Great post. I find your idea of a post-apocalyptic game particularly interesting. I think this may be not only promising in increasing catastrophe resiliency, but also perhaps in simply being a fun way for people to gain useful knowledge even if a catastrophe never happens (potentially by gaining knowledge of basic science etc). I’ve been thinking about this latter proposition recently anyway—I think there’s a lot of scope for improving education with educational games that are actually fun to play—but the idea of hitting two birds with one stone seems like a great prospect.
I’ve just been writing a post about this very idea when I stumbled on this post, so I’d love to continue the discussion!
My tentative intention would be translating the information found in The Knowledge, or some subset of it, into a video game. In order for it to be cost-effective, the video game would need to be:
Actually a good game. I suspect many games designed as edutainment (or having social impact, a political message etc.) fail to achieve their goals, while fun games which just “happen” to teach something can be quite effective. Programming basics (Human Resource Machine, a good few other games), physics (Kerbal Space Programme), history (Crusader Kings and a multitude of other games), the exact steps of performing an appendectomy (Life & Death—I admit it’s quite niche, but I actually still remember how to do it ;) ), etc.
Easy to implement with a small team and on a small budget. Modding probably is the way to go, though it might interfere with making the game available for free, which is my next point. As much as I love Don’t Starve, modding This War of Mine, Rimworld or NEO Scavenger might be a better idea, since those games have more realistic aesthetics, which might enable us to reuse more assets. One Hour One Life might also be a good one to look at since it’s already open source.
Free and cross-platform (or at least playable on mobile). We would want to reach as many people as possible, and checking off these 2 boxes would probably boost it by one or two orders of magnitude compared to a paid PC game.
Some reasons why creating this video game (or an EA-aligned video game) might be a good idea:
I conjecture that many more people would engage with a video game presenting a particular topic in a fun way than with a non-fiction book on the same subject. A relevant comparison (cursory research suggests that for both books and video games reviews correspond to roughly 2% of sales):
NEO Scavenger by Blue Bottle Games has 3,700 Steam reviews (9,000 if you combine PC and mobile sales), and I think NEO Scavenger is as niche as it gets. This War of Mine is a more successful (but still relatively low-budget) indie game in the same genre, tackling a similar topic, and has sold 4.5 million copies and has 63K reviews. Note: both of these are paid-for games; intuitively, they would probably have had at least 10x more downloads if they were free.
There’s probably quite a significant overlap between EAs and people who dabble in coding video games as a hobby. We could capitalise on that; if the game is a spare time passion project for a bunch of us, that could theoretically lead to infinite cost effectiveness—assuming we don’t accidentally create the most addictive video game ever and end up causing more harm than good ;) (For a more serious analysis of cost-effectiveness see below).
The broader EA community would hopefully help promote the game, and give us feedback in the design process.
Things to consider:
Cost effectiveness. Realistically, I think the game would need some development budget; this would lower the risk of the team getting burnt out or distracted from the game by other priorities. We’d need to estimate how many people we hope to reach, how much they would learn, and put a dollar value on teaching a random gamer the Haber–Bosch process.
This interesting article on profitability of indie games isn’t exactly heartening – even if we assume that making the game free would broaden our reach, we’d need to sanity-check that we have a greater chance of success than an average game developer.
I have some more thoughts and ideas I’d love to discuss with anyone interested in getting involved in the project.
P.S. As a tangent, I was also thinking about another idea for an EA-aligned video game; something like Reigns or Democracy 3 where you’re a multi-billionaire starting a charitable foundation aiming to solve all the world’s problems. The player would have to assign donations to various causes (possibly including longermism and animal welfare), while balancing PR, fundraising, talent pool etc. In order to not put people off, I think it would need to be very low-key about its EA message, perhaps not even mentioning the term – it’s just that donating to malaria net distribution would “happen” to bring you closer to victory than sponsoring a new museum.
Great post. I find your idea of a post-apocalyptic game particularly interesting. I think this may be not only promising in increasing catastrophe resiliency, but also perhaps in simply being a fun way for people to gain useful knowledge even if a catastrophe never happens (potentially by gaining knowledge of basic science etc). I’ve been thinking about this latter proposition recently anyway—I think there’s a lot of scope for improving education with educational games that are actually fun to play—but the idea of hitting two birds with one stone seems like a great prospect.
I’ve just been writing a post about this very idea when I stumbled on this post, so I’d love to continue the discussion!
My tentative intention would be translating the information found in The Knowledge, or some subset of it, into a video game. In order for it to be cost-effective, the video game would need to be:
Actually a good game. I suspect many games designed as edutainment (or having social impact, a political message etc.) fail to achieve their goals, while fun games which just “happen” to teach something can be quite effective. Programming basics (Human Resource Machine, a good few other games), physics (Kerbal Space Programme), history (Crusader Kings and a multitude of other games), the exact steps of performing an appendectomy (Life & Death—I admit it’s quite niche, but I actually still remember how to do it ;) ), etc.
Easy to implement with a small team and on a small budget. Modding probably is the way to go, though it might interfere with making the game available for free, which is my next point. As much as I love Don’t Starve, modding This War of Mine, Rimworld or NEO Scavenger might be a better idea, since those games have more realistic aesthetics, which might enable us to reuse more assets. One Hour One Life might also be a good one to look at since it’s already open source.
Free and cross-platform (or at least playable on mobile). We would want to reach as many people as possible, and checking off these 2 boxes would probably boost it by one or two orders of magnitude compared to a paid PC game.
Some reasons why creating this video game (or an EA-aligned video game) might be a good idea:
I conjecture that many more people would engage with a video game presenting a particular topic in a fun way than with a non-fiction book on the same subject. A relevant comparison (cursory research suggests that for both books and video games reviews correspond to roughly 2% of sales):
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell has roughly 2,100 Amazon reviews (UK and US storefronts combined).
NEO Scavenger by Blue Bottle Games has 3,700 Steam reviews (9,000 if you combine PC and mobile sales), and I think NEO Scavenger is as niche as it gets. This War of Mine is a more successful (but still relatively low-budget) indie game in the same genre, tackling a similar topic, and has sold 4.5 million copies and has 63K reviews. Note: both of these are paid-for games; intuitively, they would probably have had at least 10x more downloads if they were free.
There’s probably quite a significant overlap between EAs and people who dabble in coding video games as a hobby. We could capitalise on that; if the game is a spare time passion project for a bunch of us, that could theoretically lead to infinite cost effectiveness—assuming we don’t accidentally create the most addictive video game ever and end up causing more harm than good ;) (For a more serious analysis of cost-effectiveness see below).
The broader EA community would hopefully help promote the game, and give us feedback in the design process.
Things to consider:
Cost effectiveness. Realistically, I think the game would need some development budget; this would lower the risk of the team getting burnt out or distracted from the game by other priorities. We’d need to estimate how many people we hope to reach, how much they would learn, and put a dollar value on teaching a random gamer the Haber–Bosch process.
This interesting article on profitability of indie games isn’t exactly heartening – even if we assume that making the game free would broaden our reach, we’d need to sanity-check that we have a greater chance of success than an average game developer.
I have some more thoughts and ideas I’d love to discuss with anyone interested in getting involved in the project.
P.S. As a tangent, I was also thinking about another idea for an EA-aligned video game; something like Reigns or Democracy 3 where you’re a multi-billionaire starting a charitable foundation aiming to solve all the world’s problems. The player would have to assign donations to various causes (possibly including longermism and animal welfare), while balancing PR, fundraising, talent pool etc. In order to not put people off, I think it would need to be very low-key about its EA message, perhaps not even mentioning the term – it’s just that donating to malaria net distribution would “happen” to bring you closer to victory than sponsoring a new museum.