Educational Gaming Commons

I think the stereotype about todays games is that they're all like World of Warcraft: games within massive multi-player on-line environments. Andrew and I play a lot of games and several of them have simplistic interfaces.

Here are some examples:

BiteFight [Be warned -- if you click this link, I can't vouch for your safety.] - an HTML game where you play a werewolf or vampire and compete against other people in the game for experience, gold, items, etc...

Kingdom of Loathing - With hand-drawn graphics and silly monsters like "Sabre Toothed Lime", "Knob Goblin", and "Disco Bandits", this game is a pretty compelling tongue-and-cheek version of a fantasy role playing game.

Both are time limited -- you can only do so many actions and then have to wait for a while before acting again. You can group with other players and fight against other players in both games. Both are free to try.

If you're looking for something with a little more educational value, you might want to look at NationStates where people set up fictitious countries with their own forms of government, civil rights, and economic parameters, and then work with other nations in a U.N.-like way.

My point with these examples is that they are living, breathing, biting games that people play, they aren't that difficult to develop, and they let you get very specific about the focus of the game. In other words, you don't have to render thousands of virtual country landscapes in Second Life to play a simulation where you control a country's policies and production resources. Or in other other words, the cost of producing a game like Warcraft is in the millions, but a student could write an HTML game if you worked out the game mechanics.