Video Games in the Classroom: Eve Online

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.

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.

Social Sustainability

I've already posted on the gamification of many green movements, namely the use of electric cars and for recycling. But I believe there is another aspect that is beginning to show up in the green world that had its start from the internet and video games: Social Connectivity. We, as humans, care what other people think of us. We compete, cooperate, and judge each other, for better or worse. This sense of competition, however, can be harnessed to create an environment where everyone ends up becoming a bit more energy conscious.

Social networking has shown that large groups of people care about how others see them. How else can you explain Gamerscore? Gamerscore is a number attached to a person's Xbox Live profile, and is an indication of how many achievements that player has accumulated. This number has no bearing on gameplay, no monetary value, and is not officially ranked, but people care a lot about comparing this number to everyone they meet. This competition over a number of no real significance shows just how powerful social interactions can be in influencing how people act.

As previously posted, Nissan took this and created a leaderboard which ranked drivers on their driving efficiency. The Green Button Initiative is program by the Department of Energy that makes utility information more accessible to customers. One of the proposed ways of creating energy awareness is by pitting neighbors against each other on their energy usage.

Neural Energy Games wants to create a strong community in which competition and cooperation will be able to thrive and drive energy consciousness. We want to include some kind of achievement system, as well as a wide range of statistics from each of our games. By tying everything to a single player profile, we also want to make it so that this competition on one area of the site results in competition in others. This is of course a long term goal, but it's important for us to think about these issues to set a foundation that will support these ambitious plans.

Reframe: Using Pop Culture For Energy

I think something we need to consider when talking about science education is how it is framed for students in the classroom. Facts are often given in a vacuum: they come from a textbook with very little context and few connections to a student's world at large. But what if we brought what kids cared about into the classroom, engaged what they know with what we want to teach? I think that we can reframe the discussion on energy topics to include video game and other pop culture references, increasing student interest, and maybe even turn some of them into scientists in the process.

I want to start by giving an example of how to introduce several types of energy technology to kids with the Fallout video game series. The Fallout universe is one in which 50's era cold war mentality and atomic age technology were never abandoned, resulting in a future where cars are powered by nuclear reactors and vacuum tubes were the cornerstone of computer technology. Energy is of great importance in this universe, since the nuclear war which caused the game's post-apocalyptic setting was a result of a resource war brought on by the depletion of petroleum reserves. As the player works through the wasteland of what used to be the United States, he comes across a variety of things which can be used as a tie in to various energy technologies. For example, in the game Fallout: New Vegas, the player comes across a solar complex that uses concentrated sunlight on a central tower to generate energy. The climax of the game also takes place on the Hoover Dam, which given scarcity of resources in the game universe is a very valuable commodity.

By tying lessons about petroleum, nuclear energy, or natural resources to examples form the Fallout games, students become more involved with their own learning, using these visual examples to better understand more complex concepts. These examples can be used as a humorous introduction to nuclear topics, with pictures of the mutated inhabitants used to illustrate how the public views nuclear energy. They can also be used as an example of where the game got things right, and where they are exaggerating facts for fictional use. They can also be used as simply a way to connect with kids who are uninterested, a way of bringing in those who are on the fence about listening at all.

These are, of course, mature themes which need to be assessed by the teacher using them. But I believe that these examples can be used to generate more interest in learning, and even cause students to retain knowledge better. The more involved and engaged they become in the learning process, the better they are able to grasp the concepts important to the lesson.

The cost of Freemium

The purpose of any business, whether it be behind video games, education, or both, is to make money. Neural Energy Games is no different, and once these games come out, we will be looking for ways to generate profit. There are many ways to sell video games these days, but the one that is beginning to gain a lot of traction is the "Freemium" model. When I say freemium, I mean that the majority of the game will be playable for free, but portions of premium content will be accessible with money.

The decision to go with the freemium business model came after a lot of careful consideration, since there are many ways where it could go wrong. One ill effect from the free-to-play model comes from how it effects the way kids view hard work and value. Consider a game where your character needs to become level 10 to compete against the next opponent. The player could spend hours training his character until it becomes level 10, or he could pay 5 dollars to have the character automatically leveled to 10 in a matter of seconds. Broken down to its basic level, this is basically telling kids that hard work is valuable, but not as valuable as cold, hard, cash. Even though, in a cynical view of the real world, this is basically how it works, it's probably not the greatest thing to feed into our students' heads that money is the solution to hard work.

I want to say that Neural Energy Games has a strong opinion on how free-to-play games should be structured in that game altering items will be kept at a minimum. We will strive to move away from the types of games which makes it basically impossible to compete with others or advance in the game without paying, and instead move towards models made popular by Valve, which is based heavily on virtual vanity items that are completely optional. Since we want the games we make to be education in nature, we want to make sure everything is as accessible to every student as possible.

Game First: Education Second

The perception of educational games as being "serious games" has a lot to do with how they're usually conceived. Most of the time, these games are thought of simply as a vehicle for feeding raw data into students, another way of getting the same type of information structured the same way as traditional lectures. Because of this, these games don't reach kids, they don't have fun with them, and the games don't get played. Quick experiment: Name an Educational Game. Got one? If you said "Math Blaster," congratulations! You've named a game that is over 20 years old and is usually the only example of an educational game a member of the general population can name. Unless you count Oregon Trail, where elementary school children learned dysentery was the number one killer of the west.

We, along with some other newer educational game companies, are beginning to take a different approach, focusing more on creating a fun and engaging game that kids will actually want to play. Instead of just taking paragraphs of information and shoehorning it into a matching game or trivia game, we work on creating games which make sense mechanically with the topic at hand.  With this in mind, we have many game concepts in the works, with several in the prototype stages. I know I've been teasing these games, and I do want to show them as soon as they're ready. However, I don't like putting out products which are ill-formed or half-baked, and we also need to think about protecting intellectual property, so it may still be a few weeks before they go live on the website.

Neural Energy Games will focus initially on putting out several smaller flash games, each tuned to a small aspect in a certain topic in energy. From solar cell function to how to run a nuclear plant, there are many opportunities for creating interesting games for students.