Description:
Age of Ecology is an (award-winning!) "serious game" that we made during a summer internship with the USGS (United States Geological Survey) and Stanford University as a follow-up to the Delta Game. This game is intended to be more fun to play than the Delta game while teaching the principle of environmental sustainability. You act as a city planner in a randomly generated terrain whose goal is to make as much money as possible within a time limit. This game features a novel user interface in which you use a paintbrush tool to select arbitrarily shaped regions of land to manipulate.
The game includes various modes in which you can buy land, organize it into selectable groups, and build farms, cities, fisheries, ports, and levees (flood protection). As you play, there are various layers of data available on the map that you can turn on and off. These include things like pollution and fish population that you should keep an eye on, because destroying the environment will bring devastating effects. For example, if you overfish, there will be no fish left for you to catch next year.
This game includes a lot of in-game help, but here are a few extra tips:
- If something doesn't seem to be working, make sure that you can afford it, make sure you own the land, and make sure you have the appropriate layers turned on in the view panel.
- The coastline (the area shown in orange by the levee cost layer in the view panel) is reserved for levee building. This means that you cannot zone farms and cities there.
- In order to select a region (in selection mode) and manipulate it (such as zoning it as farm or city), you must first group it in grouping mode.
- Note that fishing boats have an upkeep cost if they are at sea, which means you probably want to bring them in if you notice that a fishery is losing money. (You can see a fishery's current profit when you select it.)
- Start the game off with farms because they are cheap to start. This is because infrastructure for cities has an upkeep cost. When you build a city, be prepared to lose money for a while until the city attains the infrastructure and population requirements for an industry. Only then will it start to make a big profit.
- Make sure you don't over-pollute: water pollution kills fish and too much air pollution will cause people to leave your cities.
If you're interested in learning more about this game, see our blog post.
Age of Ecology was named "Best Serious Game" in the student division of the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge at the 2008 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference.
Controls:
| Mouse | See Above |
| I | Toggle Interface |
| Shift | Add to Selection (in paint mode) |
| Esc | Restart Game |