Educational

I Have Candy Get In The Van is a game about touching the lives of young people. It wobbles in an uneasy, feverish, barely restrained balance between trying to paint a humane and serious portrait of the psychology of abuse, and between being a shock-baiting TIGS contest entry. If you read the author's forum thread, you get a fairly interesting journey of difficult passion and ultimately, ambivalence.

Real Lives 2010 is an updated version of a game that has been around for several years. For those familiar with the older edition, the main differences are considerably superior graphics (including algorithmically generated 3D faces for your characters) and aspects of the game that pull in information from web sources such as Google Maps at times.

Globetrotter XL is a geography quiz game, which may sound dull, but is actually quite engaging.

The play area is a map of the word -- initially, with borders in place. Your mouse pointer is a crosshairs, and the game names a city (e.g., Bologna, Italy). You've got a few seconds to locate and click on it. You are scored by how close you get, with a bonus for doing it quickly.

The New England Science Fiction Association is one of the oldest and best-organized groups of science fiction fans; among other things, they run the annual Boskone convention, and often bid for (and run) the World Science Fiction Convention. Their publishing arm, NESFA Press, exists mainly to keep in print classic works of science fiction and fantasy that commercial presses no longer see any profit in providing.

They don't publish games.

Except for this one.

In Lonely Frogs of Wisconsin, you play a female frog looking for a mate. When you start, you're assigned a frog of a particular species, and shown a bunch of different species of frogs; mousing over them, you can listen to their mating calls.

In the tradition of Flash mobs (which are going to be tracked by the NSA and headed off at the pass, going into the future) and Ghandi (dead) comes Police Brutality, a game by Jason Rohrer that explores how vocal dissent can disrupt police's efforts to taze people. The game has you, as the lone leader, shouting. As you do, other people are galvanized, and become available to shout, or move, blocking police. The goal is to prevent anyone from being evicted from the premises; you achieve this by playing the numbers of the crowd against the lesser numbers of police, divide and deter.

It is 1928, and it is time for the glorious Soviet State to crush the Kulaks and bring the CCCP dragging and kicking into the Century of the Fruitbat, I mean, the 20th century. We must collectivize, industrialize, and electrify, Comrade, lest the forces of capitalist reaction overwhelm us in the inevitable world-struggle to come!

Relativistic Asteroids is just Asteroids -- but with (some) relativistic effects added -- specifically, length contraction and time dilation.

As your ship accelerates, the little triangle that represents it visibly shortens (length contraction), and if you rotate, contraction is retained in the direction of motion, but not the others.

Time dilation isn't particularly notable--except that your bullets travel a shorter distance (when fired in the direction of motion), presumably because, in their frame they "expire" more quickly relative to the reference frame.

“Serious” games usually have to balance between being “educational” and being “fun”. Third World Farmer presents itself as a greatly educational game, promising to teach the player the hardships of maintaining a family in a world full of corruption, war and diseases. But once played, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to be successful. And that’s exactly why this game is actually pretty fun for an “educational” game.

The Chinese Room is a little like Norman Juster's Phantom Tollbooth in interactive form. Taking place entirely in the realm of philosophical thought experiment, The Chinese Room tackles questions about the nature of perception, the foundations of ethical systems, and the theoretical basis of calculus. If you've ever wanted to meet Aristotle or Karl Marx in text adventure form, this is your opportunity.