| (Pages: 1, 2) | |
And of course it will be interminably boring and pointless and simplistic just like every educational game ever is. | |
do they use spirit cones to control traffic? | |
Generally, but every now and then you hear a terrible news story of a beast that had a head-on collision while drink-prowling. | |
Don't forget those Ameri... I mean, Western Monstahs that don't know how to drive our awesome roundabouts and get stuck in infinite loops. | |
You're telling me. Although you can tell if you go to Euro... I mean, the continental kingdoms who is a tourist. A minotaur pulling out the wrong way and having to avoid a crowd of angry warlocks is such a giveaway. | |
Kids play a lot. I know I sure did. What scares me though is that in order to stop the spirit monsters, you cast spells and SET UP TRAPS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. | |
Only if the All-Seeing Eyes of Fine'ing aren't upon them. :) | |
Wait... what happens when they run out of gas... I mean astral energy on the road... I mean spirit channel? When you hit an overpass are you transcending to another plane, or are you upgrading the monsters? Is the final boss an 8 lane... spirit channel? | |
thats nice, good to know that the government wants to give gaming as an educational tool a new go, when i was a kid we had text based games, and that was actually just math on a pc whit a score in the top corner, oh and this awesome platform game where you had to spell certain words at the start and then we find the thing we spelled, that was rad. but then again an online multiplayer game filled whit kids young enough to need to know how to pass a street, sounds like a how to catch a predator trap. LFP for 8wheeler of redneck doom, need speed controller and traffic guard. | |
Sorry, what was that, Orange-kun? Anyway, hooray? At least it does it by killing them if they get it wrong. | |
"While one branch of the UK government is busy trying to turn gamers into soldiers, another is using online games as a source for good..." Whether this was implied or not, you're stating that soldiers are bad, or recruiting soldiers is a bad thing. :| | |
Hmm... Sounds like a waste of time and energy mostly. If you want kids to know about looking both ways on a road, teach them to look both ways on a road. It's not nearly as hard. Although I am very curious to how successful they'll be. | |
Surely, rather than making kids cross roads safely they will instead jump out in front of monsters...sorry cars and try to hit them with a big wrench whilst a fox looks on. Either it will make kids try to attack vehicles or it will make for a really dull game in which you have to wait for traffic, sorry monsters, to stop before moving on. Sort of like Frogger in MMO form. But with big wrenches. And foxes. | |
They get points for creativity, lose points for it probably sucking though. | |
We Canadians happen to have and know how to use traffic circles thank you very much. | |
This looks AWESOME! I with i could have played this when i was at school! | |
In WoW, the Frogger sections in Naxx and Ulduar can teach you to look both ways. Especially in Ulduar. | |
Are you an American? No? Then I wasn't refering to you Canadians. | |
So the UK DOT spent untold thousands, maybe millions, of pounds to create "Frogger"? And here I thought we Americans knew how to waste taxpayer dollars. Well, at least your game rip-offs are improving. | |
Pretty damn clever if you ask me. It can teach only not traffic safety, but to be aware of your surroundings and careful in general. | |
You said "Westerns". | |
best....thing.....EVER! | |
Yeah. Canada is more of a North-West from Europe, don't you think? At least from the political point of view. "Don't forget those Ameri..." was about Ameri...cans. | |
Well my opinion is that educational game producers are basically at odds with the whole idea of making a game. It's sort of like those mockable "knowing is half the battle" bits at the end of GI Joe Cartoons that existed to provide minimal educational content. They were tacked on, pointless, and totally detached from reality. You did however see them because if you were the right age you watched GI Joe and the show itself entertained you. The thing with educational games though is that they are all about the message, and put as little actual game into them as possible, which of course means they are boring to play and nobody gets the message anyway. I see the above idea as being an interesting attempt, but I'm vaguely reminded of an MMO someone developed (and which was reviewed on Something Awful) about teaching kids to conserve electricity which basically involved convincing kids to run around and unplug power strips and mess around with people's laptops (should they leave them unattended). A matter of a bad game, an okay message, and the encouragement of W T F behavior. In this case with the traps and spells and such I have to question what, if any message kids are actually going to take away from this, and how rapidly they are going to get smacked if they do. Truthfully the only educational game I know of that ever seemed to be worth a bloody d@mn was Carmen Sandiego [SP], it was an interesting take on trivia and managed to be amusing enough to get kids to look stuff up in fact books. It worked the compromise well. As far as most games like various incarnations of "Math Blaster" or whatever they basically amount to a fancy tableau to display a problem just like a chalk board. Personally if I was going to develop an online game or "MMO" based on educational principles I'd take a queue from some of the "space mission" alternative schools they have run. The idea being to send kids to the equivilent of "Space Camp" for a couple of weeks, and present all of their school work such as mathematics and the like into the format of having to operate a spacecraft performing a mission, complete with props and such. So as a result instead of a math program showing up superimposed over a ship with an alien heading towards it "solve this problem in the time limit" the is no problem expressly stated as part of the exercise with the kid having to figure out what the problem is to begin with. I've read about such things (as limited as they are) in the newspaper and such through the years. At any rate most schools can't afford to send everyone to such programs, or run them full time. However I figure a similar enviroment could be recreated using computers with a similar attitude to presenting the problems. Like the above programs such things would be presented as an alternative to normal school work/classrooms (ie work in front of a comptuer) rather than with it. Of course teamwork being a key component of such things, and of course it might not work with certain self validation principles of education. I mean if little timmy messes up and the ship goes careening into the astroid, peer pressure is part of it, and the teacher needs to make it bloody clear everyone is F@cking dead, and he needs to do better, even if he's like 11 or 12. Heck, I'd even have the other team members put into coffins/boxes at the beginning of the next class and make him walk by and apologize to rub in the point. :P Okay, okay well maybe the last bit is a bit much, but still that's how I'd try and design an educational game intended for use in schools or whatever. I'm sorry but "spirit trails" and such are ridiculous, and I always thought even on the limited subject of enviromentalism things like "Captain Planet" really seemed to miss the point of the entire issue from either side. Heck, half the time there WAS no other side, it was "Oh no, some guy is decimating a forest just because it gets his rocks off or whatever, let's go beat him down!". | |
Do you have kids? Have you ever tried to teach one? Every little bit helps. This is really cool. It looks good graphically. The story sounds tight. So it should be entertaining enough for them while helping teach them a good lesson. maybe I should play it as well. I never look both ways lol. | |
If you were thinking it would play like Frogger then you may be surprised it looks like this Skip to 1:40 and you'll see it's like a turn based combat system where you have to set traps for the Hopefully kids only take advice of the looking left and right and not setting traps =P And at least it may get people off runescape! | |
Couldn't they just have used Frogger? Not only does it teach traffic safety it also teaches safety around water and crocodiles. | |
well...its certainly better then i thought it would be. still not something i'd play, but i generally hate online games to begin with. | |
So this is where tax payers money is going to...Wonderful. Personally I'm for natural selection so let the kids run out into the path of a 4x4 through sheer stupidity. | |
I dunno, Dead Space was pretty educational. | |
Surprisingly doesn't look horrible. Sure, it's a bit silly, but I do love me some turn-based combat. | |
Ahahahaha!!!"Oh my gosh Timmy just got run over call 911!" "Stupid daddy, hes just battling a monster" Ok jokes aside why didn't they just make this like a frogger game? Or better yet just make a SHORT flash game and have schools post it. This game is really a epic fail though lol. "Alright we've got our group, wrench ready?" "Check" "Dog ready?" "Check" "Alright lets go fight those monsters!" "Wait! Wont those cars just run us over?" "Shut up Timmy, or do you not want to play with us?" "*Sniffle*Ok..." | |
atleast they dont push it down the throaths of childeren kinda looks cool | |
| (Pages: 1, 2) | |
Extra Punctuation
MovieBob: Intermission
Experienced Points
First Person
Exploding Barrels
Miracle of Sound: Encore
Loading Time
Special Attack
Backchat
Drinking Games
Escape to the Movies
Escapecraft
Escapist News Wrap - Premium
Escapist Podcast
Feed Dump
GinxTV
Jimquisition
LoadingReadyRun
Mahalo
Meatbag and Co
Media Sandwich
Miracle of Sound
No Right Answer
Pro-Gamer Gauntlet
Reviews
Space Janitors
Tales from the Table
The Big Picture
The Escapist Presents
The Retro Show
Trailers
Unskippable
Zero Punctuation
Max Payne 3 Review
Company of Heroes 2
XCOM Enemy Unknown
Black Ops 2
Diablo 3 Review
TERA Review
Firefall Beta Preview
Starhawk Review
Critical Miss
Name Game
MMOG Teaches Kids About Traffic Safety
The UK Department of Transportation presents Code of Everand, an educational MMOG that teaches kids to look both ways before crossing the Spirit Channels lest they be devoured by monsters.
While one branch of the UK government is busy trying to turn gamers into soldiers, another is using online games as a source for peace: The Department of Transportation has funded development of Code of Everend, a (seemingly) clever little way to teach kids proper traffic safety.
In Everend, the kids will be put into the role of Pathfinders, heroes whose job it is to navigate the treacherous Spirit Channels (aka roads, only with monsters and beasts instead of sedans and SUVs) that criss-cross the countryside in search of the mythical Code of Everend, which one can assume is a book of traffic safety laws or something like that.
As silly as the premise seems (and as easy as it would be to make fun of it), I can't see this as being anything but a good idea - it's a presumably fun way to get a useful message across to children, it's a creative take on how to make something mundane something fun and exciting, and while I can't exactly see how the game intends to work beyond "Don't run into the
roadsSpirit Channels," that's probably because I didn't develop the thing.In England, do the monsters run on the left side of the Spirit Channels?
(Edge)
Permalink