Review of the game Real Lives 2010 created by Educational Simulations
Rating: 
About Real Lives 2010
Real Lives 2010 is an educational sandbox simulation PC game. There is a trial version of the game that is free to download and a premium edition that must be purchased. This review was written using the trial version. Real Lives 2010 is designed to help people understand what it is like to live in other countries. There is a focus on people from developing countries but game play is not limited to just developing countries.
The player takes on the role of someone from another country. The game follows the character from birth onwards. The player makes decisions about the character’s life. The trajectory of the person’s life is affected by the decisions that the player makes and the reality of life in the country where the character lives.
Above: In Real Lives 2010 the player takes on the role of someone from another country.
Above: Information about the family the character’s family and how they compare with people across the world.
My Opinion
The Good
Real Lives 2010 does some things really well. It uses world statistical demographic data to generate game play in a way that I have never seen before. For example, your character or one of the character’s loved ones may develop a disease. If the player asks for more information about the disease, it will explain a bit about the disease and then give some statistical information about how many people in that person’s age group, gender, socio-economic class and living in that geographical location get that disease. It also provides a link to the source of the information so that the player can verify it. This game provides a really interesting way to learn what life might be like in a different country and in different circumstances. It could be especially useful for teachers and could easily inspire further research on particular countries or diseases.
The Not So Good
However, without a secondary motive to play the game such as using it as a classroom stimulus activity, I do not think the gameplay will be compelling. The game is only in beta at the moment and has a few bugs – I sincerely hope that I am proved wrong and that many find it compelling. It is certainly a game I would classify as worthy.
Real Lives 2010 as a system of conflict
Conflict in a game arises from a player actively pursuing a goal but obstacles impede them from achieving it (Crawford in Drennan 2009). Conflict in this game is of the form single player versus the system. The game attempts to make the challenge personal by assigning the player with a character that has just been born. The player’s task is to guide the character’s decisions throughout their life.
Although Real Lives 2010 provides the player’s character with plenty of impediments that would get in the way of the character’s progress in life (such as a family member getting sick), it is difficult for a player to develop their own meaningful quantifiable goals. Although sand box games generally do not tell players what their goal should be, they do provide a number of different measures or achievements that a player can use to measure their own accomplishments. The game provides many statistics but some of these statistics are difficult to understand. It is also unclear as to which of the statistics the player can affect. Many of the statistics appear to be based on life in that particular country but it is unclear whether there is anything the player can do to improve or worsen them. I understand why this may have been done. In reality (outside of the magic circle), there are no silver bullet solutions to poverty and poor living conditions. The game is trying to show the plight of people living in a variety of different situations and they do not want to sugar-coat it and make it look like it is a really easy problem to solve. However, I am not sure that this works in a game situation.
Above: Many of the statistics displayed in the game are difficult to interpret and it is unclear which aspects can be affected by decisions made by the player.
There are only a small number of decisions that the player can make and when they make the decisions it is unclear how these decisions affected the outcome of what happened.
Above: The decisions that the player can make are shown on the above screen. Many are greyed out.
There are some options in the game that are unable to be accessed by the player because the buttons are greyed out. The game does not explain why some are inaccessible. For example, I wanted to educate my character but there were times when all of the schooling options were greyed out. That may be because where he lives schooling is unavailable or too expensive but the game did not give me enough information to know whether that was the case.
As a player, because of the lack of competition and conflict, you feel that you are really just watching to see what happens. The game does provide a new way to explore life in other countries but I think the game has a ways to go before it will truly engage the player on its merits as a fun game.
This game is more a cool way to display, use and humanise real data than it is a fun game.
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Above: This game pulls in real-life data froma variety of sources.
One way that this game could be improved is by providing a smallish set of indicators that the player knows will be influenced by their gameplay decisions. The rest of the rich data should not be discarded (although its signficance could be made clearer) as those using the game may want to access this data; especially if they are using the game as part of classwork. It should be made clearly obvious which statistics the player can affect.
Image Attributions
All images used in this review are screenshots taken from the game Real Lives 2010. These were used for review purposes. If you are the copyright holder of these images and wish for them to be removed, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
References
Drennan, P. 2009. INB280/INN280 Fundamentals of Game Design – Lecture 5. QUT.
Tags: game review, real lives 2010, serious games