I see Banished as a way to help students understand a key set of historical/prehistorical concepts not easily understood by minds familiar with “history” television, and “historical” video games. Isn’t that the way it usually was historically? Within that time, my citizens made no technological progression, despite the fact that they did improve upon their job efficiencies. My town almost collapsed a few times, my population rose and fell erratically, and my cemeteries had 50 or so tenants.
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What was holding back their little hamlets? The answer is, of course, code.īut isn’t it refreshing to have a “civilization building” game that keeps civilization out of your grasp? Shouldn’t we be tired of the inevitable march of human progress from games like the Civilizations or the wide range of free to play games like Grepolis or Kingdoms of Camelot? My personal record for Banished is 40 in-game years. Life for the inhabitants of Banished towns is brutal and highly subject to the whims of weather and the dearth of knowledge about basic survival in the mind of the 21st century player.Īfter playing the game for an hour or so, my students couldn’t seem to get the population above 28. What is most useful, I think, for history education is that actually reaching a “city” population seems to be impossible as the game is written. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland.” The technological period of the game is meant to be Medieval Europe, although there are agricultural products that only existed in the Americas at the time (a common error in “medieval” media). What is it like to play a survival game where most of the death is not dealt out by swords, automatic weapons, or C4? How about a historical simulation that simulates death as experienced by most humans in human history- old age, disease, accident, starvation? Is there a game that has no zombies, no crazy multiplayer, and real-like forever- death?Īccording to the creator, Banished is a “city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. A very recent “ anthropological study” of DayZ, for example, analyzed the tendency of survival sandbox games to “get murdery,” and then the chief investigator got a little murdery himself. These games could never be played in a classroom, but I think that some sort of data collection, visualization related to game play and/or specific gameplay videos could be valuable. In each case, death takes your stuff, and makes you start over at a spawn point. Rust eventually removed the zombies, seeking to remove its label as a DayZ clone (are zombies a way for game designers to allow violence against humans who are dead anyway? Probably an issue for a separate post).ĭayZ and Rust are next-gen survival simulations, incredibly open-world, huge difficulty, in which the causes of death would be an insurance adjuster’s nightmare- cold, starvation, cholera- but mostly murder. In both cases initially, the games included zombies. Minecraft’s “Survival Mode” has now been given a few competitors- games that pump up the realism and multiplayer possibilities, taking players on violent and chaotic survival trips.īoth DayZ and Rust, like Minecraft, spawn players with next to nothing (in the case of Rust, naked) and leave them to fend for themselves or to team up to survive. How did it feel the first time you successfully built a shelter and waited out the night? Ask any Minecraft player. There has always been Minecraft’s “Survival Mode,” of course. Despite the controversy, I think the thrill of survival can motivate students, and that the worlds created to simulate survival situations are great fodder for critical historical and scientific analysis in classrooms. But games can be studied without being played, given the amazing number of gameplay videos and wikis for almost any video game. Often, much about these games are taboo in the classroom- hopeless violence, unacceptable language.
There’s something about the thrill of living when you should be dying. There has been a recent blooming of games that place players in narrative-free survival situations (often called “survival sandboxes”).
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