stone, wool, wood, glass, and other materials to create anything they can imagine. The game also features “redstone” which can be used to create electronic circuits that can open doors, create traps, or push a cart down a rail. Minecraft teachers have become incredibly creative with this game. Not only did they form MinecraftEdu with the developers, but they have created lesson plans on everything from animal cells to contour maps to geographic features. They have used it to recreate the Taj Mahal or build a digestive system that students can explore. See the Examples page for videos.
Pandora Project, The
The Pandora Project was a role-playing game in which students developed islands of expertise in the science and ethics of xenotransplantation by engaging in the practices of professional mediators. As explained on the website, “Players take on stakeholder roles in groups of three and spend several class periods conducting a conflict assessment, using internet links in the game to research their positions on xenotransplantation and the positions of the other stakeholders. They gather information on genetics, epidemiology, and cell biology they need to argue for their position. Based on their research, each stakeholder group prioritizes the issues in the dispute and the various options for each one. Using these priorities, players divide into groups, with each player representing a stakeholder in one of three separate negotiations. The negotiations take place over several hours, and the game ends with the same kind of debriefing that takes place in a negotiation practicum.”
Portal
Portal and Portal 2 are challenging commercial puzzle-games created by Valve. These games are unique because they also have a rich story line and meaningful narrative, which can be rare for puzzle games. In Portal, the player navigates Chell, the protagonist, through the fictional Aperture Science Laboratory. Each room features a different puzzle where players must use the laws of physics, logic skills, and scientific inquiry to progress. Chell is equipped with a portal gun, which can create two portal ends that she and other objects can travel through in 3-dimensional space.
Cameron Pittsburgh, a high school physics teacher, has become a bit famous by using Portal in his classroom. Pittsburgh has used Portal 2 for teaching everything from oscillators to parabolas to the ideal gas law. He has now teamed up with Valve and developed Teach with Portals. This website provides several lesson plans in physics, geometry, language arts and chemistry. Valve has also provided teachers with a puzzle-maker for Portal 2 which gives teachers more control over the design of the game and lets them (or even students) create their own puzzles for students to solve. See the Examples page for videos.
Quest Atlantis
Quest Atlantis is an international online 3-D game for children from 9 to 15 that features scientific inquiry. It has many different units that encourage children to take on the roles of scientists, doctors, reporters and mathematicians. Most of the units inspire social action, such as the Taiga Water Quality unit. As expressed on their website, “The Taiga Water Quality Unit is an interactive narrative set within an aquatic habitat (Taiga National Park) where a serious ecological problem has resulted in many fish dying. In the unit, students navigate through the virtual park and interact with other players and non-player characters who communicate their perspective on the problem. Taiga best exemplifies the potential for connecting content with context by supporting students' experience of the consequentiality of their actions. For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company).”
River City
River City is a 3D virtual environment that aims to facilitate 21st century skills and scientific inquiry. As explained on the website, “River City Curriculum is interdisciplinary in scope, spanning the domains of ecology, health, biology, chemistry, and earth science, as well as history. Three diseases simultaneously affect health in River City, based on historical, social, and geographical content. As students explore these diseases, they learn how disease is spread and how human interactions can have effects far from the initial site. This situation allows students to experience the realities of identifying a problem, investigating it, and delineating the multiple causes that underlie a complex phenomenon. Students follow multiple threads that potentially lead to very different hypotheses and experiments. This helps refute the common belief that there is one right answer to any science experiment.” The game is a 17 hour course that is designed to replace existing class lectures.
Roller Coaster Tycoon
Roller Coaster Tycoon is a commercial construction and management game where players design roller coasters and also the theme park they exist in. Players have to overcome and utilize different forces like momentum and gravity. The player’s rides must carefully choose the direction, loops (corkscrews, vertical loops, zero gravity rolls), and height of their rides to meet their customers’ preferences. If they are careless, the rides can crash and cause injuries and their park’s popularity will plummet.
SimCity
Sim City is a city-building simulation game that allows players to build and design a city. There is no specific goal to achieve; instead, players must manage their commercial, industrial, and residential zones while expanding their city and nurturing their economy. The player must simultaneously keep an eye on crime levels, power supply, population, and traffic congestion. Natural disasters and power plant accidents may interrupt the player’s efforts. The player is also evaluated by the citizens depending on the production of public goods and tax rates.
Sims, The
The Sims is a commercial life-strategy simulation game where players can create a Sim (person) and guide them through their life. Sims will need to get jobs to bring in income, balance a social life with neighbors and family, and also fulfill their dreams. Players manage their Sim’s bills while also directing them to obtain skills, like playing guitar or logic, which help obtain promotions at work. The Sims also has an impressive architecture tool, and players can design the houses that Sims live in from the ground up and can create entire communities.
SpaceChem
Zachtronics has a handful of games developed by Zachary Barth, a popular indie game developer. One of the most popular games is SpaceChem. Players take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Players construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products while streamlining designs to meet production quotas and survive encounters.
While Zachtronic games have not been studied for their educational value, these games are incredibly examples of what games can achieve. They are extremely challenging puzzle games with a devoted fan base that is consistently posting very complicated and scientific forum posts on strategy and solutions (click here for an example). Click here to see the SpaceChem guide for educators.
Sparked
Sparked is an augmented reality game formally known as The Extraordinaries. Players sign up and make their profile, listing all the skills that they have (brainstorming, web design, drawing, social networking, etc). Non-profits, businesses, and other organizations then list all their “missions” that players can choose to take up. It might be something like reading an audio book for a blind child or helping a charity spread their message around. Players can collaborate with each other to take on difficult missions or spend 10 minutes doing one. They are rewarding and thought-provoking.
As discussed on their site, “When a user logs into Sparked, our challenge-matching engine recommends a series of challenges based on the person's skills and interests profile. We use this same engine to select and email a "Weekly Challenge" to your users. While Sparked has its roots in online volunteerism (Requesters being nonprofits and Solvers being volunteers), the platform can and has been private-labeled and used for multiple purposes centering on online engagement.”
Spore
Spore is a simulation/strategy game where the player develops a species as it undergoes evolution. It falls in the category nicknamed “god games” in that the player has complete control over the game world and its design. The player starts with a microscopic organism and eventually develops it into a complex creature with social and intellectual features. The player must develop his species’ assets to survive the changing environment. Spore is also famous for its community aspect as players can upload their own creations to Youtube and to Sporecast.
StarLogo
“StarLogo is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the behaviors of decentralized systems, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, and ant colonies. It is designed especially for use by students. In decentralized systems, orderly patterns can arise without centralized control. Increasingly, researchers are choosing decentralized models for the organizations and technologies that they construct in the world, and for the theories that they construct about the world. But many people continue to resist these ideas, assuming centralized control where none exists--for example, assuming (incorrectly) that bird flocks have leaders. StarLogo is designed to help students (as well as researchers) develop new ways of thinking about and understanding decentralized systems.”
SuperBetter
(see McGonigal’s book “Reality is Broken”)
SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better into a multi-player adventure. It’s designed for anyone recovering from an injury or coping with a chronic condition to heal with more fun and less misery. You are to do at least one mission a day so that you start seeing yourself as powerful and not powerless. First you pick your identity and choose your superpowers. You then recruit your “allies” who will be your inner circle of friends that will give you weekly achievements and will play the game with you. You then identify the “bad guys” as those things that make you feel worse and need to destroy or avoid. You then identify your “power-ups” or what make you feel stronger. Finally, you create your “superhero to do list” where you make a list of goals for yourself that show off your strengths and progress. As you progress, you unlock achievements like “The Harvest” for eating vegetables for dinner or “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” for ignoring your e-mail for an entire day.
Supercharged!
Supercharged! is a 3-D simulation game designed to help introductory physics students develop intuitive understandings of electrostatics. As the website explains, “The game places students in a three dimensional environment where they must navigate a spaceship by controlling the electric charge of the ship, placing charged particles around the space. Students must carefully plan their trajectory through each level by tracing the field lines that emanate from charged objects, and in the process of doing so, develop a more hands on understanding of how charged particles interact.” The idea of the game is that “by representing complex scientific content through tangible, experienced nontextually-mediated representations, simulated worlds may also engage reluctant learners in the study of science.”
World of Goo
World of Goo is a commercial physics-based puzzle game. Players must build bridges, towers and other structures using goo balls and balloons. The structures must overcome forces working against them, such as gravity, while avoiding obstacles like other structures, hills, and spikes.