game
18 posts
People of the Pandemic is a game that lets you choose how many times you leave the house to get food or go for a walk. Using data for population and hospital beds in your ZIP code, the game then simulates infection, death, and recovery for a hypothetical virus, based on your choices and 19 others’ choices who played before you. The infection rate felt aggressive no matter what choices...
How many US cities can you name? Here’s a quick and fun game by Ian Fisher to find out. Simply start entering as many as you can think of and rack up population counts as a sort of point system. Tags: city, game, population
On the surface, driving a car might seem fairly straightforward. Follow the rules of the road, don’t crash, and watch out for others. So why not just let a computer do all of the work? The Washington Post provides an interactive simulator to put you in the passenger seat and see for yourself. Tags: game, self-driving, simulation, Washington Post
Compared to a computer’s pseudo-random number generator, we are not good at picking random numbers. Ilya Perederiy made a quick game to show how bad you are: Your fingers tend to repeat certain patterns even if you don’t notice it. The program keeps a database of each possible combination of 5 presses, and two counters are stored under each entry — one is for every zero that follows the combination,...
The Rush Hour puzzle game was invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s and made its way to the United States in the 1990s. There are vehicles of varying length in a parking lot, and you have to figure out how to get one of the cars out by shifting all the others inside a six-by-six grid. Michael Fogleman wrote a solver and generator for the game, resulting in a...
Educate Your Child by Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee uses census data and the school selection process to simulate the steps you you might take in choosing your kid’s first school in Chicago. The Chicago public school system has a high level of school segregation as a result of parent’ residential and school choices as well as policy decisions that do not encourage integrated neighborhoods and schools. In this game, you are...
You’ve probably heard of the wisdom of crowds. The general idea, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book, is that a large group of non-experts can solve problems collectively better than a single expert. As you can imagine, there are a lot of subtleties and complexities to this idea. Nicky Case helps you understand with a game. Draw networks, run simulations, and learn in the process. The game takes about a half...
Sisi Wei for ProPublica and Nick Fortugno of Playmatics made a game to provide a feeling of what it’s like for someone who needs escape from their home. Based on the real case files of five asylum seekers from five countries and interviews with the medical and legal professionals who evaluate and represent them, The Waiting Game is an experimental news game that lets you walk in the shoes of...
Have you seen this yet? Illustrator Alexander Perrin experimented with bringing a hand-drawn quality to an interactive medium. It’s a breath of fresh air called Short Trip. (And brb, I need to take a walk outside.) Tags: game, illustration
Twitch launched Stock Stream, which is a multiplayer stock market game that uses $50,000 of real money for trading. During each five-minute round, players vote for stocks they want to buy or sell, and a player earns points if the stock goes up during the five-minute period. The game runs at the open and close of the market, and the game ends if the value decreases to $25,000. [via Waxy]...