Week 5 – Video Games as Designed Experiences

Reading this article made me think back to one of the most influential games in my life, which just happened to be the game I made my first post on: Sim City. The game is even mentioned in this article, and I played a lot of simulation games. I remember their early days, when they could be “hacked” and their logic could be exposed (as was mentioned in the article), although I still found it a useful learning experience to figure out the hack, because it has some underlying “truth” to how to model the real world. Actually, I believe finding these hacks was able to provide a better learning experience sometimes. For example, it was an easy hack to figure out that you should ALWAYS build clean power plants and NEVER build coal power plants if you wanted your city to survive, because you always needed to demolish your coal power plant as your city grew larger. This taught me a valuable lesson on pollution and the environment, and lessons like these really stuck in my mind. I could go on and on about these kinds of games and how I am a big believer in their potential to teach.