One thing that will always be tied to how energy is used in the world is economics. Money, and where it goes, is often the single most important variable determining whether an idea sinks or floats. But economics as a concept is sometimes very difficult to understand as an outside observer. Unless a student has experience with an allowance or personal money, there is very little he or she can experience in their own life that would help with the complexities of economics. That is where video games come in.
Eve Online is a computer game where a player is given a ship and allowed to do as they please. They can spend time mining ore, chasing pirates, exploring the galaxy, or destroying each other's ships. While this may not sound much different from any other space game, what makes it interesting is the player controlled free market economy within the virtual universe. Everything, from the most basic mineral ore to the most elaborate space freighter, can be bought and sold. (If you were to watch some people play the game, you would assume they were simply using the stock market, given all the graphs on the screen.) And when I say free market, I mean that players are not only able to lie, steal, and cheat their way to the top, they are encouraged to do so, since there is no regulatory body to punish them.
The truly free market of Eve Online allows players to experience many key economic concepts first hand. Buy low, sell high. Demand in often localized and where you sell is very important. Large corporations (which are player formed) can corner markets and dictate how the price of a commodity moves. If a deal is too good to be true, it probably is (there are stories of Madoff scale Ponzi schemes and mind-boggling tales of corporate espionage). If students were to read about all these concepts, they would have more trouble retaining the information as opposed to if they were personally invested in how well their space mining operation was doing.
These concepts are important in our education of energy topics, mainly because many of the technologies today are not penetrating the market due to high costs. The reason many US solar companies are going bankrupt has a lot to do with China undercutting prices and flooding the market with their own cells. Students who understand the economics of green energy as well as the technologies behind them will be much better prepared for the future when they become the ones who are making the decisions.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
The Value of Accuracy
Video Games are, by design, a series of simplified obstacles. The player chooses to overlook generalizations and simplified mechanics in order to have fun playing the game. The degree to which a game chooses to simplify itself runs a wide range, from the airplane simulators which require custom screens and flight controls, to Mario Kart, where go-karts can be driven with a single stick and button. For an educational game, finding the right balance between simplicity and accuracy can be a challenge.
The degree of accuracy a player accepts for any given game has a lot to do with how that game is presented. The best example I can give is by looking at racing games. Racing games have a varying degree of accuracy depending on which one you decide to look at. At one end of the spectrum, you have the Kart racing games popularized by Nintendo, where characters race around fantastical tracks while lobbing cartoonish weapons at one another. Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, and a slew of others fall into this category, where all it takes to do well is an understanding of right and left. At the other end, you have games such as the Gran Turismo, which features realistic physics and cars which require a great deal more skill to drive. In Gran Turismo 5, the player needs to understand the effects of under braking, how to find a good line through a turn, and how driving changes under adverse weather. The rest of the spectrum is filled with games which find niches at some balance between the two ends. Blur has powerups and weapon pickups, but requires more precision driving. Need for Speed uses advanced physics and cars, but driving them is significantly easier than in true sim racing games.
But even with this vast array of games playing loose with the idea of accuracy, you can still find a successful game at any point in the spectrum. As long as the game is consistent and up front about the degree of accuracy it holds onto from the real world, someone will play it if it is an interesting game.
Sometimes educational games get too caught up in the battle for accurate representations of the problem at hand and forget that it really doesn't matter how true to form the content is, as long as the game is engaging to the player. The games that Neural Energy Games will develop are meant to educate, which means they will attempt to be as accurate as possible, but that doesn't mean the game can't also be engaging to the audience.
The degree of accuracy a player accepts for any given game has a lot to do with how that game is presented. The best example I can give is by looking at racing games. Racing games have a varying degree of accuracy depending on which one you decide to look at. At one end of the spectrum, you have the Kart racing games popularized by Nintendo, where characters race around fantastical tracks while lobbing cartoonish weapons at one another. Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, and a slew of others fall into this category, where all it takes to do well is an understanding of right and left. At the other end, you have games such as the Gran Turismo, which features realistic physics and cars which require a great deal more skill to drive. In Gran Turismo 5, the player needs to understand the effects of under braking, how to find a good line through a turn, and how driving changes under adverse weather. The rest of the spectrum is filled with games which find niches at some balance between the two ends. Blur has powerups and weapon pickups, but requires more precision driving. Need for Speed uses advanced physics and cars, but driving them is significantly easier than in true sim racing games.
But even with this vast array of games playing loose with the idea of accuracy, you can still find a successful game at any point in the spectrum. As long as the game is consistent and up front about the degree of accuracy it holds onto from the real world, someone will play it if it is an interesting game.
Sometimes educational games get too caught up in the battle for accurate representations of the problem at hand and forget that it really doesn't matter how true to form the content is, as long as the game is engaging to the player. The games that Neural Energy Games will develop are meant to educate, which means they will attempt to be as accurate as possible, but that doesn't mean the game can't also be engaging to the audience.
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