iCivics

For this project I decided to focus on the games offered on iCivics. Prior to this class I’d been told about the game by multiple people but never really sat down and played it, but this week seemed like the perfect time to dive in.

I started off playing “Crisis Of Nations”, which is a game that deals with political science and international policy. During the game you act as a fictional nation that participates in political action with and against 4 other nations throughout different crises. Your goal is to collect a predetermined number of the assets to win the game.



The next game was called “Activate”, which is a political activism game that’s focus is getting you to understand what can be done from an activist standpoint for various issues. The game takes your character from grass roots level activism to the national scale, but I didn’t get that far. Your character is charged in many different activities, from fundraising, volunteering, article writing, to schmoozing with politicians, the game gives a rudimentary overview of what it means to be an activist.

The last game I played in the iCivics realm was a game called “Do I have the right?” which takes place in a fictional law firm that specializes in rights violations. Your job is to connect clients with lawyers who specialize in the proper type of case. This game speeds up rather quickly, clients become enraged when they’re not given service quickly, there are bogus cases coming in all the time and you’ve really got to figure out what rights are being impinged as different situations arise. Out of the three this was the game that I spent the most time playing, I got really into the rhythm of the game and felt like I had figured out what issues applied to each right. As you develop prestige points you can hire more lawyers and improve the specialties of the lawyers you already have. The game was very fun and I definitely believe that I learned a lot from it.



All three games taught me a lot, each of them working their subject matter with a fun yarn of serious matters with the forgivingness that a videogame affords. The game Crisis of Nations used a lot of good terminology that applies heavily to social studies and political science. In the game you’re given a finite amount of resources that are used with the resources of other countries to solve economic and humanitarian crises. You can also force other nations to submit more resources if you feel that they’re getting away without helping on big issues. The overall end-game of collecting resources also gives the player a sense of what nation do in actual crises when doing their best to help without expending all of their precious resources. In Do I have the Right? I found that I needed to work quickly and efficiently to serve the highest number of clients with a high success rate. This meant that I had to turn away some clients in order to get the most out of my lawyers and it also meant that I had to determine whether I could use a lawyer for a case that may not have been their specialty. Overall it was a great learning experience that utilized a lot of different skills.

Each game on iCivics taught me by first giving an optional tutorial of each mini-game. These would walk you through how to operate the game and how to understand the developments within the game itself. Each game offered positive and constructive feedback that was usually accompanied by some form of audio. You could easily watch your success by seeing the prestige points or resources that you’ve been accumulating throughout the gameplay. These games used the discovery principle by allowing the player to skip the tutorial and jump right into game play. The majority of the games are based on discovering more information as you work through the levels of the game. The use of happy and enraged characters in “Do I have the Right?” is an example of the multimodal principle. You’re also accessing the intuitive knowledge principle and transfer principle as you figure out different ways of achieving game goals throughout the levels. I think that these games were great, as a future Social Studies teacher I really look forward to having students develop their understanding of the world around them with the use of these games. I think that these games can be accessed well within the classroom as a supplement or pre-teaching/front-loading activity for a unit on any material covered in the many games iCivics offers.