Age of Ecology
Since it’s about time I actually wrote something here, I am now going to introduce Age of Ecology, the game that Carl and I have just spent five weeks of our summer making. Last summer during our internship at the USGS (United States Geological Survey) we created the Delta Game, a demo of how a real-life problem can be turned into a game that’s fun to play. This summer we got ourselves another internship with both the USGS and Stanford University in which we tried to improve on the Delta Game. Our new game, Age of Ecology, abstracts away from the geography of the Delta and deals with the issue of sustainability in general.
What’s Sustainability?
At the beginning of the five weeks, Carl and I sat through a bunch of meetings in which the word “sustainability” was drilled into our heads. Afterwards, we didn’t particularly feel like doing any work, so we engaged in one of our favorite forms of slacking off – multiplayer Age of Mythology. And we noticed that Age of Mythology has got to be the least environmentally sustainable game of all time. You keep getting more and more villagers, who keep cutting down more and more trees, so you can get more and more resources. And when they deplete one forest, you just move them on to the next one. And the trees never grow back. And you just kind of hope you’ll be able to win before all the trees are gone forever. (But sometimes you get these lame situations where you’re on a different island from your enemy and you need lots of wood to build ships to go attack, except there’s no wood left on your island so you get stuck in a stalemate and everyone just sits around until you decide to quit.) Anyway, the point is that in the real world, the trees do (eventually) grow back. This means that if you play the real world in Age of Mythology style (where you try to hoard as many resources as you can as quickly as possible) you’ll kill all the trees and be left with nothing. However, if you can find the subtle balance where you cut down a few trees but leave enough so that they can repopulate, you’ll never run out of wood and you’ll be able to attack your enemy’s island again and again and again (or whatever). So if you haven’t figured it out yet, sustainability is all about creating an environment that will remain stable and support human civilization for future years to come. And as much as I’ve rambled on about Age of Mythology, it’s actually a very real problem when it comes to things like pollution and overfishing.
Problems with the Delta Game…
Everyone at the USGS was very impressed by the Delta Game. But it still had two major problems. The first is that it really just isn’t that fun to play. Period. For a while we tried to pretend that what the player does actually affects the outcome of the game but it turns out that whether you win or lose is largely dependent on chance (whether or not earthquakes and floods decide to annihilate your whole place). The other problem is that it’s not very realistic. We ended up making up a whole bunch of equations as functions of time for things like sea level rise and population, which were somewhat based on scientific data but also involved a lot of guesswork. As you can probably imagine, these were very hard to get right and are probably not particularly accurate. (Although I’ve just ripped on the Delta Game a lot and made it sound completely useless, it was actually a very successful first step in solving the problem of how to turn a real life problem into a game.)
...And how we solved them
The problem of fun is the one that we (hopefully) addressed the most in Age of Ecology. In contrast to the Delta Game, there are few probabilistic elements. This means that if you use the same strategy twice, you will get very similar results both times (which was not at all true with the Delta Game). Having said that, there did still need to be a certain level of uncertainty in the game, since the real-life problems that it models involve quite a bit of uncertainty. We also came up with a pretty amazing idea that the entire interface is based around: the paintbrush tool! You can select land of any size and shape to manipulate, rather than having to use the preassigned regions in the Delta Game. And you really do have to agree that painting stuff is kind of fun (although we do hope the rest of the game is fun too and you’re not just here to draw pictures on the screen (which is what we spent a lot of time doing)) (too many parenthesis). The problem of the Delta Game lacking realism was much harder to address, but we did take a step in the right direction with agent-based modeling.
Agent-Based Modeling
It probably took me a solid two weeks to figure out what exactly agent-based modeling means because it’s really vaguely defined and you can interpret a whole lot of things as agent-based. But it basically means that there are a bunch of independent entities (agents) that each act based on their own interests and do not necessarily have much idea of the larger scope of what’s going on. We were introduced to a program called NetLogo that makes agent-based models and saw a good example of this: it was a model of cyclic sheep and wolf populations in which the sheep started eating the grass in an unpredictable rotating pattern. They weren’t programmed to do it, but due to each of their individual behaviors the pattern emerged on its own. In Age of Ecology, agent-based modeling took the place of things that we would have otherwise had to make up complicated equations for. For example, every farm pixel is an individual farmer with a “willingness to take risks” rating who uses water cost and nutrient data to decide which crop to grow every year. This causes behavior such as crop rotation to emerge on its own without us explicitly programming it into the game. Similarly, city pixels choose an industry based on population and infrastructure. Fishing boats are also independent entities that move around based on fish population. Having every pixel act based on simple rules is a lot easier than trying to come up with an equation for something like farm profit over time based on a whole bunch of different factors. Agent-based modeling is still far from the real world in many ways, but it’s a step above the equations we made up last year. Agents also prevent the user from having to do tedious work like deciding which crop to grow based on a whole bunch of data (just like how the auto-attack function prevents you from having to explicitly tell your guys to attack the enemy units when you find a bunch of wood on a little island somewhere and can finally afford enough ships to attack your enemy’s base). With agent-based modeling, the agents can make profit-related decisions for you so that you are left only with sustainability decisions (like preventing cities from polluting too much even if it would make them more money in the short term).
Multiplayer
The original intent for this game was to make it multiplayer. This would mean multiple players would own chunks of land on the same map and would each be affected by each other’s pollution. There was going to be a legislation mode in which players could vote on environmental laws which, if passed, everyone would be forced to comply with. But, we couldn’t accomplish it in the short five weeks that we had. We still hope to do it someday and release a second version, but for now it’s just a single player game and it still works well enough that way.
Conclusion
If you’ve actually read this far I’m kind of impressed. Anyway, in conclusion, we made this game called Age of Ecology that’s not nearly as sophisticated as Age of Mythology but hopefully adds the aspect of keeping the environment sustainable. The underlying lesson that this game should teach you is that even if you’re some greedy investor trying to make money in some 80×60 pixelated world somewhere (hopefully it’s just as relevant to the real world…) you still need to care about the environment. Because if you kill all the fish today, you’ll go hungry tomorrow. I’m kind of hungry right now so I’m going to stop writing soon, right after a short section that I couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else.
Adobe Flex
(if anyone cares, there are a whole bunch of trademark symbols on those two words (Adobe and Flex) and I tried to put them in but it broke everything when I tried to post this so don’t sue me or anything…)
Since we were based at Stanford University this year and did not have access to USGS’s Flash CS3 licenses (like we did last year for the Delta Game), we wrote Age of Ecology using Adobe Flex. Flex is a framework that uses actionscript (Flash’s programming language) and provides a bunch of nice HTML-style components. If you’re interested, we found ourselves some free educational licenses here.
Play Age of Ecology!