You are a bear, winter is coming, so drive around and eat fish and berries to prepare to hibernate!
Alright, this may be far fetched as a science based game, but the execution is just amazing! As the say in the video: “The best bear driving simulator ever made”. Bonus points for how upset the bear gets when you don’t shove food in his mouth quickly enough.
Get it here: http://www.enviro-bear.com/ for android, apple and windows!
And this video of the game play is amazing…
I'm an evolutionary biologist interested in understanding why we're so drawn to video games and why we gain so much enjoyment from them.
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Just like rock music in the 1950s, Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, and death metal in the 1990s, videogaming has been demonised by parent groups. For decades, gamers were portrayed as obese social outcasts that spent hours in a dark basement hunched ...
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I love skylanders. And given that it’s more than a 1.5 billion dollar enterprise, it seems that I’m not the only one. Now, I don’t love Skylanders like I do games like Deadspace, Borderlands and Mass Effect, I love it for completely different reasons. I ...
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Studies of video games often focus on the effect they have on children. But given that the majority of gamers are adults and that we have a growing ageing population, it’s as important to understand the role games play in the lives of ...
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Here is a wonderful little game that allows you to take up the story of being a male cuttlefish exploring the ocean in search of a female to mate with. It’s a fun little story that mixes human emotions with the biology of cuttlefish, ...
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**Update** If you’re interested in out how the class went, clickhere. If you’d like the manual, click here. As an undergrad, I detested labs. They were boring. Demonstrated by teaching assistants with a superior knowledge of the information I was meant to glean, somehow titrating ...
Hello, and thank you for this great information. As a middle school technology facilitator, I am interested in the use of games to enhance education. I started using Aris yesterday and made Asheboro Nature Hunt, a simple game that requires the player to find and photograph nature: flower, plant, insect, and animal. I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind. What is the result of player choices on the Development and Physiology screens? How is the Guarded Female, for example, activated? When the player gets to the GPS location? I realize you’ve spent a lot of time on this and I don’t want any secrets, but if you could give me some insight into your game layout and design, I would be grateful. I’d like to try creating similar games concerning the food chain, natural selection, law of superposition, etc. Thanks again. You rock!
Hi Barry,
Glad to hear you’re trying it out! I’m happy to share what little I know about Aris.
Early player choices result in individuals being given an attribute (an item with an attribute tag) that determines how other characters interact with them. For example, when an individual with a fast metabolic rate catches a fly, they only receive a single energy unit (because their physiology requires more energy to perform at a higher level) while an individual with a low metabolic rate gains two units of energy. There are other costs and benefits associated with each choice (how they interact with females or predators, for example.
You make these differences trigger by writing in logic statements that recognize the possession of an attribute and provide the desired outcome (e.g., if player has low metabolic attribute then fly = 2 energy).
The guarded female is activated in a similar way. You make a different character that appears only if players posses a certain tag. Alternatively, you can create a single character that interacts with the possession of certain attributes. Either would work, but I chose the former since it allows creating different spawning rates for different characters.
And yes, the game is all about GPS locations–you can choose how close an individual needs to be to trigger an interaction with a character and also make it appear automatically, or only if the player chooses to interact with the character.
I hope that helps. The online resources for Aris here (http://arisgames.org/make/training/) and here (http://manual.arisgames.org/) are pretty good and provide insight into some more ways to use Aris.
Good luck and have fun!