How a video game taught me something

Sometimes people argue wether or not games can teach us something or in how far. Espen Aarseth once had a whole lecture about "The Good, the Bad and the Ludic", discussing wether games teach us good things, bad things or if games are purely ludic, to be seen as a stupid leisure time activity without any kind of connotation.

During the past few weeks, for the first time, I had the feeling that a game taught me something useful. The game I am talking about is Banished (2014) which was developed by Shining Rock Software and distributed over Steam (Valve Corporation, 2003). This is a real time strategy game (even though you could argue it is not because there is no fighting) in which you control a group of settlers trying to survive in a randomly generated environment. For this you must build houses, storage barns and depots for working material. Through the game you will be able to build more and more "advanced" structures such as crop fields, orchards or pastures.

But enough about the game. As I mentioned earlier the game taught me something, so what is it? Well first of all I learned that cabbage is harvested earlier in the year than potatoes. In the game that is very important. During the winter you let your citizens gather roots and berries or hunt or fish, whereas during spring summer and autumn you let them work on the fields. That means that you are not getting any food until the time of harvest. The time in between can be a really tough one and therefore it is a good combination to plant cabbage and potatoes, so you have food incoming a bit earlier than if you only planted potatoes (I also assume that potatoes produce more food, as well as wheat; this assumptions derives from the higher prices for the seeds of these plants). But, to be honest, I am not sure yet if this actually resembles real life (this is still in research though!). To get to the issue I actually wanted to adress here, let's take a look at the development of my population:

Figure 1: Screenshot of my town with population screen.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the population with highlights.

In this screenshot I highlighted three situations, which I will explain one by one now. First you can see that the four different graphs have different meanings:

Yellow – overall population

Green – Adults (the people who can actually work)

Blue – Students (don't work but will be more efficient once grown up)

Red – Children (completely useless food-leeching creatures)

Now to the highlighted situations. Situation "red" was right after I started playing. I built my barn to store food and some houses, started to tell my people to gather food. Quickly – during the 5^th or 6^th winter – a lot of my citizens died from starvation. I was not able to supply my population with enough food because it was growing too fast. Fortunately not all of my citizens died, but the dearth stopped around the amount of population I started with.

Case yellow was different. The problem here was not that my people died from starvation, but from just being old. As you can see at the red graph in that period the amount of children went down. So slowly over several years my citizens just died from demography. I had no idea what to do about it so I googled and found out that you get more children if you build houses (apparently my citizens like to have sex in private – weird...). So I managed to stop the deaths once again.

Following this a time of wealth and prosperity arrived. I had enough people to supply everyone with food and knew about the houses equal children mechanic, so I started building more houses. I mean... I had more than enough material for it, so why not? This was a grave mistake as the next dearth followed instantly (the orange circle). Throwing me back to the population I started with – again - even faster than the first time!

So what did this teach me? It taught me a lot about economy and something my teacher told me in highschool, but I never really cared about: In times of prosperity and wealth you should not invest and build stuff, you should save it for the worse times! So instead of sending all my people into the mines and quarries during a good period I started to hoard food in unreasonable amounts. This enabled me to see a period in which I use more food than I produce coming and react to it during a few winters (as well as the population screen you can check exactly the "used" and "produced" status of goods in the town hall). So – afterall – my highschool teacher was right and if I listened to him, I might have reached a population of 200 citizens faster than (estimated) after 100 years.

PS: So apparently the harvesting thing is not really accurate and maybe games are not teaching us anything?

Ludography

Banished (2014). Shining Rock Software.

Software

Steam (2003). Valve Corporation.