There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.

Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.

What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?

  • naught101@lemmy.world
    12·
    11 hours ago

    How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science

    Edit since a few people asked: I don’t have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:

    • According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
      • Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
    • Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
      • Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord’s Game (the precursor to monopoly)
      • This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
    • Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn’t due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
      • Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
      • Tak is another example that’s a lot easier to learn (because it doesn’t require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
    • TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don’t think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players’ life experience, and via the setting/world.
    • Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
      • No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
      • Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.

    There are probably plenty more links. I’ve been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I’m just starting out looking in to game design…

    edit 2: also, a plug for !complexity@lemmy.world

    • Aequitas@feddit.org
      2·
      1 day ago

      I want to know more. Part of my job involves teaching lessons on climate change in schools. I have often wondered how I could incorporate games like Minecraft into this.

      • naught101@lemmy.world
        2·
        12 hours ago

        Edited a bunch in. Would be interested in your Minecraft thoughts after reading that. I don’t immediately see that Minecraft specifically would be useful for climate change. I’m a climate scientist, but I haven’t played the game… There are a few other games out there that do tackle climate change, some in useful and interesting ways.

        Edit: some of the games I know:

        • Daybreak by Matt Leacock et al.
        • Hack the Planet
        • there’s heaps of solarpunk and climate games on itch.io, I havent tried many yet.
          • naught101@lemmy.world
            1·
            8 hours ago

            I haven’t. I’m less interested in videogames, because I find I prefer the social interactions of physical games more, and I also suspect that videogames fall into more of a one-to-many style communication, rather than many-to-many (I have played them a lot in the past, just not so much these days).

            I had a quick skim of the wikipedia page, but it mostly seems pretty focused on the narrative (aside from the dice pool mechanic, which sounds a lot like Psi*Run dice mechanic discussed on this podcast). Was there something in particular about it that I’d be interested in?

            • CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              1·
              4 hours ago

              Mostly the fact that it’s very class and socially conscious, and is using games as a way of teaching deeper truths. The mechanics aren’t super interesting, though they are solid. It is definitely a one-to-many thing, though

              • naught101@lemmy.world
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Oh yeah. I see that kind of teaching as fairly similar to what you would get from movies or books. Definitely useful, and with lots to explore (I want to write some SciFi eventually). But I think it’s fundamentally different to when the game structure teaches things.

                Of course, there are table top games that have those elements too, though probably less than videogames, since they usually depend on the players creating the story on the fly.