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The Fight for Energy
by Ian Bogost August 29, 2005
categories: Educational Games

Energien.dk is a Danish educational site for junior high kids, specifically about electricity, gas and energy. It was created for use in Danish schools, and appears to have been commissioned by for an association of Danish energy companies and providers.
 
If you click on the link Kampen om Energien (the Fight for Energy) on that page, you'll find is an RTS style game in which the player manages the use and distribution of electricity during the last 150 years. The player must "build a society" to realize "the challenges faced with when it starts to use electricity, when it has to expand the use because of the development of society in general, and then later try to reduce the use of electricity and pollution" (many thanks to Lisbeth for the overview and translations!). I can only get so far because of all the Danish, but the game seems to be well put together with good production value. One of the problems with educational games is that they often fail to take advantage of the standards and conventions of videogame genres. Kampon om Energien seems to borrow directly from standard RTS conventions, which makes a lot of sense for this kind of game.
 
You can also try out Legen med Energien (Play with Energy) is a series of small "interactive physics set-up tests and assignments" to be used alongside a textbook.
 
(thanks to Nico for the tip and Lisbeth for the Danish help)

Comments (1)

I finally had time to check this out. The game is (was?) still in beta and unfortunately unplayable right now - at least on my iMac since it requires you to right click for you to move units. However when you do right click the Shockwave context menu appears which means that you ain't going nowhere with your unit.

I wanted to check the developer's site (http://www.aludo.com), but it seems to be long gone from Uncle Google's archives.

In short, it seems to have been discontinued.

Still, I did check out a few trial levels with no movement, and it seems that the game actually has potential. It's a learning game that actually utilises the strenghts of RTS games - resource gathering, building and research - to let the player experiement and explore in a more non-linear fashion. But, it's a sandbox with no showel so far. Too bad really.