Slashdot Mirror
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."
What about Sim City?
sneak more porn into future Maxis titles.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How bout Sim City 4? Other than the occasional fires, tornados and alien attacks, it's pretty passive and very educational.
Might I reccomend the Incredible Machine Contraptions? There is nothing remotely offensive about the game, it can be EASILY argued to have educational value (it's more or less a puzzle game, along with basic physics), and should be both cheap and easy on the computers.
Chromatron is a puzzle game of lasers (no, not the killing kind), optics, and geometry. It runs on Mac or Windows. The first 50 puzzle version is free, additional puzzles can be had for very cheap.
:) Give it a try.
It's also *challenging*. If you only have an hour or so per schoolday with the kids, this'll probably last until the end of the schoolyear.
Random and weird software I've written.
I'm getting a little tired of all these half-thought-out questions being posted to Ask Slashdot. We're willing to help provided you have a well-defined request.
I've found nothing I thought was objectionable - but this is a very conservative community.
Your first task is to more fully understand what is acceptable to this community. You clearly don't have a grasp on this, yet you ask us (who know even less about the community) for suggestions. Until you can come up with a detailed list of what is not acceptable, you're just wasting your time -- and ours.
Come back when you've done your homework. Then we'll be happy to help.
I think it's a fun littly game. I am 100% sure there is nothing objectionable in it, educational wise it teaches kids how to run a small business maybe? at the very least there is basic math in it you could point out.
Off the top of my head, some of these may be a bit dated.
Also from Maxis: SimCity, SimAnt
Something from the Test Drive series (its physics! You may want to avoid the "hot pursuit" series)
Conway's Game of Life
One of those universe/solar system simulations - I forget the name.
I'm sure there's plenty more out there. Good luck.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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!!
It almost makes me sick to think that school officials would have a problem with The Sims for those reasons.
I have never played, but the fact that they are concerned that characters 'may' do some things that aren't PC (that's politically correct, not personal computer) doesn't seem like such a big deal. The characters follow the players lead. If they are led to get in bed together, the player obviously had some idea what was going on before. It's not too likely that they would suddenly discover the existence of males and females who get into the same bed by playing the game.
Saying the Sims is harmful to the students is like saying that they are harmful to themselves. If they don't have dirty little minds, they won't run into these things. If they do have dirty little minds how does this affect them?
Children who grow up in a sheltered environment are often unable to properly adapt to the real world when they are forced into it.
Let the flames begin!
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.
Railroad Tycoon 2, it's got a ton of history about railroad development. There are a bunch of tycoon games in this one's footsteps, some are better than others.
Alpha Centari, is a different take on civ, there is some battle, (not bloody as I recal but there is some fighting).
If you have an older group I'd suggest wall street raider, especially if they finish a unit on the stock market. Graphics are poor but the game is quite fun. There used to be an excellent risk like game with more updated country borders, the rest of the gameplay was very similar to risk, it was quite fun too.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It teaches you math. Fragging and Tking.
It teaches you history. Nazis vs. Allies.
It teaches you physics. Fire that panzer up close.
It teaches you physical Ed. Your wrist will be tired after 10 hrs of wolfing.
It teaches you art. Watch that blood splat.
It teaches you chemistry. Stab someone with that poision needle.
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.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
FreeCiv supports OS X with Fink. I would think this would be a great game for the kids to get together and play. It would teach history, let them learn about ancient technologies etc.
If you feel like paying money, you might also think about getting Civilization 3, I've never played this game myself, but I recall Civilization II had a lot of good historical information about various technlogies and epochs in history. I would assume that this version would have something like that as well.
If you have any windows machines you might also consider exposing them to Alice, not it's not American McGee's twisted (and quite fun) game, but a project from Carnegie Mellon to teach kids about 3D and Game Programming.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
This might sound like a strange solution, but there were tonnes of good educational programs on some of those old 8-bit machines... especially the Apple ][ and even for the Commodore 64.
If you can fish some of these old-skool educational programs out and run emulators on your laptops, then you've got something at least.
Dunno about the legality of using old software on an emulator... but I doubt anyone will really care.
I remember playing loads of educational games on the Commodore 64 back in the day... "Rocky's Boots" and "Goldfields" were my favourites.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The more modern definition of "sim" that you seem to be using typically doesn't include anything of any redeming educational value. Most of the rules of the world are so simplified that behaviour within the sim is borderline random or very easy to effect by doing something seriously unrealistic. You'd get about as much educational value out of Monopoly as you would out of Railroad Tycoon. You could try looking at word and puzzle games. There's a "Wheel of Fortune game for the Mac, but I would imagine that a room full of kids would go through the library of puzzles pretty quickly.
My final suggestion might be a little out of your scope: Robocode or Corewars -- Kids develop their own little programs that battle it out in a virtual arena. The second is a little more abstract than the first. At the very least it will teach them how to program.
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).
Hmm, did you try pong? Actually lunar lander might be ok for them.
Ambrosia has a line of games that I think would be kid safe; Uplink is fun and challenging, and no violence or nekkid, but maybe it simulates "hacking" too closely. "Nova" is a Space Trader game, so simulates some economic theory. I don't recall anything offensive in it, but you have a pretty low bar, too.
There's also iConquer from KavaSoft, a RISK-alike that is very like.
Also try Apple's Product Finder; it reminds me that there's several good racing/skating games that aren't offensive, and lots and lots of strategy games. There's even a "kids" section from which too chose.
Good luck! And try posting to some of the Apple lists! I think many of us Mac IT folk are interested to know how this thing is shaking out in Maine.
--
$tar -xvf
This program is an excelent, free space simulator. Fly the Apollo 11 mission, launch the space shuttle and dock at ISS, or for real fun, launch a probe from earth, have it gravity assist around venus, and go out to the outer planets. The physics seems very realistic and real world. Math will for sure be a huge help in this. The main site is Here, and also check out Dan's ORbiter page, with many great addons and sound updates here. For a great video of orbiter in action (But without any view of the controls or the mathmatics involved) check out video 3 from this page.
Did I mention its all free as in beer?
As mentioned, SimCity would be a good choice. Also SimTower or even SimLife. A few more: - The online Yahoo! game Text Twist would be good for building vocabulary. - Oregon Trail is a classic. - Any of the historical strategy games (Civil War Generals 2, Empire Earth, etc.) - World War II Fighters is a good flight sim with a strong historical component. (And patriotic to boot!) - Number Munchers for math skills? FYI, I actually used The Sims to do a science project in middle school.
-----
If the truth scares you, cease asking scary questions
If you can't find any non-violent mods for Quake 3, have the students create one.
The could create the own map, their own non-violent weapons... You'd have to call them something other than weapons. Maybe a non-violent game of tag... Or water balloons.... The hand to hand combat could be pillows for a pillow fight.
Or want about some non-violent mods for Never Winter Nights?
What, me worry?
Although probably a bit more expensive then you were probably planning on spending, you might want to consider The Wild Divine Project.
From the site: The Journey to Wild Divine is more than a computer adventure. It integrates a personal spiritual quest with an innovative biofeedback interface and high-end multimedia production. The result is an unparalleled and fulfilling "Inner-Active" experience.
Basically, you explore the virtual world and learn to complete tasks that require you to learn to control your pulse and breathing rate using a biofeedback system.
I haven't played it... but it certainly looks cool
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
OK, they do "mate" but its about as asexual a mating as you can get (ok, they don't get "married" so I guess it will offend those who are easily offended). And the creatures aren't human and I'm not entirely clear on the specific doctrine of offense involved. Do these people require that chickens marry before they mate?
The players do get to raise the kids - and those kids are not always the best behaved of creatures so it can be an interesting process. Rather more demanding than the "carry an egg around for a week" type thing that has been popular.
Who knows - it is possible that if there are enough people who demand that everyone adhere to their particular mating rituals that maybe the makers would add in a "you must be married to have eggs" option to make using the game possible. Naturally (and I mean that word quite literally) that also raises the questions of the death of a partner, adultery, divorce and what not. Not to mention heaven and hell (and purgatory and beatrice and ...).
Sim Slashdot!
Maintain a minimum population of trolls!
Never ever lern 2 spel!
Praise shoddy design and white-heat-inspiration hacking as "visionary" and "wave of the future"! Imply that any project concerned about quality over features is "slowing down" and losing its developer base!
Find wildly biased opinion pages and report them as if they were news! Abuse your position as editor to add snide immature comments as part of the story!
Report them again a few hours later!
Isolate the only actual humor in the polls section!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Pretty much all the major non-military sims out there would work for you.
MS Flight Simulator
MS Train Simulator
The most violent you can get is crashing, but even so, nobody gets hurt. You see, that's the whole point of simulation!
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.
Thats great. Too bad the students have iBooks that are missing both the requirements for Window OR Linux, and the intel or AMD procerssor. Nifty game but useless.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
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
Pangea Software have a lot of fun games for kids. Take a look at Enigmo , it's a great puzzle game.
.
There is also The Incredible Machine but it may only works on OS 9.
If you want something a little more "arcade", you can find on GarageGames Marble Blast
And FroGames will soon release a fun racing game : MiniOne Racing . (ad)
The "G-Rated" restriction cuts out almost everything that attempts to model the Real World, seeing as it includes procreation and death by nature. Thank goodness the children can be protected from education about real world problems [note: this is sarcasm].
SimCity is obviously a good candidate (though you may need to disable the in-game disasters, depending on how strict you want to be).
Tropico would run a very close second in my book, excepting that you're a dicatator and can issue some serious edicts (including arrest, the death penalty, contraception bans, heretic branding, and religious inquisition). If anything, it's more educational than SimCity, for these very reasons.
Civ and the like are basically out. This is unfortunate, as Galactic Civilizations is great, and offers ethical choices similar to those in Tropico (though less direct, they're mostly of the "what do you do with the locals where you're colonizing" variety, as well as intergalactic warfare).
It has always struck me as absurd that the name of the game is "Civilization", while the object of the game is Conquest.
Capitalism and its kin can offer some very good business/economic simulations. Railroad Tycoon is a great game (and since v3 is out now, v2 should be dirt cheap - it's the one I have). Some of the other "XYZ Tycoon" games may also apply, but I haven't played them.
Some flight sims, sports, and puzzle games may also be appropriate.
The Stair Dismount game is a great educational physics sim, but it's a little bit violent. Likewise, Carmageddon 2 has imbued me with a healthy terror of automobiles.
The player has to balance the actions these Sims (individual people) take over the days and weeks in the game. You have to make sure they go to work and get paid, so that they can eat and pay the bills. They have to do a certain amount of socializing and fun activities or they become unhappy and do badly at work. If the Sims don't clean up their garbage, and the house gets messy it negatively impacts the mood of the Sims. The better you manage your Sim the better they do at work, and then they get promoted if they do well there. The player also has to manage the relationships of their Sims with each other. If the Sims don't keep up a friendship by inviting one another over, playing games, and talking on the phone then the friendship can end.
As for the content being inappropriate, there are several factors. 1) Although two people can get in bed together they have to be in love to do this. Once in bed they are only allowed to sleep, no hanky panky. 2) There are love relationships and the player can have two Sims who are in love kiss. Nothing beyond kissing goes though, and in 7th or 8th grade some kids do kiss. This brings me to 3) The polygamy bit, is not really polygamy, it is 'cheating' meaning one Sim has two or more loves. If this cheating is found out the cheater is rebuked by the cheated and their relation ship is trashed. (Some times the male is slapped by the female I think.) So there are consequences for this cheating and it is not condoned.
All in all to really understand this game, as for any game, you should actually play the game yourself. Maybe have one of the students help teach you to play.
I think parents who are concerned about what games their children play should play test the games. Meaning: play the game themselves. If the parent has a hard time playing the game have the child show you how to play while you are at the controls. Even if it is not interesting to the parent or teacher, show interest because it is interesting to these kids!
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.