The game start by you selecting your “Powers” and a company name. The ‘super power’ to keep confidential the chemical composition of the fracking fluids. Thinking about how it would work in the actual game, we could have it be implemented on three levels. You know as technology doesn’t stand still and same holds true for Fracking methods. The companies are always looking for a higher yield of gas. So each level would be newer chemical compositions that’d increase yields. Then have the game progress 5 years, and have events pop up that may restrict or give access to specific powers. Like having public outcry due to harmful chemicals found in your fluid would restrict your company to the next level of the power described above and some others. Like running a public ad campaign, etc. This is similar to how it’s illegal in chess to make a move in check that also puts you in check.
By: Vishesh Sarin
I’m not sure if anyone else here has heard of the website addctinggames.com, but there was one game called Stick RPG. You had 24 hrs worth of energy in a given day, and once you went over that energy limit, one “day” in the game was gone. I’m proposing some kind of system like this or to make the game more of an RTS (real time strategy) – what do you guys think? Also, is this going to be like a solo campaign or a mmo?
I think it would be cool to have some goofy wack-job side characters that could either help or hurt you. Like a crazy hillbilly that’s threatening to blow up one of your sites with moonshine bombs or something, or maybe a Sierra Nevada club officer or Greenpeace person who’s constantly giving you problems. You could settle with these people in court or get rid of them in other ways (to be determined)Other game ideas: 1. can make the actual process of fracking like the old flash game “Gold Minder” but instead of controlling and swinging the magnetic hook to get the gold, you can control the pressure of the water (or something similar)
2. like some cell phone games like “castle clash” or “jungle heat” where you build up an army/base but you only have a certain number of “workers” (i.e. 10 workers = can do a max of 10 different jobs at one time) we could do something similar so you can just be doing every single process all at the same time. This way you have to manage the actual process (moving trucks, preparing fracking fluid, fracking, removing surface water, etc).
3. like rpgs that have certain base stats (STR, DEX, INT, LUK) maybe we could have a similar kind of system where every time you gain a level you can add however many points (say 3 or 5?) to the 4 different categories? More strength means more power to frack, more dexterity means you can frack more efficiently, more intelligence means you have people like at MIT and MITEI working for you to improve your technology and thus making you more efficient, and LUK could be something but I don’t know what.
By: Nathan Woo
Most of my ideas are designed base. Like, after reading this- “octopus of piping”- I really wanted to see some giant smiling purple octopus who’s tentacles go into the ground and it just looks happy and adorable. Of course it’ll be like surrounded cracked, burning, desolate land. It’d be a cool contrast imo. Also, like a mini game could be like that game “digger” and like there could be two modes: fracking and direct drilling; and three areas: shale, coal beds, and tightsand.
By: Shannon Lipp
The game I played Oiligarchy. The link ishttp://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/. And I would recommend others to play this very interesting game. The game is mostly about the oil industry. And how you as an oil Ceo must not only manage the oil industry and insure that demand is higher than yield, thus producing higher prices per yield of oil. Also you must report to the shareholders to ensure that the growth is sufficient. Also you must manage politics by giving finical contributions during the election. Also you are constantly being updated with events that concern your business, whether that be environmental policy or politics and quite hilariously you can sway the election by giving. Also it is quite funny when you build a new rig on top of the existing civilizations, it actually shows you destroying rain forest and other things to build the oil site. Essentially you need to keep profits up, while juggling environmental policy, issues in Washington, and shareholders. It is very difficult and I failed a couple of times because the shareholders fired me due to the lack of profit and insufficient growth of the company.
I think we can include aspects of this game in our game but visualize the environmental impact more to shock people into the realizations of the impacts of fracking. I think we can include the actual fracking devices similar to the game and maybe the immediate consequences of fracking can be displayed. Showing people the true nature of fracking.
Overall watching the corporation as well as playing the game. People don’t understand fracking or corporations. I think our main goal should be to try to illustrate this very deep and complex ideas into a simple game that people would enjoy yet learn the true nature of corporations and fracking, and how both pose a danger to society if they are not kept in check. Overall the game needs to be fun as well as informative in order for it to be successful. By: Juan Paulo Pagaran
I played League of Legends a little this week. I played a game and lost miserably, but I found the leveling system interesting and the gameplay and extent of teamwork enticing. I stopped playing after one game because I’ve heard about how much my friends get into it, and I didn’t want to get started on a completely new game even though it’s free!
I thought of a couple of ideas for cards, with some of ideas for design. Also, I thought the name of our game could be Frack-A-Hole.. maybe.. haha
I was thinking of a few ideas for content of the cards, including maybe disallowing access to certain areas for a certain number of turns or natural disasters to lower stats, but I could not think of a way to integrate the end of the world thing. By: Kenneth Harary
Last week I put a sample player card on the site, and this week I created a sample game board. It definitely could use a bit of sprucing up, but it incorporates the ideas about the different states being more or less expensive to frack in, and it also has Ray’s idea about the way of measuring how close we are to world destruction– it grows exponentially, so the closer to the end we get, the faster the game goes.
I played Pandemic 2, first as a virus, and then as a parasite! I like how your actions control the speed of the game and I also enjoy how the speed is not the deciding factor in success. I really hope we can incorporate that kind of player control into our game. It also had the end game be destruction of humanity, which was actually pretty fun (in a morbid way!). I, however, did not succeed. The population of Earth did a good job shutting down and separating from the infected (especially Madagascar!)
Link to Pandemic 2: http://www.addictinggames.com/strategy-games/pandemic2.jsp
Game Board Mock Up.jpg By: Alexis Caligiuri
I was kind of envisioning that the game would be sort of similar to an iPad (and maybe iPhone, but I’m not sure) game called My Country.
It’s a game where you start with a little bit of money and get to build your own ‘country’ (when I played it, it wasn’t really on a big enough of a scale for me to consider it a ‘country’, but the main premise is still there).
By: Joshua Ingersoll
I tried out Age of Empires this week, which, if haven’t heard of it, is basically a real time strategy game that revolves around building and improving a civilization while simultaneously warring with your opponents. It relies pretty heavily on skill, as you have to manage your resources well in order to upgrade and prevent other empires from conquering you. I think some of the elements are usable in our game, like the extremely gradual growth (you have to get food to make villagers, wood to make buildings, and gold in order for them to research and find new technology) and the progression of time (new “ages” provide new buildings and stuff). All in all, a pretty solid game with some definite parallels to fracking. By: Zachary Moore
Right now I am playing a game called Alice: Madness Returns, which is a game based on the story of Alice in the Wonderland. You have to follow the story line and gain back all the memories you have lost. And the reason I like the game is because the game is somewhat connect to the story of Alice in the Wonderland, but also, it’s playable and entertaining, not only because of that, the game designer also added a lot new factors in the game. I feel that in the game we are creating, we need to relate to the realistic, and the basic information or knowledge would help them feel that the game is more familiar and it’s easier for them to follow the game design. For example, in the game, the smiling cat is there, and he is one of the instructor that guide you and give you hints. Like what I have already said, there are also a lot games like Battlefield3 or Crysis that also have provides more real details. For us, it’s not necessarily that we understand what is really happening in the world. I mean, such as, spy, marketing, government and etc. Of course, we can’t do things like wikileak has done. But we can use game as a tool to form an information that urges people to know that the situation we are facing right now is serious, and we need people to help support. For Fracking, there are a lot positive opinions in the public, like there are a lot news that was saying Fracking is a great way to get new resources and etc. So I think we have to add real scenarios about Fracking, but I don’t think the game scenarios should exact like the real horrible situations. Because the players probably would have a hard time to accept those sad cases. By: Ming Yang
I as a process that a player has to go through in the beginning in order to start having access to better resources/skills/abilities in the game should be incorporated. Has anyone ever played Mage Knights? It could kind of have a similar progression where your skills/abilities are not that great in the beginning and then once you start conquering “monsters” or obstacles, you start having these crazy abilities that let you take a lot of control of things. I also thought this part was interesting: “However within bacterial populations found in this water, a small proportion will thrive in the low oxygen, high heat environment “down hole,” and on the chemical constituents of fracking fluids.” We could make this part of the game too! As far as I know this isn’t actually happening but because bacteria is being introduced to this new area, something could happen where the bacteria evolves into monsters that corporations have to deal with?
By: Gabriella Cerezo
I played a flash gamed called CivCity rome. I was thinking a similar concept for the game. In this game, players have to expand and grow their civilization to become more powerful and wealthy. You continue to build services for protection, food, and other resources that would strengthen and fortify your civilization. As you continue to enhance your empire, you can control and trade with other civilizations, and if you’d like go to war with them as well. As far as planning, I feel like this is a simple game play that could easily be replicated to be a fracking corporation trying to top its industry, using the same tactics as Civcity. It’s a great game, because players need to use some logic and strategy to help build and grow their civilization to be the greatest power.
By: Sneha Patrachari
The game I played was Oiligachy. i really had no idea what games to search for so I went and looked at the ones others were recommending and came about with this one. it was quite interesting and actually difficult for me because I didn’t get the hang of it at first so I kept losing because I didn’t make sufficient money to keep my business going but basically what you have to do is manage an oil industry making sure everything is running properly and make sure your demand is good. I found it a great game to use as an example and switching it to being all about fracking. I think we can expose why corporations are really greedy in order to keep their company alive or else get fired like i did playing this game.
By:Yadira Navarro Landeros
For my game idea I am going to go with making some mocked up cards. I’ll probably take my MTG cards and then print out new actions for the cards. I think it would be fun to use these cards to play basically the same game as Magic except the idea would be that every time the other opponent is successfully ‘attacked,’ and loses ‘health,’ the attacking player would receive Victory Points or something to mark that they have started to grow/expand. So the different basic components of the Magic: The Gathering card game include:
Lands or Mana, Creatures, Artifacts, Equipments, Sorceries, Instants, Planeswalkers, Enchantment
These could be tweaked to be more relevant to our game:
Lands or Mana–Amount of Money
Creatures–Characters to ‘fight’ for you, like lawyers, PR, workers, drivers, etc.
Artifacts-?
Equipments-Equipment…to help you do things, like digging, searching for good land to frack, etc.
Sorceries-Actions that can be done only on the active player’s turn, like “Any lawyers you control on the battlefield gain X power to convince the opposing player’s lawyers when attacking/’suing'” or something like that
Instants-Same idea as Sorceries except they’re just able to be played at any time
Planeswalkers-Additional players you can ally with that are cards (could be additional players that help feed into your corporation, like a CEO of a truck company who makes a deal to work with you for a lower price in return for something)
Enchantment-Becomes attached to either self, opponents, creatures, etc; could be a card that says “This creature/character is now enchanted. If it is a lawyer, whenever it takes a case, flip a coin. If it is heads, it wins the case” or something like that. By: Gabriella Cerezo
My idea for the game was making it somewhat similar to the game Monopoly. Rolling dice, flipping a card, revealing corruption, giving you decisions of either making corruption or giving you a chance to clear everything out to make it healthy for people to live in. Instead of having each square you land on being a street, place, or business it can be a door and each door you buy represents some kind of charity fooling the person that is playing into buying it. It can either make you or break you. Once you are given the card of ownership, behind the card can be the description of what you have REALLY bought. Each card can either tell you something like “you have bought a door, and opened it letting a lot of pollutants into the air causing respiratory system to fail” or something like “ people have found out that this company has been releasing a lot of toxic substance kerosene” it has caused cancer in a family member you must buy a lawyer to help you make this all disappear. They will need money if they cannot afford it they will be sent to jail. Though he can get out if he has a “get out of jail” card. I think we color usage is important. I think they can convey others of doing something. For example red shows a lot of power, tension, and aggression. We can incorporate such colors in to influence players. Example: Players 2 and up First player rolls dice. You have landed on a door with a picture of dolphin. You have two choices: 1. Buy door (could be deceiving) 2. Turn a card over from pile First player decides to buy door, unfortunately exploring for oil and gas has caused to endanger dolphins because of disturbance you caused in their environment due to sound waves therefore causing a danger to the bottlenose dolphin. Sorasota Dolphin Research Health Assessment is onto you so you must get a lawyer fast! BY: Yadira Navarro Landeros
How to avoid “legal blockades” that would make fracking illegal or regulated by the government. Scenario: ordered to show with experiements/studies whether or not the fracking process contaminates drinking water.
Solution: Find loopholes in the order, and do only what is specifically asked of you to do according to the order. Experiment up to that requirement and state that your conclusion does not justify additional further study at the moment in time.By: Christopher Mai
“Beneath Laura’s modest ranch-style house on a green plot of land beside the small Divide Creek, stretches the Piceance Basin. This basin, comprised of “tight sand” formations, contains “as much as 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — enough to supply the entire United States at current (2006) consumption levels, for well over four years” (Nijhuis 2006: 32). In 2001, gas development in her area was just beginning to boom. Three wells had been drilled just 300 feet from her rural home. She did not have a lot of control over the development of the wells on or around her property, because she owned only the surface of her land and not the rights to the minerals below. This situation, common for private landowners in the West of the U.S., is called “Split Estate” (Anderson 2009, GJDS 2006, Spaulding 2006abc).” my idea is that maybe when you try to buy land from people, you can either try to convince them to sell it to you (which won’t work every time, but you’ll get more profit), or you can use the “Split Estate” approach, which will always work, but it will get you less money and/or it will make people view your company more negatively.
By: Joshua Ingersoll
First of all, the land owners are lack of knowledge about the Fracking process. After they realize, the water have already damaged by the chemicals. The problem is that the good water would never come back, the smell and grayish water kept for a long time. Or sometimes would be worse than that, those chemicals gradually harming to people’s body and causes cancer. Secondly, it’s really hard to track the mineral rights. Since many of them are ruled by the local, so that it’s really hard to manage those Fracking actions. Thirdly, the companies are trying to find the loopholes of the law. They bought the lands from the landowners and use not only the surface area and the subsurface area. I feel that in order to urge people against fracking, we should make people know more knowledge about fracking and how harmful that is. People tend to focus on those short term benefits instead of long term. But if we ignore the influence of fracking, it would causes way worse consequences. By: Ming Yang
People automatically assume studies from prestigious universities are credible, even though, as Wylie points out, they may be flawed or baseless claims. I think that there should be some way to fabricate a study by a credible source to calm the public and/or convince policymakers to let us go through with our plans. This isn’t based on the study so much, but another idea I had was a “public outrage meter.” Basically, every time you do something bad, the public gets angrier, so in order to appease them one would have to release a study like above or do something else to reassure the public that their methods are not harmful. Another idea I forgot to mention that I got from the Schlumberger anecdote was something along the lines of patent cards. When you earn enough to unlock a new resource or something, you can somehow patent it so that this technology is available to you and no one else. By: Zachary Moore