Bioregions would make a lot more sense. Use catchments and biome boundaries, because those are the units that need coherent management. They would correspond a bit, but not quite.
I don't believe that's true.. It currently has around 9k servers, but I think the vast majority of those will have less than 10 users.
Anyway, there's currently about 1m active users, so the real question is will it scale by 3 orders of magnitude? And my point being that I'd expect the network to become more connected as it scales (at least for the main archipelago, which is probably always going to house a majority of users).
Is that really true though? Say we end up with 10k servers with 100-1000 users each, even if only 10% of those users have a connection to a server that no one rose on their server is connected to, that's still a highly connected network.
Then add boosts from other servers (that incentivise cross-network follows)...
I like this take, but I wonder if there's eventually a combinatoric problem with having hundreds of thousands of small instances, each with thousands of connection to other instances? I have no idea how that relates to the network/computational constraints..
If you treat them as fundamentally different, you're not gonna spot it when the same attitudes start appearing within your in-group. Monsters are still human, we all gotta work to keep that in check.
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.
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?
Cool thoughts. I would be thinking more about the intersections of cultures on those edges, rather than the nations, since they also happen within nations in some places. Even within cities, really..
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.
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..
Vision is a strong word. I think it's a vague idea in most cases