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Academic Games Are No Fun
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Academics have been flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology and turn these environments into educational tools. A game called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and developed at Indiana University was supposed to test economic theories by manipulating the rules of the game. There's only one problem. "It's no fun, " says Edward Castronova, Arden's creator and an associate professor of telecommunications at the university. "You need puzzles and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach." Part of the problem is it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that goes into developing something on the scale of World of Warcraft. Castronova is releasing Arden to the public as is and says his experience should serve as a warning for other academics. "What we've really learned is, you've got to start with a game first," Castronova says. "You just have to." The new version is titled Arden II: London Burning."
If there is one thing I've seen on The Linux Games Tome, its that it only takes a few people to build a MMORPG. If anything, they should just use the quarter of a million to mobilize some open source programmers around a game that is open source.
I still know when you can ford a river in covered wagon and how to die of cholera.
Didn't we just have this discussion in June?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I see Arden is just yet another module for Neverwinter Nights. And so long as I need to have THAT installed to play Arden, why don't I just, like, put on my robe and wizard hat and play the main campaign? Of COURSE people don't want your module - you've lashed it to something that's far more compelling.
World of Warcraft is the biggest name out there precisely because it is fun for a lot of people with multiple playing styles. How many games that either weren't fun at all, or only fun for a small subset of a potential player base have gone by the wayside in recent years? There's still something to be said about gabbing a niche for a player base, but the game has to be fun to attract enough people to keep it going. Once the game stops being fun, the only thing to keep it going is the sense of community with the people you're playing with. Once that's gone, people move on.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Perfect Competition is a game that seems to have similar goals, but I guess it must be fun enough for at least a few people to play. It wasn't really my thing but it is a business/economics sim that is quite active. From their site: Players can establish companies, run a hedge fund, direct a company as the chairperson, recruit and dismiss staff, choose markets, set up business units (shops, factories, oil rigs, mines, livestock farms, crop farms, logging camps), deal with suppliers, decide on locations and transport, manage production, pay wages, set prices, innovate and differentiate products, carry out R&D, patent intellectual property, advertise, build brands, sell products, sell services, buy and sell land, invest in real estate, borrow and lend through company bonds, issue shares, invest in shares for dividends, speculate in shares for capital gains, acquire and merge companies, execute hostile takeovers, create horizontal and vertical business conglomerates, buy market research, analyse balance sheets and profit and loss statements, monitor cash flow, examine financial ratios, view economic statistics, and base business decisions on the economy of the game: interest rates, inflation, commodity supply shocks, and more. It is the most comprehensive, realistic and popular business simulation.
Have you thought this through? Whenever a regular MMO changes it's rules, an almost instant flamewar commences and many people leave the game.
If you want people to play your game, and keep playing your game, you will not be able to simply change the rules to test some theory of yours concerning economics... No, you'll have to be busy keeping people interested, and not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
It's a great idea, I give you that, but it's simply not feasible for real...
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Acedemic games no fun? That's because the focus is WRONG. Games are meant to be fun or entertaining: that must always come first. Same thing with Christian metal bands. If you focus on the message first and not the music, people aren't going to bother even listening because the music is sub par. There are more examples I could go on and on about, but simply put most educational games are misguided because that's the nature of acedemic games. I mean who is going to fund an educational game where only 5-10% vaguely seems educational? But that's what is required.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up. I took a class in college where the class worked on an academic game, and it had potential. It took place in the old west and kids were meant to do various things. Now you aren't going to be able to quiz kids every 30 seconds, but you can easily drop in things that are somewhat educational like what people used to buy, what sort of horse does what task, etc. No one would be rabidly pleased at how educational your game is, but it's not that hard to get people to pick up small bits of real knowledge.
I remember plenty of fun, academic games that I used to play.
Number Munchers, Super Number Munchers, Donald Duck's Playground, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trial 2, anything involving Sesame Street.
Of course, it's easier to make educational games for children. Part of the reason is that even if they don't know how to play the game as it was intended, they'll play it a different way. I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
but it only takes a few people to make a MMORPG only a few people will ever want to play.
Considering all the angst displayed here when World of Warcraft is mentioned there should be no shortage in OS programmers creating new and great MMORPGs to bring down the evil and all so boring and all so many people are leaving and etc etc World of Warcraft.
But there isn't.
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time. I can find any number of people "with great ideas for a MMORPG" I just cannot find anyone who is a. willing to expend the real time it will take, b. compromise with others, c. just be available for group meetings, and d. willing to code the grunt side of the setup.
Hell this guy is just making a module for NWN or such... all the ugly stuff most programmers hate is provided (art work etc)
The days of just tossing out something (laughable anyone think a MMORPG can be made quickly - even muds took time to evolve beyond copies of diku)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The idea of a game where the main play activity is to change the rules has a fairly old pedigree -- one variant, called nomic, was popularized (OK, in a geeky sense) by DouglasHofstadter in the Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American way back in 1982, and the game itself is older than that.
Nomic is a little different from the emphasis of TFA, in that nomic's creators focussed on the political implications of self-referential, self-modifying rule systems, and TFA seems to be mostly about the economics of such systems.
I and a group of my friends took on nomic many years ago, and found it to be mostly theoretically interesting, and not all that fun in practice.
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"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
I don't "get it" (SL) and actually remarked to a co-worker after trying it for a while that it wasn't any fun because you don't kill anything, but lots of people spend a lot of time there.
I make games, and 95% of my focus with a game is to make it fun, and entertaining, and popular. that used to be 100% of the focus until I made this which started getting enquiries from university teachers and students who wanted to integrate it into lessons. That game now has a number of site licenses for schools, and apparently goes down very well. The reason I think it works, is that ultimately, it's just a fun game. The game may make you think about the subject matter (politics) but it doesn't ram it down your throat. It's also not vaguely preachy, and basically tries to be neutral on all issues, which avoid antagonizing or irritating any of the players.
Democracy is popular enough for me to do a sequel (nearly done!), and this time round it does contain a whole bunch of real world statistics and background data (in wiki-style form) which is presented as additional (and optional) to the game itself. This is just like those historical RTS games which have a built in encyclopaedia. You can play Age Of Empires just for fun, but it you really want to find out a bit more about trebuchets, the game is happy to help.
that is as it should be. Games on interesting and intelligent topics that encourage the curious player to learn more. You should never ram the educational bit down the players throats. People play games for fun. If they want to do hardcore learning, they break out a textbook.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Organ trail? Good God, what kind of sick, gore-filled rendition of Oregon trail have you been playing? At least it teaches anatomy...
They need a Magic School Bus game based on that episode where they drive around in someone's bod, and another whether they drive out to Pluto.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
They exist! See here and here
I remember playing the solar system one at the library. It was pretty fun - jumping around in low gravity and such.