R13: Feeding the ideological engine in Democratic Socialism Simulator
- Due Feb 26, 2020 at 2:39pm
- Points 4
- Questions 4
- Available until Jul 13, 2020 at 8am
- Time Limit None
Instructions
Molleindustria is a maker of (usually) free, short-form, online games. Many of their games comment on current events, politics, and ideologies. You can see a 7-minute review of some of their past games here (not required to complete this reading assignment): https://vimeo.com/166296194 Links to an external site.
Molleindustria's latest game, Democratic Socialism Simulator Links to an external site., was just released at the end of last week. As part of the game's release notes, the developer surprisingly shared a spreadsheet in which they've authored much of the game's textual content.
Spreadsheets are a very common tool for defining and maintaining game data. A spreadsheet created in a tool like Microsoft Excel can easily be exported in the CSV (comma-separated values) format -- a simple lines-of-text format that can be quickly loaded in most game engines. Some developers opt to use cloud-based spreadsheets (e.g. Google Sheets) so that their game prototypes can automatically pull in the most up to date data each time a new core gameplay session starts (dramatically speeding up some game balancing activities). Here is one such story (optional reading): https://medium.com/@urpi/spreadsheet-tools-in-game-design-57511eac68c Links to an external site.
Read through the release notes for Democratic Socialism Simulator (DSS) here: https://www.molleindustria.org/blog/democratic-socialism-simulator-release-notes/
Links to an external site.(noting the giant link to a Google Sheet in the middle)