Chapter 12. Games
Personally I'm not much a player of computer games but maybe they can be used for environmental education.
In a first investigation I found
Lincity
and Real Life,
please check their usefulness by yourself.
Lincity
- Build & maintain a
city/country. You are required to build and maintain a city.
You must feed, house, provide jobs and goods for your
residents. You can build a sustainable economy with the help
of renewable energy and recycling, or you can go for broke
and build rockets to escape from a pollution ridden and
resource starved planet, it's up to you. Due to the finite
resources available in any one place, this is not a game
that you can leave for long periods of time. This game is
similar to the commercial simulation game with a similar
name. This package provides files common to both the X and
SVGALIB versions of the game.
Real Life
- "In
Conway's Game of Life every cell
is either fully alive (has the value of 1) or completely
dead (has the value 0). In Real Life this restriction to
bivalence is lifted to countenance -real-valued- degrees
of life and death. Real Life contains Conway's Game of
Life as a special case; however, Real Life, in contrast to
Conway's Game of Life, exhibits sensitive dependence on
initial conditions which is characteristic of chaotic
systems."
Sierra
has produced (some time ago) Eco Quest 1 - Lost in
Rainforest and Eco Quest 2 - The
Search for Cetus. The EcoQuest games were for
MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. These were targeted at younger
players.
SimEarth, 1988, Maxis (DOS, Win3.x, Mac) Simulates the
development of a planet from the forming of the crust
to the spread of civilization. Based on James
Lovelock's Gaia theory. Somewhat dull and difficult to
learn, but there's a good amount of educational value
to be gotten out of fiddling around with the models,
particularly greenhouse effect.
Balance of the Planet, 1991, Chris Crawford (DOS,
Mac) You take the role of a government policy-maker
who must try to balance industry and ecology.
Remarkably complicated and drab (even moreso than
SimEarth), but certain to be educational and
thought-provoking if time is spent with the manual.
(The Mac version can now be downloaded for free from
Crawford's website
http://www.erasmatazz.com/free.html, but Executor
seems to be unable to deal the filenames in the
archive.)
Global Effect, 1992, Millennium (DOS, Amiga) An
early real-time strategy game where you must try
to conquer your opponent while dealing with the
ecological ramifications of your weapons and
industry upon your population. Clunky interface,
not a lot of fun compared to current Warcraft-type
games.
SimIsle, 1995, Maxis (DOS, ???) Develop a
tropical island without destroying the
rainforest ecology. Large learning curve but
supposedly a lot of fun.
SimPark, 1997, Maxis (Win 95, ???) Sort of a
children's version of SimIsle, which is
simpler and more education-focused.
I suspect the older games should run just fine on dosemu.
|
|