The Grand Inquisitor

This article was written by BaldwinP. Please give up some love.

Let’s start with the easy ones.

1. Mushrooms make you grow up big and strong. But as a side-effect, you may see turtles and other mushrooms walking around the place kidnapping princesses.
2. If you swallow the right pills, you can run around eating up ghosts!
3. Dropping blocks and doing lines is addictive.

I’m sensing a theme here.
But seriously, once upon a time when the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye, video games were often educational as well as being fun. Instead of a computer in every home, laptop bag and hip pocket, computers and game consoles were a big investment for a family to make. Inevitably, this meant that many families wanted to be reassured that Little Bobby or Susie would be improved by the magic thing with the screen and a Golden Age of learning from video games began. Grand Theft Auto was not what most game-buying parents envisioned back then (unlike the more recent parents of Little Bobii, Soozzie and Maddisynn; in retrospect, the baby names were a warning). Without further ado, a nostalgia learning trip for the 70s and 80s children among us:

Civilization
Civ players could tell you how many hours of sleep they lost to that “Just One More Turn” impulse, but how many hours were spent reading the “Civilopedia” and learning about bronze working, clicking through to discover about the military brilliance of a Greek Phalanx, before jumping ahead to read about Women’s Suffrage and then ending the turn with a report from a historian like Gibbon or Toynbee? The school projects of a million nerds were born here… and so, one suspects, was Wikipedia.

Sim City
“Argh, traffic! I can’t stop the congestion, stop complaining!”
“Argh, housing prices! I build more residential zones and it does nothing!”
“Crime, ha! MORE POLICE!” …. “Argh, out of money, and they’ll hate me if I raise taxes, what to do?”
In retrospect, there was no better training for running a real city or country. If only George W Bush had played Sim City while sitting at his desk, the world would be a different place. For a start, Sim City has no war button, although it did have monster attacks and nuclear meltdowns to contend with…
Maxis went on to make games including evolution-simulator Sim Earth, genetic-experimentation-simulator Sim Life and ant-simulator Sim Ant before throwing over this educational lark in favour of The Sims.

Oregon Trail
What we learned: the past SUCKED. Be grateful we live in the present with computers and no dysentery and only having to eat horses in fancy restaurants.

I welcome your comments on your favourite classic games (educational or otherwise) in the comments. And remember to be careful with those mushrooms, or you might end up turning a family-friendly icon into this: