Analysis of Simulation Games

I chose to analyze the game Real Lives. This is a simulation game created by Educational Simulations. Real Lives was developed to give people an understanding of life in less privileged nations. The game creates a life for the player by giving a name, age, and family history. The player progresses through life making decisions about school, jobs, family, relationships, and expenses. Each new year of life brings new information. Boxes pop up giving the player news and information about events and culture happening in that country. The game world consists of a map of the area the simulation person lives, graphs representing the other family members' health and well being which represents lives similar to those lived in the assigned country. The game world has examples of dwellings, charity, diet, and leisure activities which correspond to those elements in the real world.
Some of the elements of the game Real Lives overlap with the components I included in my definition of games. My personal definition of a game was an organized social experience where players follow specific, pre-determined rules to meet a common end goal. During the experience there can be teamwork or conflict as the players compete to find a winner. While Real Lives isn't really designed to be a social experience, it very well could be that. A group could work together to make the life decisions in order to have multiple viewpoints. There are pre-determined rules within the game like staying on top of monthly expenses and aging one year at a time. The common end goal would be healthy survival. There is not really conflict between players in the game, but conflict occurs in the simulation person's life. A clear winner or loser does not exist in this game.
I feel that Real Lives would be an excellent game for the converger type of student. This type of student enjoys thinking about and making decisions. One learning objective for this game would be to describe common problems encountered by people of the country the simulated person lives. This would help the student gain a greater understanding of difficult decisions made by the natives thus giving them a greater appreciate of the culture. Another learning objective would be to describe the basic housing and education systems of the country of play. This would require the students to read carefully and pay close attention to the information pop ups to piece together the context clues to arrive at a better understanding.
In order to implement this game in the classroom, a teacher would have computers with Internet access. A teacher might have a problem having students with limited background knowledge on the assigned country, so by having other websites, books, or brochures available, the students would have better resources to answer their questions. To implement the game, the teacher would have to share the purpose behind the play and walk the students though a sample life. This way, each student would feel comfortable playing alone. The teacher would need to introduce a method of evaluation of the game play. For example, one way to assess the students would be to have them print the diary provided throughout the game. They could use the diary to write a first person account of either the whole life or small portions as if they were the simulated person. The students could then share their diaries with one another so that each student would walk away knowing about more than just their played person. The teacher would create a rubric to share with the students to evalulate the diary on style, accuracy, and demonstrated understanding of the culture.