bandit king of lunch and string

idea i'm sorta chewing on: a minecraft addon to help me memorize katakana. items with katakana syllables on them drop as loot, and you can combine them in the crafting table to create the thing they spell. since katakana is the syllabary used to spell foreign words, i wouldn't have to spell the japanese words for things, so i don't have to learn the script and the vocab at the same time. although i guess i could expand it to have the japanese words also be valid recipes.

i can't actually do this because i don't know java, but if i did, obvs programming it would probably cause me to memorize katakana quite nicely.

 

the katakana addon idea is the result of a more general thought i've had tumbling around in my head for the past few days: i want there to be more educational games that are GAMES first and foremost.

most educational games -- especially for adult level learning -- aren't really games. they're lectures or worksheets with some bells and whistles stuck on. they have lesson plans and they give tests, or they're simulations of such narrow scope that you wouldn't play them for their own sake. i got to thinking about this because we were watching the 'carmen sandiego' cartoon, and even though it's tremendously cute, the geography information is so pasted on that it just flies right past me and i don't really remember it. it's not something that's integrated into the experience.

i was thinking about that, and then about how seebs and nick like to play these super complicated space exploration games, and how i've put so much time into learning how to do stuff in a hundred different minecraft mods that if i was getting paid for it i could live on it.

why can i focus and learn in minecraft, but not in duolingo?

the flippant answer is "because minecraft is fun," but it's more nuanced than that. i've had fun educational experiences that didn't manage to make the lessons stick in my head. and i've been frustrated as hell with some minecraft stuff, but even if i want to give the jackass who came up with grid power the mother of all swirlies, i still will never forget how it works. because i used that information, and i used it enough to make it stay, and i got something i wanted out of using it. something more satisfying than a checkmark or a ding or the words 'good job'. i mean, maybe it was only pixel ingots of imaginary metals, or whatever, but they let me have more fun, building stuff and fighting monsters and exploring.

what i sincerely wish existed, and would pay cash dollars for, is games that are fun in the real way, with lots of things to do besides take in information and spit it back out, but which integrate new information into the game in such a way that you're motivated to work with it. where you learn vocab not just to click a button and get told you're right or wrong, but to upgrade your sword, or buy a funny hat for your animal friends, or whatever. (i mean, it doesn't have to be a fight/explore game, i am all about the crafting and play way more animal crossing than your average fortysomething.)

anyhow, maybe something like that exists and i just haven't found it yet. i don't think i'm in a position to create it myself. i'm not an expert on anything that can be taught that way, and i can't program worth a damn, and frankly i don't have any good ideas for the game part either. i certainly don't have the time, executive function, or business acuity to assemble a game development team.

but someday i might just manage to write a small minecraft mod. so that's what i'm thinking about.

 

you know what would be really boss, would be a big sandbox game like minecraft or some of the mmo's, where you have lots of questing and interesting stuff to do, that included assorted lessons as like seasonal events, sort of thing.

you know how in fantasy mmo's, there's always some winter festival event where you collect snowballs or fight the ghost of winters past or something? there's all these minigames, and special items you can get, and so on. well, imagine a game that has a different event every few weeks, but instead of being idk like the elf flower festival or whatever, it's the geology event. and you quest to get a rock hammer and testing kit, and there are npc's that need different minerals for different purposes, and you go prospecting for them and bring back samples, and that's how you get tokens and items for the special flying zamboni mount or what-have-you.

so the majority of your game time is spent exploring and fighting wild zombie hockey players etcetera, not cramming data into your brain all by itself, dry and crumbly. you're playing a game. you're having fun. you just happen to also print indelibly onto your memory that kimberlite is associated with diamonds, because you need 60 of those damn diamonds to get the flying zamboni.

also, the game should really have a flying zamboni. because i want one.

 

Hmm. There's some things that are sort of in this genre, a little -- like microcorruption, which uses a simulator of an actual real-world CPU to simulate how a large category of security attacks work, and let you reproduce them by running actual code on an actual (emulated) CPU, and messing with its inputs. So some of the issue is that we have games that are somewhat built around learning how to use or do things -- but they tend to be focused on things that are designed to be more fun to do, because the default real-world things are not as well balanced.

 

tooth hurty :(

 

beautiful princess seebs, posting here because tumblr's insane bot flagged the post as porn

Spoiler: troubleface <3

 

what i'm aiming for, conceptually, is games where learning geology is no harder or more arbitrary than learning which pelts drop from which beasts, or where to dive for magic pearls, or how to seed fluix crystals and craft them into storage components, or whatever. at no point would there be a test or a teaching moment like "red striped sedementary rocks are called what?" -- just a quest to bring in x amount of iron ore, and the information that it can be found in banded iron formations. the flavortext from the questgiver could mention that these are pretty much rust deposits, laid down when the atmosphere began to get oxygenated, but it wouldn't just be an infodump. it'd be part of the Lore, and it'd help you find them, by mentioning that you'd look in places that were oceans a billion years ago. this clue could help you locate the right places to dig by asking other npc's if they know of that kind of stone nearby.

like, all of this is exactly the same kind of questing you do for arbitrary maguffins in adventure games already. the idea is to make it a science item instead of an arbitrary maguffin, and make the clues science clues instead of made up lore.

not everyone would find that more interesting. but not everyone has to. i'm not aiming to outcompete warcraft, just to make something that's more fun than the latest slapped-together 5-whole-minutes-of-almost-fun browser game on joe random edu-site.

(edit: initially typoed 'sedentary' rocks and now imagining banded iron formation lying on the couch going "i dun wanna")

 

carbon is stored in the cat

 

Spoiler: is this zelda or minecraft?

https://www.tricksywizard.com/comics/2018/11/18/my-little-stalpony

 

i know it's zelda, that's the joke i was making, that it could as easily be minecraft. maybe it wasn't a very funny joke.

 

oh hey, that's the same comic as this one https://www.tricksywizard.com/comics/2018/10/21/class-clown

classic

 

https://www.tricksywizard.com/comics/2018/2/21/ranged-attack-roll

it's like this artist lives in my head