Posts Tagged ‘sims’
IBM’s City Simulation Trains Planners to Tackle Future Problems for Growing Urban Centers
OK, mayor, 40 percent of your water supply is leaking out ... what do you do?
The company unveiled its "serious game" this week at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas, as a training tool for city leaders and planners. The free game would require players to guide their city through sector-specific missions focused on energy, water, banking, and retail.
One mission involves the water usage increasing at twice the population growth. The city is also losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure, and energy costs are rising. Players would need to put a water management system in place that draws on "accurate real-time data" to make their decisions.
IBM pointed to expert predictions that the world's urban populations will double by 2050, with an estimated one million people moving into cities each week. Today's cities already consume 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their precious water because of infrastructure leaks.
Simulations are already used as tools for real-world planning among financial analysts and the . But games such as CityOne could represent a stepping stone to the far more ambitious projects such as Europe's proposed which would incorporate reams of real-time data about the world.
Either way, we're just waiting for the Hollywood story where the young genius with knack for urban planning suddenly realizes that he's been "playing" not just a game, but real life all along.
Video Game Teaches Cambodian Kids to Avoid Real Landmines
Warning: this game may have beneficial real-life consequences
In the game, players navigate photos of Cambodian jungle landscapes in search of photos for several adorable cartoon pets -- no cartoon landmine characters here. The point of the maze-like game is to train players and embed warning signals about landmines in their minds.
The game arose from a request by the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, a Californa-based nonprofit, which expressed frustration with the ineffectiveness of informational pamphlets and other existing methods of teaching landmine avoidance. The project also received a $78,000 grant from the U.S. State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement.
Copies of the game should be compatible with the low-cost laptops made available to many developing nations through the One Laptop per Child program, according to Corey Bohil, a media researcher at Michigan State University.
Leaving aside a faint resemblance to Nickelodeon Jr.'s Dora the Explorer, we like the idea of a video game that can teach kids to avoid the deadly consequences of warfare's long legacy. It's also a nice change from all the designed with warfighters in mind.
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