About
Technically, I was a girl gamer in my teens. I played Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs and board games and I was usually the only girl gamer there.
But when my kids were little, I was sure video games were the work of the devil and would rot your brain. I eventually got over my nonsense and hopped on the gaming bandwagon, in part because I was taking college classes and also homeschooling my sons and I realized that the simulations my kids were playing for fun blew the "pencil and paper" simulations in my college classes out of the water.
So step one was to catalog all their games and decide which ones counted as "education" for purposes of keeping homeschooling records and step two was to snap up one of their completely ignored Sim games and make it my own. They had a copy of, I think, the original SimCity and they never played it. I had decided I wanted to have a career having something to do with the built environment and playing this game was my idea of how to test drive my career aspirations.
I really loved the game, even though I burned down a bunch of cities before I figured out what I was doing. Some of those were so bad, it was like "Oof. Just close that file and don't ever open it again. I feel psychologically scarred from that."
Over the years, I've played SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. I used to joke that I needed to play 10,000 hours of SimCity so I could someday be an urban planner.
I intend to use this site to talk about using various games as city modeling and learning tools, even if they technically fall under some category other than city building games. (My kids got me hooked on Master of Magic by saying "Mom, it's Just Like Your Favorite -- SimCity!" and teaching me to play it as a city and civilization building game.)
September 24, 2020
But when my kids were little, I was sure video games were the work of the devil and would rot your brain. I eventually got over my nonsense and hopped on the gaming bandwagon, in part because I was taking college classes and also homeschooling my sons and I realized that the simulations my kids were playing for fun blew the "pencil and paper" simulations in my college classes out of the water.
So step one was to catalog all their games and decide which ones counted as "education" for purposes of keeping homeschooling records and step two was to snap up one of their completely ignored Sim games and make it my own. They had a copy of, I think, the original SimCity and they never played it. I had decided I wanted to have a career having something to do with the built environment and playing this game was my idea of how to test drive my career aspirations.
I really loved the game, even though I burned down a bunch of cities before I figured out what I was doing. Some of those were so bad, it was like "Oof. Just close that file and don't ever open it again. I feel psychologically scarred from that."
Over the years, I've played SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. I used to joke that I needed to play 10,000 hours of SimCity so I could someday be an urban planner.
I intend to use this site to talk about using various games as city modeling and learning tools, even if they technically fall under some category other than city building games. (My kids got me hooked on Master of Magic by saying "Mom, it's Just Like Your Favorite -- SimCity!" and teaching me to play it as a city and civilization building game.)
September 24, 2020
