Tag Archives: video games

Building McMansions in Minecraft

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Check out this recently constructed McMansion in Minecraft. Here is a description of the structure:

Finally, it’s here! I have built an amazing McMansion!

This grandiose house features:

• A large entrance and foyer,
• a large living room with a high ceiling (and a balcony of the second floor hallway),
• multiple smaller rooms that could be sitting rooms, a dining room, a kitchen, etc.,
• a back porch, and
• 10 bedrooms! Gee whiz!

I have built two other McMansions before (both on the Iciclecraft server), but this is by far the best one.
Feel free to paste it into your own Minecraft world. However, if you use it in multiplayer, please credit me as the builder.

Sounds like McMansion features. The only thing missing here is a full neighborhood of mass-produced McMansions. And the tags for the post reinforce the McMansion idea:

Tags:Mcmansion, Mansion, Manor, House, Grand, Large, Big, Grandiose, Land Structure

I suppose the quick answer for why someone would build a McMansion in Minecraft is because they can. Perhaps they like building houses. But, to intentionally design a kind of home that is generally viewed negatively begs for a better reason. If you could build anything, why a McMansion?

Fathers still play catch with their sons? What about football, video games?

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I recently saw a review of the new Jackie Robinson bio-pic 42 that suggested American fathers still bond with their sons by playing baseball. My first thought: do fathers still do this on a large scale? Here is why I think this may be an outdated sentiment.

Baseball is no longer the most popular sport in the United States. Even with the large number of kids who play baseball or Little League, baseball’s peak has long passed with the NFL taking over the sports lead. The NFL released its 2013 schedule last week and ESPN was breathless for a while looking at the most tantalizing games that have yet to be played. Baseball is no longer the “all-American sport” and surely this must trickle down to the activities of kids and fathers. While it does have the same nostalgic pitch, what about playing catch with a football in the backyard? (This may be impacted today and in the future because of fears of concussions.) Moving in a different direction, as has the racial composition of baseball players, what about kicking around a soccer ball in the backyard?

Here is another possibility for how fathers and sons might now be interacting in the United States: by playing video games together. The generation who grew up with video games has reached adulthood and these video games habits don’t simply disappear. What if fathers and sons don’t play sports together as much as play Madden? What if they enjoy a good session of Call of Duty? This may not be happening on a large scale yet but I imagine this would grow in the future.

All that said, I want to see some data about how exactly fathers are bonding with their kids in 2013. Appeals to playing catch in the backyard might just be nostalgia for a bygone era.

Sad: newest version of SimCity causing a large outcry

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As a longtime fan of SimCity, I have not enjoyed how the changes to the newest version have turned off many fans:

Electronic Arts’ long-awaited release of SimCity on Tuesday should have been an occasion for a worldwide collective all-nighter of urban planning, a nonstop bacchanal of factory building, endless intricate min-maxing of grids of pavement. 12 a.m. Eastern Tuesday morning should have been SimCity’s finest hour.

Instead, the whole operation seized up and shit the bed. EA, a technology company with a market capitalization of over $5 billion, could not muster the online servers necessary to handle an influx of players looking to build their cities. This was entirely a problem of EA’s own making, as SimCity was not designed with an offline mode. Even if you don’t want to team up with others and join your cities together, you can’t just build your personal metropolitan layouts in peace: Every player must be constantly connected online, as a draconian step to crack down on piracy of this PC-only game.

Hey, launch hiccups happen, right? Everybody all tries to connect at once, servers get throttled, and you figure out a way to make it work. Trouble is, as of this writing EA hasn’t figured out a thing. SimCityis still totally busted. It’s difficult to log in: Nearly all of the servers are full, and when a player does find one that’s available, attempting to log in usually throws back an error. And you can’t try again until a 20-minute counter finishes ticking down…

In other words, SimCity is currently in the midst of a disaster that makes zombie attacks and nuclear meltdowns seem tame. Electronic Arts’ attempts to fix the problem have not only been unsuccessful, they’ve been making the SimCity blackout even worse, at least from a public relations standpoint: EA said Thursday that it would actually begin removing features from the game in an attempt to get it to run. At first it was non-core features like achievements and high score leaderboards. By the end of the day EA had ripped out the “Cheetah” gameplay mode, which speeds up the passage of time so you can develop your city more quickly…

In response to Wired’s request for comment, an EA spokesperson referred us to a blog post by SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis, who wrote that Electronic Arts would be adding new servers until the player base could be fully accommodated, and that it would prioritize stabilizing this situation before it turned the game’s features back on. She did not give a timeframe for the resolution.

It sounds like a bad situation from all that I have read. For example, check out the overwhelmingly negative reviews on Amazon. This is too bad as the pictures of the graphics I’ve seen look beautiful and some of the interactive elements between cities and within regions sound really interesting. But, I agree there should be a one-player mode so a city builder is not always dependent on other players.

In the end, I hope SimCity is redeemed. One thing that has been noticeable in the online complaints is the number of gamers who have enjoyed SimCity for years. It is not flashy, doesn’t involve violence (though you might count destroying your own city by disaster), and might even give you some insights into urban life. People want to play the game but under certain conditions.

Reformatting a zoning map of Chicago to look like SimCity 2000

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Zoning maps can include a lot of categories but what happens if it is converted to a SimCity 2000 format? Check out this recolored Chicago zoning map:

To spice up their interactive “2nd City Zoning” map of Chicago, Derek Eder, Juan-Pablo Velez and Aya O’Connor paid tribute to the SimCity franchise with some familiar color-coding. Blue for commercial, yellow for industrial, green for residential.

Then they got carried away, incorporating a few choice icons from SimCity 2000 as well as some of that legendary game music, which you can listen to while you browse the map.

Zoning is a little more complicated than the tri-color scheme implies, but by the time you get to the portion of the site that explains the difference between Manufacturing and Planned Manufacturing Districts, it’s mission complete for the designers.

Here are more details of the SimCity change from 2nd City Zoning – including a plea to not be sued.

It is too bad there isn’t a longer discussion about the simplicity of SimCity zoning versus real world zoning. Are there benefits to presenting a simpler zoning map to residents? (This assumes that there are a good number of residents that want to look at such maps.) How much complexity compared to real life was SimCity missing in the 2000 version? SimCity players might have learned something by playing the game but might also have been misled by the reductionism.

The music takes me back…

Do “Anthropological Video Games” lead to anthropological learning?

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The New Yorker has a short article about several anthropological video games including “Guess My Race,” “The Cat and the Coup,” and “Sweatshop.”

A cluster of teen-agers gathered around a small table, and passersby could hear them exclaim, “Asian! Yeah, I knew it!” and “Aryan? That seems ridiculous.” They hovered over two iPads in the Grand Gallery of the Museum of Natural History during the Margaret Mead Film Festival, playing a game called “Guess My Race.” It was one of five video games in the Mead Arcade; the others included “The Cat and the Coup,” which traces the downfall of Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and “Sweatshop,” in which you hire and fire workers for your loathsome factory.

Aiding the swarms of museum patrons who stopped to play were volunteers from Games for Change, a New York City-based nonprofit that encourages the development of what it calls “social-impact games.” (All of the games at the arcade are also available for free through the organization’s Web site.) I sat down at a laptop to try my hand at running a sweatshop. To a bouncy techno soundtrack, the boss floor manager, who keenly evoked Hitler, spewed insults and directions—”Lazybones! How are you today? Shh-h-h-h. I don’t care!”—and the orders started pouring in for shoes, shirts, hats, and bags…

In 1940, Margaret Mead created a card game along with her husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Called “Democracies and Dictators,” its cards contained instructions such as “Dictator! Crippled Industries: You have put your leading industrialists into concentration camps. (lose a card in 5).” Mead wrote that it was based on “the basic ideas that democracies and dictators play by different rules and work with different values.” She tried to sell the idea to Parker Brothers, but it was never produced for public consumption. The games on display at the Mead Arcade have been markedly more successful. “Sweatshop” had a million plays during its first three months, and “The Cat and the Coup” has received acclaim from gamers around the world—including one German reviewer who wrote that it is “like Monty Python being dropped in a bowl full of Persian kitsch.”…

But if games train players in the rules of culture, what happens when those rules become too complicated to follow, or, perhaps, obsolete? Settling down to play “Guess My Race,” the player looks at photographs of ten faces—no artifacts here, the subjects are familiarly modern. You choose from six possible races that vary widely from one round to the next—descriptions might be nationalities, skin colors, religions, or loaded epithets like “Illegal” or “East Coast.” The player might have to select from options that would seem to be simultaneously plausible (i.e., Asian versus Indonesian, or Black versus Caribbean) with answers that suggest race is self-defined, not regionally or ethnically determined.

And so the gamification of the world continues. I’m not surprised these games are featured at a museum; when recently visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for the first time in a few years, I was struck by the number of hands-on exhibits and games that allow one or two users to explore some dimension of science. It is interesting to see that these games have had so many downloads – people are either interested in the topics or there are a lot of gamers out there willing to trying a lot of things.

My biggest question about these games is whether players learn the intended lessons. As the article notes, games have been used and proposed for decades to teach players different lessons. We know, for example, that Monopoly is partly about capitalism. It seems to me that the crop of more recent Euro games, from Settlers of Catan on downward, tend to teach about what is needed to grow a community or society. Even new video games like Assassin’s Creed III are related to historical events. However, having played a lot of games over recent years, I wonder how much I’ve actually learned about anything as opposed to enjoyed competing. Is the point of the board game Agricola to teach me that Germans living in the 1600s needed a diverse base of multiple foodstuffs? Did the video game Civilization (II-IV) teach me something meaningful about how civilizations actually develop? I’m not sure.

Also, I have to ask: what would a sociological game look like?

Games about infrastructure: street cleaning and the construction of power plants

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Perhaps everything can go through the gamification process: I recently ran into two games that tackle issues involving infrastructure.

1. Here is a new street cleaning game recently released in Germany:

The game – known as Kehrmaschinen-Simulator 2011 in its homeland of Germany – puts the player behind the wheel of a street cleaning truck and promptly serves some of the dirtiest gutters and asphalt surfaces a city could provide.

Sadly, racing your sweeper at high speeds is not an option. What you can do is drive slowly, move the sweeping apparatus in a wide variety of ways, and – like a good street sweeper must – keep the streets clean. You can also get intimately familiar with the more mundane aspects of the street sweeping profession, from filling up the water tanks to turning on the truck’s various lights to checking your email…

Overall, the game provides what it promises: the player gets to clean city streets. How appealing that is depends on your personality.

“They say war games teach kids how to use guns and kill people and be violent; I don’t really believe in that,” one reviewer notes. “But if you do, maybe you should feed your kid some street sweeping games so he can get ready for his future job.”

The 15 minute video will give you a better idea of what the game is about.

2. We recently played the board game Power Grid for the first time. The idea of the game is that you have to build power plants, power them with resources you have to purchase, and then expand to new cities (which costs you) and also buy more powerful power plants (which also costs you more) to power more cities at a time. For an involved board game, the Amazon reviews are positive (4.5 stars out of 73), the review from Dice Tower is positive, and Board Game Geek offers a lot more information.

My takeaway comes with a caveat: anything can be made fun if done well. However, I do like thinking about infrastructure and city-building anyway so I may have more interest in such games.

Why not also pitch these games as learning opportunities? Give people the idea that playing a game might also be educational and these things might fly off the shelves. Power Grid requires a good amount of math to balance out how much new plants, resources, and city connections will cost versus how much a player will take in each turn based on their number of powered cities. While it is difficult to model complex events exactly in a game, these sorts of games could give kids and adults a better awareness of what it takes to clean streets or provide power. These are not unimportant tasks; I don’t think most citizens want dirty streets and dark houses.

New York Times review of SimCity Social

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Here is evidence that the world is a changed place: the New York Times has a short review of the new SimCity Social game for Facebook.

SimCity Social brings the original city-building video game to Facebook, though fans will be hard-pressed to find any of the depth and complexity of that popular PC series. Players place businesses, factories, houses and various attractions, as their expansionist ambitions are kept in check by an energy meter that slowly refills.

The game allows friends to establish sister cities or rival cities, which enables some entertaining cross-border acts of charity or benign sabotage. SimCity Social is a cute and capable social city builder. It’s also a shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of Zynga’s wildly popular CityVille, slapping a powerful name on a game that could never live up to SimCity’s legacy.

As a long-time SimCity fan, I’m tempted to try out this new version. However, several things will stop me:

1. I don’t want a watered down version. I’d rather use my computer and XBox 360 to play full, more stunning versions of games.

2. I’m not sure even a full-scale social version would add to the gameplay.

3. Does this app bug all of your friends like Farmville and the like? If so, I’m staying far away.

4. It sounds like this version may have become more “gamified” rather than being the free-flowing game I’m used to. Here is another review that explains some of the game:

So it’s technically Facebook, but when you’re playing it, it feels like a place (OR A CITY) of its own. I started playing it last Friday and I can’t stop. I am on Level 17, my population is at healthy 6,000, and SimCitySocialCheat.com is the website I aspire to be managing editor of. There’s something about the colorful utopia that I can not not stop thinking about.

Maybe it’s the constant yearning of completing tasks to get more energy bolts, thus being able build more houses and increase population and, in doing so, unlock the next level and new attractions.

Perhaps it’s the constant praise the game lauds on you for doing something so dumb and pointless, like planting a tree in a high-populated area. The the real world just doesn’t offer that,  unless you send a tree to Israel. (Then you get a fancy certificate back in return.)

And my friends are redeeming themselves there. You find an inner-circle of people that you can trust and rely on—not for moral support, but for land permits, teamwork badges, and Dunkin’ Donut energy bonuses: Jordanville runs on Dunkin’.

SimCity has always had some incentive to grow as you get to build different kinds of things. This often worked like it does for real cities: as a city grow, it can support monuments, cultural attractions, and more complicated transportation options. However, it sounds like this new version takes it to another level.

 

Civilization II a good “sociological simulator”? I say no

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I was amused earlier this week to see a report from a guy who has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten years. Here is a little bit of his report on the state of the Civ II world:

  • The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
  • There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

While I loved playing Civ II (and I think the gameplay was superior to later versions of the game), I’m scratching my head at how much attention this report has received in the media. Does it really tell us anything about the world’s possible future? Here is one overview from the BBC that I think goes too far:

A man who has been playing the computer game Civilisation II for ten years describes the year 3991 AD as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

Daniel Knowles, from the Telegraph and a fan of the game, says the game has certain assumptions built in to it about what will happen if there is a nuclear war or if you stop producing green technology.

“It’s a kind of sociological simulator… a giant economical model” he told the Today programme.

He believes gamer James Moore “would not still be playing it if he had reached an Utopia”.

Civilization II is a “sociological simulator”? I doubt it. Granted, the game is intended to replicate real-world nation-building and interaction. As you build your society, you have to make decisions like what kind of government to have (for example, in latter stages of the game fundamentalism is quite effective when waging all-out war), what to build and produce in individual cities, how to move certain units (military and otherwise) around, and pursue scientific and technological advancements. But, all of these types of games (and I’ve also been a fan in recent years of Age of Empires III) are only as good as what they account for. In other words, this is a low-level simulator of anything. The real world is far more complicated and many more moving pieces that games like this can allow. Indeed, these sorts of games seem geared toward all-out war between nations even as some would argue the international scene is getting more peaceful.

We are still far from a true “sociological simulator” that could account for all of the human variability in real life. This hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying – there was news recently of a group trying to put together a “Living Earth Simulator.” But, we need to remember what Civ II really is: it is a fun game with some modeling of human behavior but it really tells us very little or nothing about what the world might look like in 3991 AD.

SimCity 5 coming soon

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It appears that Maxis plans to reboot the SimCity franchise:

Enter SimCity. No really, just SimCity, like when you remake an old-school movie and crib the name unadorned — simple, straightforward, unambiguous. Only this isn’t a remake, it’s “a true rebirth of the franchise,” according to publisher EA and developer Maxis’ press release.

There’s obviously still going to be a drive to make it as accessible as possible, but EA and Maxis claim the reboot “brings the depth of simulation that has been the series hallmark for more than two decades and marries it with next generation accessibility and a robust multiplayer mode, giving players the power to change a world together.”

The emphasis this time appears to be on multiplayer, judging from the initial info-dump. Imagine building “a world that co-exists alongside friends,” in which the choices you make in your city have “long-lasting repercussions that will extend beyond [your] city limits.” You’ll be grappling with “real global challenges such as climate change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters,” and have to choose “whether to compete or collaborate” with your fellow metropolitan masons.

“Everything you see in the world we sim,” writes EA/Maxis. “Sims in each city will have jobs or can lose them, buy homes, be prosperous or be an economic drain on the city. SimCity is the city builder in which every choice powers real change that affects the character of your city, the state of your region and fellow players within the entire SimCity world. Original fans and newcomers alike will relish the opportunity to build visually and functionally unique cities that take on the character of their choices.”

You can watch the SimCity 5 trailer at the link above.

I grew up playing a lot of SimCity, particularly SimCity 2000 (though I have played plenty of all the other versions). For my money, that version was a great blend of complexity and gameplay. I think the trick for SimCity in the future is rediscovering or updating this balance: making it fun but also making it realistic. To me, the real genius of SimCity was taking real-life situations that we all know (we all live somewhere) and making an interesting game out of it. Along the way, a player would learn some principles about city planning. At the very least, you would learn about different zones and how to connect basic infrastructure (electricity and roads/trains in the original, later including water/pipes and mass transit) to all of the zones. At a more complex level, you could create intricate arrangements of land uses, mixing in civic structures like schools, city hall, parks, stadiums, marinas, and other goodies while having to balance a city budget. All of this could give a player feelings of creativity and control.

I know that people today talk about the “Madden effect” for football fans. The idea here is that through playing a realistic football game, fans learned about the intricacies of the game in a way that they wouldn’t get by watching games on TV or watching highlights on the news or on SportsCenter. For example, Madden players know the difference between different zone schemes in the defensive secondary or different pass routes. Is there a similar effect from SimCity? Would players know the different between a vibrant city and a disjointed place? (This makes me wonder: how many SimCity players built a whole map of suburban sprawl? You could do this in the game but it wasn’t really the point and the maintenance costs, usually per road piece or square of pipes or losing water pressure if it is pumped too far, would make it costly. Were the makers trying to make a point?) Going even further, are SimCity players better civic and social actors after learning more about how the urban world is put together?

The origins of Oregon Trail

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While looking at a column that included some thoughts about the book American Grace, I stumbled across the story of how the computer game Oregon Trail became a sensation. Here is what happened in those early days:

Minnesota’s City Pages tells the story of the game’s early days, when it was an underground sensation, played only by Minnesota schoolkids through a teletype machine installed in a janitor’s closet.

The Oregon Trail — a computer game in which players go on a simulated wagon journey out West, making key decisions along the way (take the Donner Pass or go around?) — was invented by a group of nerdy, computer-programming public school teachers in 1971. It was originally conceived as a board game, but Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (all Minnesotans) quickly realized its potential as a computer game, and spent two weeks programming it on a middle-school teletype terminal. Their students played the game without a screen, by taking turns pecking out commands on the console, which forwarded them on by telephone to a mainframe computer; the game’s prompts (“You have dysentery”) came out of a printer. In subsequent years, the game was accessed by kids statewide through the same method.

Everything changed in 1978, after a handwritten bid was submitted by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, then just two years old. Apple IIs were installed in schools throughout Minnesota, and the game was rewritten in the form in which millions of students have encountered it since then. Over the past 40 years, 65 million copies have been sold, making The Oregon Trail the most widely played educational game of all time. Nowadays, you can play it on your iPhone for 99 cents.

The Oregon Trail wasn’t just one of the first computer games — it was, as City Pages’ Jessica Lussenhop points out, “one of the first simulation computer games.” In fact the emphasis, for its creators, was on simulation. Looking back, one of the most striking things about the game is its accuracy: The programmers pored over actual settlers’ journals to figure out exactly how often players should break their wagon wheels, get sick, or meet helpful Native Americans, and painstakingly integrated those probabilities into the game. The Oregon Trail made pioneer history more fun — but it also made it more accurate.

Another innovation brought to you by Apple.

In conversations with other people my age, many of whom grew up playing Oregon Trail at school or at home, there is both joy and nostalgia when anyone brings up this game. Looking back it, it isn’t terribly complicated, the graphics were limited, and I’m not sure how much we actually “learned.” Perhaps it was the fact that it was a video game that one was allowed to play at school (along with other beloved games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?). However, I must ask: by playing this educational game and the others that followed, have students become more knowledgeable? Have these games contributed to rising educational achievement? (I think the answer to both of these is probably no or the impact is very limited.)

It is also interesting to see this idea that Oregon Trail was one of the first simulation games. I have long been a player of a few of these games, most notably Simcity, starting with a 386 version on a monochrome screen.