Re: [kidsgames] geography game

[jeff@smluc.org]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Paul Kienzle wrote:

-->Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 07:09:04 +0100 (BST)
-->From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle@kienzle.powernet.co.uk>
-->To: kidsgames@smluc.org
-->Subject: [kidsgames] geography game
-->
-->
-->A geography game might be fun.  Tommy wants breakfast.  Rice Crispies
-->with bananas and milk, a glass of orange juice, and maybe a kiwi on
-->the side, so he jumps into his teleporter and bounces around the world
-->looking for stuff.  He knows that rice paddies are hot and wet, and
-->bananas are tropical, kiwis are temperate, oranges are subtropical and
-->somewhat draught tolerant, and cows like grass.
-->

Sounds neat.  Would it always be the same or would it be different,
perhaps dependent on what Tommy chooses for breakfast?

-->The game starts off with an empty kitchen, and a shopping list on
-->the fridge.  He clicks on the banana icon of the shopping list and a
-->picture of a banana tree pops up with a jungle backdrop.  His teleporter
-->has a globe which he can spin and click on to go where he wants to go.
-->Beside the globe are buttons to select between temperature, rainfall,
-->vegetation, and political boundaries representations.  When he actually
-->finds the banana trees he can load some bananas into his teleporter,
-->press the return button, and be back in his kitchen with the bananas
-->on the table next to his bowl.  A more elaborate version would force
-->him to handle the bananas once for each time they are actually handled
-->(onto a truck to the coast, onto a ship, onto a truck to the warehouse,
-->onto a truck to the supermarket, onto a car to home).  All very tedious,
-->but it does highlight an advantage of buying local produce.
-->

Neat.

-->This idea was sparked by a mention on another mailing list that Debian
-->Potato includes a mapping package called GMT.  Has anyone played with it?

nope, haven't had a chance.

-->Does it have geographic data on the whole earth (political boundaries,
-->climate, etc.)  Could its maps be incorporated into a point and click
-->type game (with produce stickers of course!)  Production information is
-->available in the CIA fact book is it not?
-->

don't know, somebody remind me where the fact book is.  Is it one of the
gutenburg project's titles?

-->I don't know how this fits in with the "generic kids game engine"
-->discussion that's being batted around.  I suppose it is just clicking
-->on icons to change between scenes, and spark the occasional animation.

I hope that it does.  The idea is to try and define what a "generic kids
game engine" would need to do to be useful to developer's.  It seems from
what you have described above that the GKGE would have to make it easy to
fire off sound files, music files, animations, pictures of many formats,
and display text.  It would probably be required that these were sync'ed
as well.  Please feel free to elaborate on this topic.

-->The spinning globe is more complicated, and will require some pretty
-->game specific code.  If we design a few games like this, we will get
-->a much better sense of what facilities we need from our game engine.
-->Too bad I'm too busy to take a stab at it.  Any takers?
-->

I wish.

-->"Scalability" is a difficult problem.  Certainly a 3-5 year old could
-->click around the world and see whatever happens to appear while a
-->5-7 year old could actually collect the items on the grocery list.
-->I don't see it scaling much past age 7.  Nor do I see why it should.

As long as you aren't placing limits on it that are only geared toward
marketing the next incarnation of Tommy's Geographical Breakfast. (Hey can
we get national geographic to sponser this?)

-->I can understand the frustration with a package which puts arbitrary
-->limitations on its content simply so that the can resell three times to
-->different age groups, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem reasonable
-->to expect a game which appeals to a 3 year old to also appeal to a 13
-->year old.

I can see that my scalability comments are not well communicated, yet.  I
don't intend to make every game that we create scale from ages 1 to 101,
but I do intend that the "suite" of games that we create will have this as
a goal.

--> Now you could reframe this slightly into a game where you 
-->are given a plot of land and you can choose what to grow (bananas,
-->coffee, apples, ...).  Then introduce a trading component and groups
-->of 13-year-olds could experiment with various models of competitive and
-->cooperative trade.  But this is an entirely different game.
-->

Sounds supiciously like lincity, perhaps that code could be leveraged?


-->As for the other "scalability",  I don't see how 3-7 year-old version
-->is usable in classroom situations, or the 13 year-old version is usable
-->at home.
-->

They don't have to be.  Hmmm, there are several different types of
scalability, and we need perhaps to discuss and label them accordingly.
There is scalability of difficulty (I.E. different levels in a level based
game).  There is scalability of users (I.E. it scales to a huge number of
simultaneous user's)  There is scalability of skillsets (I.E. it moves the
player from one skillset to another in perhaps increasing order of
difficulty).  I see what you are talking about above as being a
scalability of skillsets issue, i.e. the 3-7 year-old version addresses a
different skill set then the other two.  The key I think is to make the
"environment" (character's "Tommy", spinning globe, etc.) scale between
the different games to give a smooth transition between each of the
skillsets.  I'm not sure that I conveyed that well, but you guys will tell
me if I didn't... :)

-- 
Jeff Waddell
jeff@smluc.org

Kids Games Project Coordinator
main website at http://smluc.org/SIA/kidsgames/



-
kidgames@smluc.org  -- To get off this list send "unsubscribe" in the
body of a message to majordomo@smluc.org