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G-rated Simulation Games?
jhl at school asks: "I am a Math and Technology teacher at a middle school, in rural Maine, where all of our 7th and 8th graders are given iBooks that they can use. What they are allowed to do with them is kept within strict limits, and it must be educational. I stay with then after school, and during this time they are allowed to use them for fun -- within limits (no violence, and nothing sexually explicit). I bought a copy of 'The Sims', at the kids' request, but the principal says it's too racy (polygamy is allowed, characters can climb into bed together, and so forth). What simulations our out there, where these kids can play in virtual environment, but keep it G-rated as my principal would like. Alternately, might there be some information to help the argument that 'The Sims' has educational value? I've found nothing I thought was objectionable - but this is a very conservative community. Thanks on behalf of my kids, who could use a little fun."
We've got just the game you're looking for: tranquility.
It's totally abstract, non-violent and highly mathematical. We have several schools that play tranquility
as a group activity. Download the game and give it a try, then drop us a note on our site support form and
we'll set you up with free accounts.
You know, for kids!!
I'd vote for Transport Tycoon. The lower skill levels are very weak AI (can you set the number of CPU opponents to zero?) but the integrated traffic management skills are still needed even there. It's perhaps just a little slow-paced, especially at the beginning, so takes a while to get to an "interesting" point, although you could always give them a saved game you prepared earlier.
Railroad Tycoon II has pre-set scenarios and perhaps looks better than TT, but I never got into that game quite so much.
Oh, if the Sims is too racy, good old SimCity might be OK - ISTR that there is specific educational information available for it.
That sounds kinda cool, but a much better version of that type of game is Enigmo. It's not lasers, it's fluids, and it is done in 3d space.
Brilliant game, full stop.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
I've seen a few of the other Tycoon games mentioned but not Zoo Tycoon. Somebody picked it up for my son and it's pretty tame, but still pretty interesting. I guess that you can have troubles if you let the Lions live with the Antelope (somebody gets eaten), but I don't think THAT would spark parental/principal problems.
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
Sim Tower is kind of old but it's very good.
You optimize a building. you can put a hotel, restaurants, shopping mall, movie theater, subway stop, elevators, condos etc in and you get revenue streams from it. it's great for seeing who can make the most money and why. Of course, this is for bigger kids (2nd grade minimum, probably 4th grade is better).
The other one is Sim Safari, which optimizes a game reserve. you can put in a variety of animals, but you need to buy services of a game specialist, guide, build a hut, hire drivers, etc. The fun part is that you get to learn what animals can live together (it's designed to be very educational without being too in-your-face about it).
I liked it, too, but I liked sim tower more.
Sim city was pretty good. My dad was a city manager and he loved the idea of it because it simulated all the strange things that could happen in municipal planning. Of course, Godzilla walking thru town is possible in the game but not real life, but even in the game it is rare. Most of the problems are bad street design, lack of firefighters, etc.
The interrelatedness of things is a big thing to teach. The fact that any large system involving many competing interests has multiple solutions, and sometimes the fact that people disagree or that they don't work perfectly is normal.
Lots of uneducated people all around the world (not just in the U.S.) think that there are simple solutions to the world's problems, and the Sim games show that this isn't true and, intuitively, why not.
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get soldier of fortune 2 and one of the several paintball mods. pretty colors and no real deaths. use one machine as the server and let them lan!
this is not a Sig.
Note that I'm not considering OS in this. These are general suggestions.
* Anything in the "programming game" genre. When doing this, a player designs a robot to go through some kind of puzzle or challenge (or theoretically fight, though as much of this is rather abstract, it may work under your violence issues). The original game in this genre is "Core Wars" (despite the name, if you consider this violent, I will be impressed), where little bits of code struggled desperately to try to control more memory. There are other games in this genre, like "Mindrover". I found a quick list of games in the genre here
* There are a number of simulation games that would work. Most games in the sim genre really *are* okay. The SimCities have been in the educational market forever for a good reason (makes me realize how dated my educational software knowledge is, though). For Linux, Lincity is good -- plays quite different from SimCity, with distribution of goods and power more of an emphasis than utilitiy coverage.
* Many puzzle games can be considered educational. Go to Info-Mac or another Mac software site and look under "Puzzle". I'm personally rather fond of sobokan and clones, where one pushes boxes around in a "warehouse" into proper locations. It's untimed, but fun.
* The Simple End User Linux (SEUL) project maintains a lot of links to software (including educational software) for Linux. Open source software has a way of getting ported, and I suspect you'll find that a fair amount works on OS X. Take a look here
* Ultimately, I'd say that web-browsing can be an awfully educational experience (seriously, I've learned so much of what I know from the Internet that it's nuts -- almost anything you want to know is out on the Web somewhere), more so than most "educational" games. If they have a laptop, they can browse the web, no?
I never thought much of the whole brand of "educational" software. The ones that simply included some interesting facts, like Oregon Trail or Sim City, seemed to provide a relatively low amount of knowledge for the amount of effort that gets put into them. The ones that made you do math quickly to play the game just doesn't seem to help real-world math skills much. When I learned to do math rapidly in my head, it was not using a video game.
The Web is a fantastic research tool -- boy, it's irritating when teachers try to discourage students from using any Web sources. As a matter of fact, I'd consider having a web browser always available to be one of the most valuable educational resources available. When I didn't know what a word meant, my mother always tried to train me and my siblings to go find a dictionary and look it up. The problem is that it's a real pain in the ass to do so, especially if I'm comfortably reading a book. If I have a nice, fast, stable-and-not-swapping system with a web browser up that doesn't need to run through a modem (most people used to get this in university for the first time), I'd very inclined to look up words and concepts that I'm interested about. Just recently, I read an article on "The Onion", a decidedly non-educational piece of satire that alluded to the Dauphin, some sort of French nobility. I got curious. I never, ever would have done this if I had to use paper encyclopedias, because of the effort involved, but I read up on the Dauphin, and ended up reading for much of the day about French political and military history.
May we never see th
Since SimCity 4 seems to be covered already, I'll throw in my 2-cents for one of my favorite games of all time. Pharaoh (and it's expansion, Cleopatra) is a very challenging, educational and fun game from the city building series created by Impressions and published by Sierra. There is some violence since the game tries to combine RTS games with Sim games, but the majority of game play is city building. (It's pretty hard to get away from violence 100% in historical games.) I'm not sure if this game was published for the Mac OS, but its predecessor in the series (Cesar) is defiantly available for Mac 9 and is a decent substitute. The later games in the series (Zeus, Poseidon, and Emperor) have more of a cartoon look and feel, making them less historically interesting and changes in the game rules make them less challenging.
As for defending the Sims, I recently attended a lecture on story telling through video games at Stanford University. One of the professors there was extolling the virtues of the Sims as a teaching tool. Apparently one of the term projects for the freshman humanities class at Stanford is to create a Shakespeare play using the Sims. Will Wright (the creator of the Sims and Sim City) was another one of the lecturers there. He said his philosophy behind creating games is to create the environment for player to create their own stories. As I see it, that is what he has done, thus creating games that are not inherently anything. The Sims is a means of letting a user tell a story and is no more risque than MS Word. It is important to remember that even though characters are allowed to sleep in the same bed, no characters in the Sims are allowed to engage in sexual activities. I feel the real danger for children from the Sims comes from it's online version, since all online communities have their share of predators. Sticking to the off-line version may also further your case. That's my opinion at least. Hope this helps.
-j
"Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending."
Be sure and check out Enigmo, at Pangea
:) Also Zoo Tycoon, published on the Mac by Aspyr is pretty un-offensive I'd think.
It's a puzzle game, and highly addictive.
Also, it's pretty unoffensive, but involves some good strategy play, Spaceword Ho! at DeltaTao Software
pop-pop is a great knockoff of the classic breakout, at Ambrosia Software
And of course, as people have mentioned, there's always Sim City
All these companies, with the exception of Aspyr (who publishes a lot of the triple-A ports), have pretty much exclusively G->PG-13 titles. But the ones I mentioned pretty much are lacking anything I can think of that could possibly offend.