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63-555: Wildlife Park is a construction and management simulation game released in 2003 . Like Zoo Tycoon and Zoo Empire , the game involves players in building a wildlife park or zoo . The game spawned two sequels. The game received "mixed or average" reviews, according to video game review score aggregator Metacritic . This simulation video game –related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Construction and management simulation games SimCity (1989) represents an early example of success in

126-555: A 'pure' economic simulation may be Capitalism , the goal of which is to build an industrial and financial empire. At a smaller and more concrete scale, a business simulation may put the player in charge of a business or commercial facility, designing its layouts, hiring staff, and implementing policies to manage the flow of customers and orders as the business grows. Such business simulations include Theme Hospital , Sim Tower , and Game Dev Story . One popular area for these simulations has included theme park management, including

189-458: A DEC PDP-8 minicomputer . He named the result King of Sumeria . Needing the game to run in the smallest memory configuration available for the computer, he included only the first segment of the game. He also chose to rename the ruler to the more famous Babylonian king Hammurabi , misspelled as "Hamurabi". Dyment's game, sometimes retitled The Sumer Game , proved popular in the programming community: Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half

252-403: A board game in 1959, which was one of the first games to be played via e-mail . Sports management games have the player as the owner or team manager of a sports team, and guides decisions related to training, player selection, and other facets of the team as they progress through a season, ideally guiding the team towards a championship title. In some games, the management facets are layered atop

315-445: A city from the ground up and then manage it, with challenges such as balancing a budget and maintaining popular opinion, and was considered a sophisticated simulation of city planning when it was released. It appealed to a wide audience in part because it was not a typical high-speed, violent game, and was notable for shunning a traditional win-or-lose game paradigm. SimCity has spawned numerous successful sequels and spinoffs, and

378-557: A different, shorter version that included only the first segment with the file name "sum9rx" at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. The sum9rx version was not used in playtests or included in the research report. Like many early mainframe games , The Sumerian Game was only run on a single computer. Commands were entered and results printed with an IBM 1050 teleprinter, with associated images shown on

441-485: A joint workshop, led by Bruse Moncreiff and James Dinneen of IBM along with Dr. Richard Wing, curriculum research coordinator for BOCES, in June 1962, involving ten teachers from the area to discuss ways of using simulations in classroom curricula. Based on the result of the workshop, BOCES applied for a US$ 96,000 (equivalent to $ 967,000 in 2023) grant from the U.S. Office of Education that December to continue to study

504-599: A much more popular language. In 1973, Ahl published BASIC Computer Games , a best-selling book of games written in BASIC, which included his version of The Sumer Game . The expanded version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal, based on a similar concept in James A. Storer's The Pollution Game (1970), which was also included in BASIC Computer Games as King . In addition to

567-531: A nation. These games may include geopolitical situations (involving the formation and execution of foreign policy), the creation of domestic political policies, or the simulation of political campaigns. Early examples from the Cold War era include Balance of Power , Crisis in the Kremlin , Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator . An early example of online play was Diplomacy , originally published as

630-408: A player's sense of creativity and desire for control. As such, many CMSs have no victory condition, although players can always lose by bankrupting themselves of resources. These games emphasize growth, and the player must successfully manage their economy in order to construct larger creations and gain further creative power. Unlike other genres, construction and management simulations seldom offer

693-469: A progression in storyline, and the level design is a simple space where the player can build. Some games offer pre-built scenarios, which include victory conditions such as reaching a level of wealth, or surviving worsening conditions. But success in one scenario seldom affects another scenario, and players can usually try them in any order. Because the player must manage a complex internal economy, construction and management simulations frequently make use of

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756-620: A real life activity, since the player is usually more involved in detailed decisions than a real manager or administrator. Players usually have two types of tools at their disposal: tools for building and tools for managing. Construction mechanisms in CMSs tend to be one of two types: plan-and-build where the construction is completed gradually, or purchase and place where the construction appears immediately. Random disasters can also create new construction challenges, and some games impose constraints on how things must be constructed. But usually

819-485: A region or nation, which often will include managing the transport of goods between various destinations in addition to other business decisions. Examples include Transport Tycoon , Railroad Tycoon , and the A-Train series. Business and tycoon games need not present realistic business settings, as long as the player is tasked with managing a facility with economic factors. Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius have

882-516: A slide projector. A few students played it as it was being developed, and the researchers ran one play session with 30 sixth-grade students. Project 1948 concluded in August 1964, and a report on its outcome given to the Office of Education in 1965 listing the eight "subprojects" that had been proposed in it, of which The Sumerian Game was the only game. Two weeks after its conclusion a new project

945-400: A structure will cost resources, but this is often done at no cost or with partial recovery of resources spent on its construction. CMSs are usually single player games, as competition would force players to eschew creativity in favor of efficiency, and a race to accumulate resources. They typically have a free-form construction mode where players can build up as they see fit, which appeals to

1008-409: A subgenre of CMS games where the player acts as a city-planner or leader. Players normally look at the city from a point of view high in the sky, to grow and manage a simulated city. Players are only allowed to control building placement and city management features such as salaries and work priorities, while actual building is done by game citizens who are non-playable characters. The SimCity series,

1071-424: A subset of CMSs that simulate a business or some other economy, with the goal for the player to help make the business financially successful. Some business games typically involve more management than construction, allowing the player to invest in virtual stock markets or similar trade systems. Rather than investing in physical buildings, construction can be abstract, such as purchasing stocks. The closest example of

1134-447: A windowed interface. In contrast to genres such as action games, CMS players are given computer-like controls such as pull-down menus and buttons. Players may also understand the game economy through graphs and other analytic tools. This often includes advisers that warn players of problems and describe current needs. As such, CMS games have some of the most complex interfaces of any game type. These games can be quite popular even without

1197-542: Is credited with inventing the city-building subgenre. SimCity also led to several other successful games in the same mold such as SimTower and SimFarm , and launched its designer Will Wright into a position as one of the most influential people in the game industry. These games influenced the eventual release of the Tycoon series of games, which are also an important part of the genre. Several more specific genres have developed over time. City-building games are

1260-643: The Caesar series, and Cities: Skylines series are examples of city-building games that have found commercial and cultural success. Colony management games are similar to city-building games, but based on the player starting a colony in an isolated location with limited resources, and thus are required to collect and combine resources from the local area to build out their colony, in contrast to city-building games where resources are only limited by available city finances. These games utilize construction and management extensively, with incredible detail in more aspects of

1323-528: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms series from 1986 and Bandit Kings of Ancient China in 1989. That same year, Capcom released a simulation game of their own, Destiny of an Emperor , also based on Chinese history . Utopia had a notable influence on SimCity in 1989, which is considered the first highly successful construction and management simulation. The game allows players to build

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1386-416: The city-building genre as well as an early strategy game. As The Sumerian Game was created during the early history of video games as part of research into new uses for computer simulations, it pioneered several developments in the medium. In addition to being a prototype of the strategy and city-building genres, The Sumerian Game has been described as the first video game with a narrative, as well as

1449-538: The historical simulation game Nobunaga's Ambition , where the player takes the role of the historical figure Oda Nobunaga and must conquer, unify and manage the nation of Japan. It combines number crunching, Japanese history , and grand strategy simulation , including elements such as raising taxes and giving rice to prefectures . Nobunaga's Ambition went on to define and set the standard for most console simulation games, and has had many sequels, while Koei continued to create other simulation games since, including

1512-415: The tower defense genre and Shapez.io , which has adopted the minimalistic art style of the .io browser games . Other games involve rebuilding industry and maintaining sufficient food resources for your labour force in a post-apocalyptic world, such as Captain of Industry . A government simulation or political simulation is a game that attempts to simulate the government and politics of all or part of

1575-730: The act of construction is quite simple, and the main challenge of a CMS is obtaining the resources required to complete construction. Players must manage resources within a growing economy, where resources are produced, consumed, and exchanged. Resources are drawn from a source, such as money from a bank, or gold from a mine. Some CMSs allow players to convert resources from one type to another, such as fermenting sugar into rum. Common resources include money, people, and building materials. Resources are utilized in one of two ways: either construction, where players build or buy things to serve some purpose, or maintenance, where players must make ongoing payments to prevent loss or decay. Sometimes demolishing

1638-543: The actual sports simulation, as in the case of Electronic Arts' FIFA or Madden NFL series, so that players can also play within the games as one of the athletes on the field, as well as manage the team through a season. Other sports management games, such as the Football Manager series, do not give player direct control on the actual sports matches, but may allow the player, as the team manager, to influence how they are played out, or otherwise simply simulate

1701-408: The ancient Sumerian civilization as the setting to counter what he saw as a trend in school curriculum to ignore pre-Greek civilizations, despite evidence of their importance to early history. Addis, a fourth-grade teacher at Katonah Elementary School, agreed with Moncreiff about the undervaluation of pre-Greek civilizations in schools, and had studied Mesopotamian civilizations in college. Her proposal

1764-472: The city of Lagash in Sumer —Luduga I, II, and III—over three segments of increasingly complex economic simulation . Two versions of the game were created, both intended for play by a classroom of students with a single person inputting commands into a teleprinter , which would output responses from the mainframe computer . The second version had a stronger narrative component to the game's text and interspersed

1827-603: The concept for 18 months as a joint project between IBM and the New York State Education Department , receiving almost US$ 104,000 (equivalent to $ 1,048,000 in 2023) instead for "Cooperative Research Project 1948". The project began in February 1963 under the direction of Dr. Wing, who asked for proposals from nine teachers. One of the teachers who had been at the workshop, Mabel Addis , proposed an expansion of an idea given by Moncreiff at

1890-460: The construction and management simulation genre. Utopia put players in charge of an island, allowing them to control its entire military and economy. The population had to be kept happy, and the military had to be strong enough to thwart attacks from rebels and pirates. This game required complex thought in an era where most games were about reflexes. The game sold fairly well, and it had an influence on games of all genres. In 1983, Koei released

1953-541: The context and terminology changed. The researchers conducted a playtest of the new version of The Sumerian Game with another 30 sixth-grade students the following school year, and produced a report in 1967. BOCES copyrighted The Sumerian Game in 1964. The grants for the second version of the game were in part to create a "center of demonstration" at the BOCES Research Center in Yorktown Heights for computer-assisted instruction. To this end, following

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2016-533: The creation of the second version of the game, the first segment was reprogrammed by Jimmer Leonard, a graduate student in Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University , for the IBM 1401 , to be used at demonstrations at the BOCES Research Center. Further revisions to the other sections of the game were considered, but no further grants for the project were received and no further changes were made. The project

2079-449: The early titles Theme Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon , which not only give the player the ability to manage the park but plan out and test the rides. Other niche business simulations include PC Building Simulator , which lets the player manage a small business dedicated towards building custom PCs and troubleshooting computer errors. These games also may deal at a somewhat larger scale involving managing business elements across

2142-523: The first edutainment game. As a result, Mabel Addis has been called the first female video game designer and the first writer for a video game . The original code for The Sumerian Game is lost, but the projector slides and three printouts of individual game sessions were found in 2012 and donated to The Strong National Museum of Play , where they are kept in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. A recreation of

2205-483: The first video game with a narrative, as well as the first edutainment game. As a result, Mabel Addis has been called the first female video game designer and the first writer for a video game . In 2024 a recreation of the game, based off of the available information, was released for Windows . The Sumerian Game is a largely text-based strategy video game centered on resource management. The game, set around 3500 BC, has players act as three successive rulers of

2268-420: The game calculates the effect of the player's choices on the population for the next round. Additionally, after each round, the game selects whether to report several events. The city may be struck with a random disaster, such as a fire or flood, which destroys a percentage of the city's population and harvest. Independent of disasters, a percentage of the stored grain may also be lost to rot and rats. Additionally,

2331-414: The game may report a technological innovation which has a positive effect on subsequent rounds, such as reducing the amount of grain that may spoil or reducing the number of farmers needed for each acre of land. Several of these innovations require the player to have first "exhibited some good judgement", such as by adequately feeding their population for multiple rounds. In the second and third segments of

2394-604: The game than other simulation genres. They may also feature combat against hostile entities of the remote environment, typically not a feature of other subgenres, and often require the player to consider fortifications, so this genre may be named "base building games" The colony management genre has fewer titles compared to the other subgenres due to the niche market. Notable titles include Dwarf Fortress , Rimworld (which takes inspiration from Dwarf Fortress ), Oxygen Not Included , Frostpunk , and Surviving Mars . Business simulation games, also known as tycoon games, are

2457-694: The game with taped audio lectures, presented as the discussions of the ruler's court of advisors, corresponding with images on a slide projector. In both versions, the player enters numbers in response to questions posed by the game. In the first segment of the game, the player plays a series of rounds—limited to 30 in the second version of the game—in which they are given information about the current population, acres of farmland, number of farmers, grain harvested that round, and stored grain. The rounds start in 3500 BC, and are meant to represent seasons. The player then selects how much grain will be used as food, seed for planting, and storage. After making their selections,

2520-413: The game, the city's population and grain are adjusted to preset levels, regardless of the player's performance in the prior segment, to represent that some time has passed since the decisions of the prior ruler. The player then again plays through a series of rounds. In the second segment, the player can also apply workers towards the development of several crafts—which in turn can result in innovations—while

2583-495: The games' results based on the team's composition set by the player. The Sumerian Game The Sumerian Game is an early text-based strategy video game of land and resource management . It was developed as part of a joint research project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM in 1964–1966 for investigation of the use of computer-based simulations in schools. It

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2646-529: The genre. Other games in the genre range from city-building games like Caesar (since 1992), The Settlers (since 1993), the Anno series (since 1998), mixed business/politics/building games like Tropico (since 2001), pure business simulation games like Capitalism , and niche simulations like Theme Park . CMSs are often called "simulation games" for short. Although games can simulate many activities from vehicles to sports , players usually deduce

2709-546: The kind of simulation from the title of the game. Economics play a primary role in construction and management simulations, because they allow players to build things while operating within economic constraints. Some games may challenge the player to explore or recognize patterns, but the majority of the game challenges are economic in that they focus upon growth. These games are based in a setting where an economy can be built and managed, usually some kind of community, institution, or empire. The player's role seldom corresponds to

2772-460: The latest graphics. The player in a CMS is usually omnipresent, and does not have an avatar. As such, the player is usually given an isometric perspective of the world, or a free-roaming camera from an aerial viewpoint for modern 3D games. The game world often contains units and people who respond to the players' actions, but are seldom given direct orders. The Sumerian Game (1964), a text-based early mainframe game designed by Mabel Addis ,

2835-438: The most notable online business simulations are Virtonomics and IndustryPlayer . A subset of life simulation games incorporate elements of business simulation games, but which the player-character has an active role in the game's world and often tasked with activities similar to real-life functions in a business as to keep the business going. These life simulation games deemphasize the business and management elements though

2898-474: The multiple versions of Hamurabi , several simulation games have been created as expansions of the core game. These include The Pollution Game and Kingdom (1974) by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros, which was then expanded to Dukedom (1976). Other derivations include Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank; Santa Paravia added the concept of city building management to the basic structure of Hamurabi , making The Sumerian Game an antecedent to

2961-456: The people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives". Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl wrote a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers , then termed microcomputers , making it

3024-580: The player as an evil overlord managing and expanding their base of henchmen from forces of good with limited resources and economies, for example. Active development of Internet technologies and the growth of the Internet audience in recent years gave a powerful impetus to the development of the industry of online games, and in particular, online business simulations. There are many varieties of online business simulations—browser-based and downloadable, single-player and multiplayer, real-time and turn-based. Among

3087-699: The player is challenged to make products in a cost-effective manner by establishing production lines to compete with other virtual competitors, such as in Big Pharma and Good Company . Other factory simulators are based on open-world survival games, with the goal to build enough parts from raw materials found in the world while fending off hostiles to be able to escape or achieve a very large-scale production target, such as in Factorio , Satisfactory , and Dyson Sphere Program . Other examples of this genre are Mindustry that combines factory simulation with

3150-607: The player often still needs to make decisions on purchases and how they manage their time in game to be successful. Examples of such games include The Sims series, the Story of Seasons series, the Animal Crossing series, and Stardew Valley . Factory simulation or optimization games typically involve the efficient conversion of resources into products through a combination of a labor workforce and automated systems. Some of these are closer to business simulations, where

3213-544: The process of writing an assembly language version. In 1968, however, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Doug Dyment gave a talk about computers in education at the University of Alberta , and after the talk a woman who had once seen The Sumerian Game described it to him. Dyment decided to recreate the game as an early program for the FOCAL programming language, recently developed at DEC, and programmed it for

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3276-417: The reigns of three successive rulers of the city of Lagash in Sumer around 3500 BC. In each segment the game asks the players how to allocate workers and grain over a series of rounds while accommodating the effects of their prior decisions, random disasters, and technological innovations, with each segment adding complexity. At the conclusion of the project the game was not put into widespread use, though it

3339-561: The summer of 1966 by adding a stronger narrative flow to how the advisor tells the player about the events of the city, refocusing the second segment of the game on the new concepts introduced, and interspersing the game with taped audio lectures corresponding with more directly related images on a slide projector. These have been described as the first cutscenes . A 1973 summary guide to educational games described The Sierra Leone Game as being very similar to The Sumerian Game , including having interspersed slides and audio lectures, with only

3402-485: The summer workshop: an economic model of a civilization, intended to teach basic economic theory. The idea had been developed during the workshop as a paper game under the name "The Sumerian Play". Moncreiff had been inspired by prior research, especially the paper "Teaching through Participation in Micro-simulations of Social Organization" by Richard Meier, and by the board game Monopoly , and wanted to use

3465-533: The third increases the complexity of the simulation by adding trade and expansion choices. In the original version of the game, the second and third segments were expansions on the first, requiring the same choices around grain in addition to the new choices. In the second version of the game, the second segment was refocused. The rounds were limited to 10 and the player was no longer required to make choices around grain allocation, but instead only make decisions about applying workers to farming or crafts. The third segment

3528-741: The use of computers in education research. The BOCES system had been established in New York to help rural school districts pool resources, and the Westchester BOCES Superintendent Dr. Noble Gividen believed that computers, along with computer simulation games like the Carnagie Tech Management Game being used in colleges, could be used to improve educational outcomes at small districts in Westchester. The Westchester County BOCES and IBM held

3591-531: Was an economic simulation game based on the ancient Sumerian city-state of Lagash . It was adapted into The Sumer Game , a later version of which was called Hamurabi , a relatively simple text-only game originally written for the DEC PDP-8 in which the player controlled the economy of a city-state. Utopia was released in 1982 for the Intellivision , and is credited as the game that spawned

3654-522: Was approved and she began work with IBM programmer William McKay to develop the game. The game itself, The Sumerian Game , was designed and written by Addis and programmed by McKay in the Fortran programming language for an IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer . The game was developed at BOCES in Yorktown Heights, New York with the file name "suilxr"; simultaneously, IBM developed

3717-435: Was designed by Mabel Addis , then a fourth-grade teacher, and programmed by William McKay for the IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer . The first version of the game was played by a group of 30 sixth-grade students in 1964, and a revised version featuring refocused gameplay and added narrative and audiovisual elements was played by a second group of students in 1966. The game is composed of three segments, representing

3780-504: Was mentioned in Time and Life magazines in 1966. The game was made available to other schools by "special arrangement" with Westchester County BOCES into at least the early 1970s. In 1969, professor Herbert Hallworth of the University of Calgary reported that the computer science department there had recreated the game for the FOCAL programming language as an educational tool and was in

3843-511: Was not changed, though plans were made to either also remove the grain allocation choices and add more choices around trade, colonization, and war, or else to instead make the third segment a combination of the first two segments. In 1962, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of Westchester County, New York , began a series of discussions with researchers at IBM , which was headquartered in Westchester County, about

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3906-410: Was started as Cooperative Research Project 2148, with two more grants given beginning in 1966 totaling over US$ 194,000 (equivalent to $ 1,906,000 in 2023), focusing on the first project's progress with the game and to run through 1967. This project created three games: The Sierra Leone Game , The Free Enterprise Game , and an expansion of The Sumerian Game . Addis rewrote and expanded the game in

3969-505: Was used as a demonstration in the BOCES Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and made available by "special arrangement" with BOCES into at least the early 1970s. A description of the game, however, was given to Doug Dyment in 1968, and he recreated a version of the first segment of the game as King of Sumeria . This game was expanded on in 1971 by David H. Ahl as Hamurabi , which in turn led to many early strategy and city-building games . The Sumerian Game has been described as

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