Creative Games sans Violence?

jolyon_jnr asks: "I'm looking for games to use in an unusual educational setting: a school within a Juvenile Detention Centre. I don't set policy, so the 'no violence' is a fixed criteria. I want to engage students' creativity and problem solving skills, without using 'boring educational software'. I've thought of Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. What other suggestions can you offer? Please bear in mind that most students have very low literacy levels, but will learn if motivated sufficiently."

Mindrover

[Evangelion]

Cognitoy [cognitoy.com] makes an excellent (and engrossing) game called Mindrover, in which you have to design and program a vehicular robot to do certain things (follow waypoints, chase another robot, or destroy the opposing robot).

I don't know if a vehicle-on-vehicle rocket launcher qualifies as 'violence' or not (since these are very clearly toy robots going at it), but it's certainly an awesome game, even apart from it's educational value.

Loki [lokigames.com] has also ported it to Linux, and thier port is flawless.

I know it sucks, but...

[Spagornasm]

Did you consider any of the Myst series? Those can engage the eye candy requirement, and also help them develop complex problem solving skills...that is, if they understand different bases and number theory :-)...

Low literacy levels?

[liquidweb]

To suggest a solution as well as a direct statement of their literacy, I'd suggest anything in the "You Don't Know Jack" series. Seriously though good stuff.

Games

[Registered Coward v2]

Some good ones:

Roller coaster tycoon
Flight Sim 2000
Pipe dream (an old water puzzle game where you built plumbing to see how many pieces you could use.)

Have you looked at any of the old text adventures: Activision has a CD with a number of old Infocom games such as Zork, which while they do have fighting (Sometimes), it's all text and not very graphic. Great puzzle solving games. Frotz, a free interpreter for text adventure games, has a pretty good following, with a number of games available.

Finally, have you considered plain old Legos?

Err chess?

[MrP3ach]

Or perhaps even civilisation or some historical wargame/strtegy game i.e Steel Panthers. You could use Typing of the Dead to teach keyboard skills or do these count as violent and could be disturbing to their fragile little minds. Though quite how it will help is beyond me. What do you want to teach these people? How to use a computer or how to play games?

Sokoban

[Wolfgar]

This is a great little addictive game where the object is to push boxes through a maze to designated destinations without getting any of them stuck (e.g. pushing one into the corner...you can't push it out of there)

Re:Oregon trail.

[NetJunkie]

Someone should do a survey to see what percentage of current IT (in the right age range) staff played Oregon Trail in school as a kid. I bet it's at least 90%.

I know I did...and almost bought the newer release a while back just for fun.

Re:hmmm

[garcia]

I wonder if The Sims would have a good or bad impact on them. Would they want to have the families fail and fight or would they learn from the positive growth of the people within the game?

It would be interesting to see how each child would react.

Adventure games!

[ZaMoose]

Almost any King's Quest ('cept the last 3d one... that sucked), any Monkey Island game, Grim Fandango, Sam & Max (well, I guess any LucasArts adv. game except for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Not so good). All teach puzzle-solving logic with a good sense of humo(u)r.

I second the Carmen Sandiego series as well as the 0ld Sk00l Oregon Trail. Mmmm, buffalo...

I recall a Sim-like game involving running a beer distributorship. Could prove interesting (except for the polka-influenced soundtrack. *shudder*)

Also, does X Pilot count as violent? You could bill it as A "gravitational physics/particle interaction simulator".

Then there's always SameGnome... *grin*

Re:Low literacy levels?

[JabberWokky]

The biggest problem with any trivia game is that it requires that you learn the trivia in your own time, and it does not really teach any information.

Having taught in a "school within a school", I can tell you that what seems to work for your mental frame does not translate. That is *not* to say that the students are dumb... in fact, some of the single mothers and drug addicts (yes, Florida throws them in together; genius) are well read and/or were good students before they entered the alternative systems. Also, they get all the nice new computer systems.

There is hope for these kids, but even more than "mainstream" students, you have to focus on their individual issues. And (and I hate this as much as you do), you have to pick which ones to give up on to focus on the ones you *can* help.

Bah - there's a reason I *used* to teach. Maybe I will again... but not until I feel I can do it without becoming irrevocably cynical.

--
Evan

well, its not first person violent...

[Anonymous Coward]

I say Total Annihilation is an excelent game to teach overall strategy without the key aspects of battlefield logistics and resource planning. Its all done with robots so no 'body' actually get hurt. Its a strech but I think its a worthwhile game for cognitive development.

Re:Old board games:

[Zachary Kessin]

A study done a few years ago showed that High School kids (It may have been Jr High) that were on a Chess team "The Raging Rooks" Did better on tests and got better grades than average. Chess is a good thing to teach kids. And lets face it in 50 or 60 years will anyone still know what SimCity is? People will still be playing chess which in one form or another has been around for 1000+ years.

Any good strategic turn-based game.

[Crio]

Really. Violence in the turn-based strategy is very abstract and, most important, you never have adrenaline rush due to it (that's what should be avoided, as far as I understand).
All kinds of Civilazation, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, xyz General and so on.

Learning curve may be a bit too steep, though.

Re:I know it sucks, but...

[Arandir]

Well, if you don't make any mistakes in the Myst games, there is no physical violence (other than an occasional imprisonment). But if you make a mistake, watch out!

In Riven you can get shot dead. In Exile you get your brains bashed in.

I just finished playing Exile a few days ago. I made a mistake. I trusted the poor guy. Then he rushes up and bashes my brains in with a stone axe. The rest of the game was quite peaceful, mellow, psychodelic, etc, so when this happened it was quite a shock. Very violent in the context of the game.

Re:Tranquility www.tqworld.com

[presearch]

Yeah. Thanks!
We've been trying to pioneer this non--violent, non-lingual, no-short-term-memory, no-threat genre (more for adults than kids) but we heard from a lot of people that no weapons etc. was not "exciting" enough. As if reef diving in the real world wasn't exciting unless a shark was after you... On the other hand, our players that "get it" are somewhat fanatical.

Bill Romanowski
TQworld