Hey, don't think all 15-18 year olds have a low attention span. Even in my early teens I was playing simulations on full realism!! :)

Of course I did like Halo too... :lol:

Half-Life taught me not to mess with zombies unless I had my trusty crowbar/shotgun/savegame

...and I think that's true of a LOT of high school gamers. We just tend to think they're all absorbed in GTA and Madden tournaments.

In high school I recall all my favorites were MicroProse titles, I also really liked the first edition of Pirates.


Ya know I was thinking of suggesting Gran Turismo for driver ed... but in reality, it's just not that hard to drive a car!

I'll put in my two cents, too.

Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3:
- business management, logistics
- geography (good for a european to learn all those locations of famous american cities, especially from western movies ;) )

Age of Empires 2:
- a huge amount of history you can learn if you browse through the in-game database
- basic strategy training exercise

Der Patrizier 2:
- again business management, logistics
- small amount of history (Zeit der Hanse)
- european geography, old trade routes and their consequences

Thniper

The RR Tycoon series is the only game I've come across that includes financing, stock/bond issuance, margin calls, hostile buyouts, supply & demand ,debt management... It's really a pretty cool intro to business and economics.

Too bad Sid Meier had to go and redo it in a dumbed down fashion and trash that aspect of the game. I had such high hopes...

Personally, I've never touched any of the "Sims" series...

Would anyone recommend any of the Sims titles for Social Studies or Personal Economics? ...or is there really nothing much of educational quality there?

The only educational value of The Sims is time management. That's what the game is about. You have 24 hours in a day that pass way fast and need to do alot of stuff in these hours: study, work, eat, make/keep friends, keep your character and the objects working (satisfy your "fun" and "social" needs and clean the house and repair broken stuff), sleep, and in the second game have babies baby to keep your family going.

Maybe you could use it to teach what happens when you spend more than you earn, as you receive bills every few days according to the objects you own. So with a cheap job you could still save money and buy the best TV and the best computer but then you wouldn't be able to pay their bills, or once being billed you wouldn't have enough money left over to buy anything else before passing away...:rotfl:

Oh I just remembered another great one. Close Combat! Something about top down low graphics games from the late 90s just kicks ass. That game teaches you so much about tactics and strategy. And the community mods are brilliant. Juno Sword Gold ftw! I just wish I could get a copy of CC:Marines. That one sounds brilliant.

In a slightly related note I suddenly found out a week ago that Infantry Zone is free again! Its a top down online soldier game from like 2000 that I played way back until they made it pay to play in 2002. But its back to free! Whats brilliant is that the game's dynamic forces team work. Even noobs report enemy position.

Check it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(computer_game)

Most of what I have learnt through games I have learnt because the game inspired me to learn, not because the game taught me.

However, most historical games teach you a lot of academic information. (I can name every radar set used on VIIC uboats in 1939-1945), but this kind of stuff isn't normally going to come in handy.

They also teach specific information/skills. (I know how to make a good convoy attack in a 1940s German submarine) but this kind of stuff isn't normally going to come in handy either.

What they don't often teach is the important stuff:
Key Skills (Math, English)
Culture (It's not like reading shakespeare)
Broad history (you might learn that Hitler used U-boats against America, but you wont learn about how the war started, what impact it had etc, etc.)
Work Related skills/trades (unless you are going to become a submarine captain)

test

Very true.

Agreed, I definitely see these games as vehicles to spark interest. How many of us would have read Iron Coffins if it weren't for SH3?

In fact, I like that title better... Top 10 Games that Inspire Learning

Is there a chance that a Railroad Tycoon 4 will be released?
I do mean a REAL Railroad Tycoon game, not that SM Railroads kind of stuff.

If they don't, somebody else will...

My wishlist for RR Tycoon 4 is:

Take everything you had in RR Tycoon 3 and just add:
1) the track building system from SM Railroads (the only thing they got close to right in that game)
2) the ability for the player to manually control the track switching
3) and if they want, go ahead and let the user crash trains into each other!

...aside from the above, RR Tycoon 3 was nearly the perfect all-round train game!


SM Railroads didn't even have cabooses? What were they thinkin? :nope:

Yep! You're completely right.
The only thing I don't like about RT 3 is, that the tunneling and bridge-building function doesn't work well.
And, if you successfully placed your tracks sloping up a hill, suddenly a new building popped up near your new track confusing the slope again. :damn:

You don't know jack.
Most of the Sim series of games

Sid Meier's railroad game wasn't bad, it just was a completely different game than Tycoon. SMR was made to be fun -- even the introductory video made this pretty clear.

The one thing I really didn't like about SMR was the interface. It was really clunky to work with because you couldn't zoom out much, you were stuck with a severe isometric view, you couldn't lay double tracks automatically, I had a lot of difficultly being able to judge how much it was going to cost.

It's been awhile since I played it and I didn't play a lot of it because of the interface. It was a pretty game and it ran well, the I was having entirely too much trouble just trying to manage the build interface. Once I got the lines up and working properly, actually managing the train cargo was pretty easy. The cargo interface was smooth and pretty intuitive, and there were a few things I liked about it over the Tycoon series. It's not exactly a "baby simulator" in comparison to the Tycoon series, but I could believe people having an easier time learning to play SMR than Tycoon 3.



Oh, let's see.

Seven Cities of Gold is a pretty decent game for geography and supply managment in the 1500's. There's a lot of balance between exploration and income, and as far as I can remember, the rivers and mountain ranges were pretty darn close to actual conditions.

I mean, technically, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego stuff. For the very-young crowd these days.

Any game with zombies in it. It's important for children to know what to do in the event of a zombie outbreak.

I kind of feel the Infocom text series have a lot of utility. Learning to map and mark your route, some of the puzzles are *very* logical in nature, and others take some kind of deduction skill to solve. Plus they take quite a bit of expermentation and require abstract thinking due to the text interface. They really do have a lot of merit to them.