Congress Slashes Funding for Peaceful Conflict Resolution Game

In a departure from the usual video game setting a recent educational video game called "Cool School" was designed to teach kids peaceful conflict resolution. Unfortunately Congress has decided to slash the funding of this program that has been receiving rave reviews from the testers at schools in Illinois. "Cool School focuses on taking players through a school where just about everything (desks, books, and other objects) are alive and have their own personality. Over the course of ten levels and over 50 different situations designed by Professor Melanie Killen and then-doctoral student Nancy Margie (both of the University of Maryland). The primary goal of the game is to teach students how to solve social conflict through skills like negotiation and cooperation. During the title's development, Killen and Margie were able to work with some talented members of the video game industry, including independent developer F.J. Lennon and animator Dave Warhol." The game is now available as a free download and will play on both Mac OS X and Windows XP.

Funding slashed for a finished game

So, they're "done" with the game, effectively. What part of their funding do they still need? The "sit on their asses and collect money for work they already did" fund?

Thanks slashdot, for providing no link to the article where the funding is being slashed, just two links to a game and people's reviews of it.

Re:Funding slashed for a finished game

The Ars Technica article does explain it; Congress funded development of the game but not its distribution. Apparently some sort of computer "inter-network" will be required for schools to obtain it, as if such a thing could ever be!

That's also what's holding back Duke Nukem Forever, I suppose.

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Good that they explained it like that in the link. Instead of linking it as if it were a game review. Which the article exactly looks like throughout. With only one tiny sentence alluding to the fact that they can't ship out the disk-copy to those 3 school

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the fact that they can't ship out the disk-copy to those 3 schools that have computers but no internet.

Although TFA [arstechnica.com] is somewhat vague on the point, it seems the problem is not quite that trivial.

Cool School was planned to be shared throughout every US el

Re:Funding slashed for a finished game

Although TFA is somewhat vague on the point, it seems the problem is not quite that trivial.

No, the problem is as trivial as he said; it's just that the original plan seems to have been much more grandiose. Come to think of it, if they *had* gotten the funding to send a DVD to every school in the country, wouldn't we be getting a story long the lines of "Congress Doesn't Know Internet Exists!!!", with pages of moronic comments about "tubes"?

I don't get the GGP's complaint about Ars Technica, though. It's not the article's fault that it's not mostly about the one sentence the editor fixated on.

Re:Funding slashed for a finished game

That's also what's holding back Duke Nukem Forever, I suppose.

Really? I heard that Peaceful Conflict Resolution accelerators simply weren't fast enough for Duke's "Resolutions."

Re:Funding slashed for a finished game

Clearly the only way to settle this is to kick ScuttleMonkey's ass for writing a poor summary.

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Getting games into schools is hard... kinda like the difference between coding a game, and selling it as a bonafide product.

To 'sell' it to schools, you need to a) make them aware of it, usually by presenting at state teacher's fairs and putting notices in

Damn!

Let's fight 'em!

Well, of course.

What good would our military-government-industrial complex be if this sort of thing grew popular? We must act now to stop the spread of such dangerous new thinking! If "tree of liberty" rhetoric was good enough for this country's founders, it's good enough

The Article...

...is on ars technica [arstechnica.com].

Negotiators?

If I wanted to play a game about negotiators I'd want it made my Lt. Rodger Smith...

Ha ha

I bet they won't cut funding for that game America's Army...

no funding?

What would be funny is if they threatened Congress to restore funding.

I tried it out

I actually have a child in the target group, so I downloaded the game to check it out.

Game-wise, it's nothing special. It's a flash based game with limited user interaction, less than exceptional graphical content, and it plays at 800x600 regardless of your resolution - no full screen capability. In their defense, most games targetting my kids show the same properties.

In the five minutes I played, I was able to click maybe 4 times, with the remainder of the time spent listening to the characters walk me through the game. The general idea they are trying to get across - building conflict resolution skills - is very apparent. I think my child will enjoy this game - although I think she won't choose it very often over other games that she has available such as Dora or Care Bears titles. Frankly, I think the commercial titles offer a much more clear educational experience, but that's not to say I don't like the game at all.

Personally - I think community developed games like those built with Scratch [mit.edu] have a much brighter future. Lord knows how many tax dollars were spent on this game, and if you had 5 involved parents working together for a month and a half, you could have something much better and more open to derivative updates.

Scratch is still flash, but at least you have the ability to update games developed with it - and tailor them to your specific needs/target audience.

Question

So which of Congress's enumerated powers did this fall under?

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Section 8: The Congress shall have power

To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the ... general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Done.

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you neglect to mention that fact that IMMEDIATELY following this statement the constitution lays out a list enumerating exactly what those powers are. If the line "common defense and general welfare" was taken to grant congress power over everything relat

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The software "is" free, literally. To anyone who wants to get it.

They shouldn't have to give away the source code, and it shouldn't "have" to be inter-operable with linux. It is made for schools, and over 95% of schools run windows. Optimizing it so it

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Seriously. Think about it. It was a game meant to teach the youngins. I doubt much time, if any at all, was put into security considerations for the code. It may work great as a game, but be a horrible vector for anyone who wants to exploit a schools compu

Re:Really....

Now, in true /. style I didn't read TFA but I did read the summery and it doesn't say anything about Linux or source code.

Wow.

Also in true /. style, I didn't read your whole comment, but I saw something in there about "governed" and "WINE" and you made no mention of "legalized". Frankly I think the US Government has no right to prohibit alcohol sales.

Re:Really....

this could be a real problem for Linux adoption

Obviously, someone running Linux or other F/OSS OS doesn't need a game to understand the advantages of cooperation or peaceful conflict resolution. Kernel, license or editor conflicts almost never devolve into physical violence.

How fun would an appropriate game be?

"Mark doesn't agree with your indentation style. What do you do?"

a) Create my own fork
b) Develop software that will display the code in the viewers indent style
c) I demonstrate my indentation preference by indenting Marks face with my fist
d) I write my own new software with a new license allowing only derivative works with the same indentation style

Re:Really....

Hans Reiser?

Well, 'Hitman' was a game too, you know.

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Taxpayer money? ITYM bondholder money. When you're spending trillions of dollars you don't have because you can't collect it in taxes the nonessential parts absolutely count as bondholder money.

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Congress isn't using war/oil money to fund video games. And in any case it's taxpayer money.

It's all "taxpayer money". So what? That's what a tax is - they take your money. It's not yours anymore.

Video games are a medium, like anything else. The point of this project was to try to use that medium to teach - now, there may be numerous reasons